Senate race
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 4/5-7. Likely voters. MoE 4% (7/6-8/2009 results)
Rob Portman (R) 39 (35)
Lee Fisher (D) 43 (42)
Undecided 18 (23)
Jennifer Brunner (D) 41 (40)
Undecided 18 (24)
And....
Governor's race
Ted Strickland (D) 45 (44)John Kasich (R) 40 (39)
Undecided 15 (17)
I'll keep an eye on these polls.
**** People wonder about Republican candidate Rob Portman who is running for U.S. Senate. Portman has always been known as a "Bush" guy because of his close working relationship with
President George W. Bush and the entire Bush family. Portman served in the Bush administration as trade representative and Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
In an article published at TradeReform.org, Portman's trade record is explained:
“George Bush chose him for a reason. His votes in the House betrayed Ohio workers time and time again,” said Doug Sizemore, executive secretary-treasurer of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO. Portman voted repeatedly to fast-track international trade agreements, voted against helping workers who had lost their jobs due to outsourcing, and voted against banning taxpayer dollars from being used to outsource jobs, he said. Portman also supported the North American Free Trade Agreement “and still thinks that it created jobs,” he added. “I can tell you there are 50,000 Ohio workers who would disagree with him on that.”
....Trade-related job losses and the U.S. trade deficit “skyrocketed under Portman’s watch,“ said Karen Hanson, director of the Ohio Conference on Fair Trade. In Ohio, more than 17,000 workers had their jobs shipped overseas during Portman’s tenure as trade representative, and the trade deficit rose by nearly 6.5%. “It’s unthinkable for Portman to receive anything but failing marks for his record as Bush’s U.S. trade representative,” she said.
Further, the trade imbalance with China spiked to more than $200 billion for the first time in U.S. history under Portman, she continued, and what she described as Portman’s failure to address China’s currency manipulation only exacerbated the imbalance. The statistics “don’t begin to reveal all the collateral damage to Ohio families and communities by this decimation of our manufacturing base in this state,” Hanson remarked....
If all Ohio voters knew this information, Portman would never get elected. (For information on how other parts of Ohio's economy were changed under Portman, see the link at TradeReform.org.)