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Tuesday, November 01, 2005
OH-04: More on Oxley
Posted by DavidNYCMike Oxley, the Republican who represents Ohio's 4th CD, will be retiring. Doubtless he'll wind up with a nice sinecure. But even though his own seat was surely safe, I'll bet he read the writing on the wall and realized that there was no guarantee that he'd still be in the majority in 2007. And he won't be the last Republican incumbent with a lot of seniority to bail this election cycle.
So what's OH-04 like? Well, a bit like OH-02, at least on the raw numbers. According to the AP, John Kerry only got 34% of the vote here. However, while Rob Portman won his last election by a margin of 72-28, Oxley got a somewhat stiffer challenge from Ben Konop, winning by "only" 59-41. (Konop, you may recall, got a decent bit of attention from the blogosphere - he was a late addition to the DKos Dozen.)
I don't know whether Konop will run again, but I think he definitely should. Retirements like this are exactly why you first run longshot campaigns against entrenched incumbents. You build up name rec, enhance your reputation and then are well-positioned when the seat opens up. If Paul Hackett can close nearly 40 percent, then Ben Konop can close 20 percent in what is shaping up to be a huge Democratic year nationwide and especially in Ohio.
Posted at 03:07 PM in 2006 Elections - House, Ohio | Technorati
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