Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Ohio 16: Schuring's Near Miss; ABJ's Bad Call

Ohio dot com still (at 8:56) has Matt Miller beating Kirk Schuring in the GOP primary for the 16th Congressional District. The SOS site shows that Schuring pulled well ahead, apparently sometime in the night, 47%-42% (if you would rather add than scroll down, the county breakdown is here.) Canton Rep. also has the correct results.

A Miller win would have been a major blow to Republican prospects for holding onto the seat. Schuring is a nice guy moderate with cross-aisle appeal throughout Stark County. Miller is a hard right conservative who vowed to run on immigration as "the biggest threat America is facing" in a heavily agricultural district, no less. Also, Schuring is a Stark County native. While Boccieri represents part of Stark County as State Senator, he is from Mahoning.

So it looks now, notwithstanding the ABJ's miscall, that it will be Boccieri versus Schuring as we all expected.

Meanwhile, a funny thing happened after Mary Cirelli announced for the Democratic nomination -- absolutely nothing. She raised negligible money, campaigned hardly at all and mustered an anemic 36%. One would be tempted to speculate that she entered as a stalking horse candidate to allow Boccieri to get his name out, especially outside Stark where he campaigned pretty hard. One be tempted to, but Mary Cirelli is not that kind of team player. I've worked with her before and she is an irascible contrarian, often at odds with her party.

It's doubtful Cirelli was trying to help Boccieri, but help him she did; he netted more votes than the top two Republicans combined. Given the asymmetric campaigns on the top of the ballot, that's not much of a portent, but it does demonstrate how valuable having a primary contest can be.

UPDATE: No sooner did I hit "post," but Ohio dot com ripped down their erroneous story. Here's the screen shot of the original:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Makes sense, but the agricultural counties are the ones that Miller carried by 2 to 1 in each case. Also, if I am Boccieri I am concerned that Cirelli was able to pull down that many votes without spending any money or investing much time into the primary. Boccieri will suffer from the "Capri Cafaro" syndrome and will be painted as a carpetbagger.

Ben said...

36% for raising no money and not campaigning is not too bad in my eyes