OH 5 Update
Its getting late and I’m tired of looking at board of elections websites… It looks like Bob Latta is beating Steve Buehrer by about 1300 votes right now. Some of the polls were open late. I’ll post the final result as soon as I hear something.
do we know what counties haven’t reported yet? which candidate is expected to do well in these yet-to-be reported areas?
What really hurt Steve was a major loss in Wood county.
I’ll have more details soon I hope.
Seneca and Putnam have not yet reported. Putnam is in Steve’s Senate District but a smaller county. Seneca is next to Wood which is Latta’s political base. Seneca is the larger county of the two.
Thanks Scott. Welcome back to RAB.
so gents…how about a prediction on final two counties?
Thanks Matt, appreciate you letting me back on. I think its a tossup that could go either way. Bueher should win Putnam, Latta should win Seneca. Seneca is slightly bigger and Latta has a slight lead. But turnout is so low anything can happen.
I think it would be difficult for Steve to pull it out at this point.
I think Buehrer takes Seneca and Putnam. He has done very well so far in the eastern part of the district.
However, I don’t think the numbers will be enough to counter Bob’s huge win in Wood County.
Latta takes it by 1,000 votes.
What a bunch of freaks we are - waiting up all night for these two counties.
This has played out in some ways like Jean Schmidt’s special primary in 2005. She lost most of the counties but won her home county (Clermont) by a real large margin. Latta carried his home county (Wood) by over 7500 votes. Wood is the largest county in the district.
I wonder how things would turn out if it wasn’t for these 3 extra goofball candidates in this race skimming a few thousand votes here and there.
Good question. These specials tend to draw a lot of folks. A couple of these guys drew some good percentages in their home counties.
Protest votes. Quite a few of them - didn’t like the tone of the election.
Primaries suck. Can’t wait to go bludgeon some Democrats.
I was at the Franklin County GOP defeat party tonight and a lot of excellent candidates lost. I’m happy that in the 5th, we have a couple of candidates who would be more conservative than the Congressman they are replacing (may he rest in peace).
Obviously, Latta isn’t the ideal candidate for me, but conservatives need to move the bricks they can and leave the ones the can’t. And a vote against socialism would be a vote in the general for whoever wins this primary battle.
Johnny Q., I have made peace with and I now embrace my inner nerdness.
Matt, I was at the Brownson defeat party tonight…Columbus elections were absolutely abysmal for our party.
But hey, at least we swept the judicial races in Franklin County.
I hear ya Scott. I figured myself the guy who - win or lose - tries to have a good time on election night.
Now I’m that guy in the corner with a laptop running precinct totals for city treasurer races.
Cheers to political nerdiness!
I hope that if Steve loses, this doesn’t discourage the Club for Growth from getting involved in Ohio races. They are a rare organization because they actually help candidates in major ways when those candidates support the general interest (small government, low taxes, no pork) instead of special interests. I would donate to them long before I’d ever donate to the RNC.
New topic -
Bill Todd was bound to lose. The numbers in Columbus won’t get you there.
1) Would a different message have gotten Todd more votes? What is that message?
2) Say the Coleman story is 100% true and the Dispatch runs it a week ago. How many votes is that worth? And would it have gotten a few GOP council members elected along the way?
There is MUCH much more to the Coleman stories that they are sitting on.
Wolfe protected his candidate and his financial interests. And I wouldn’t feel too awful if the entire goddamn Dispatch building burned to the ground. Screw them.
100% reporting Latta wins
http://vote.sos.state.oh.us/pls/enr/f?p=152:5:0
The 1420 net gain for Latta in Wachtmann’s House district was big. Still unclear as to why Wachtmann sold out and decided to support a guy who was for a key issue Lynn always opposed, i.e. the Taft sales tax and spend budget. The phone bank calls he recorded were some of the ugliest I have ever heard.
Another factor - urban vs. rural. Buehrer won 10 of 14 counties, but Latta’s Bowling Green brought him 7541 more votes than Buehrer. Tough to recover that many no matter how many conservative farm counties you
win.
The biggest factor: nearly 12,000 people (16.15%!!) voted for one of three people who could not win. In my mind that is a strong statement against negative campaigning. I heard a lot of “they’re both bad” from people who had a lot harder time hearing “I’m Bob Latta and I approved this message” than they did “The Club for Growth is Responsible for the content of this advertising. It is not approved by any candidate or candidate’s committee.” Their protest votes backfired, as most “third party” votes seem to do, and helped the guy who was the most negative from Day One (in my opinion) win.
I am not sure Latta can mend enough fences in the next 34 days to avoid an embarrassing squeaker in December.
History Buff,
The rural counties went to Steve because Club For Growth and Steve Buehrer himself Mr. “I am not responsible for any attacks on Bob Latta” were able to distribute lies throughout the district much more efficiently than Latta could get the truth to the voters.
Buehrer’s major and most effective smear campaign started on Wednesday a week ago. He launched pamphlet after pamphlet of lies about Latta’s voting record on fiscal and social conservative issues. Steve Buehrer made loyal pro-lifers wonder if Latta really was pro-life. That was completely in bad taste. Guess what for Steve it worked in those rural counties where Latta only consentrated media to get the story straight. That media was already in doubt as Steve beat Latta to the story.
Latta’s GOTV effort in Wood and his long standing support in other counties like seneca and sandusky helped him to make sure voters knew he was not bad man as Steve Buehrer had painted. The county which closed the polls was the teller of what the Latta name means to the fifth district. Putnam county voters had enough respect for Bob Latta to look past Steve Buehrer’s lies to recognize Bob Latta is a true honerable man like his father they all knew so well for many years.
Mr. Pullins legal scholar that you are. If Steve Buehrer runs again what would that say to his comment on Toledo 11 where he said he “wants a conservative to win”. Then again he says Latta is not a conservative so it isn’t the Republican party that Buehrer cares about it is his own ambitious self.
You CRAZY CATZ Lets get together behind Bob Latta now
Omigosh! Steve Buehrer issued mailers on the issues, citing the actual voting record of his opponent a week before the election? How terrible! Perhaps he should have stuck to the REAL issues like VoteSmart.org surveys, right?
I never heard Buehrer say Latta was a “bad man”. I saw him say Latta voted for a major tax increase that he did not, voted for a chicken pox vaccine from aborted babies that he did not, etc. But those are just negative attacks, right? We need to stick to talking about Tom Noe and the BWC, right?
The first dime spent on negativity in this campaign was on a phone bank paid for by Latta using a message from Lynn Wachtmann saying “don’t believe the lies of Steve Buehrer.” This came as a surprise to voters who hadn’t yet a word from the Buehrer campaign because they hadn’t yet spent a penny.
Latta and his anti-Ten Commandments/School Prayer style $#!^, on the other hand, is going to leave a baaad taste in the mouth for some time. If that makes us all “bad losers” in farm country, so be it.