COLUMBUS — As he cruised to an expected and convincing win, Republican Gov. John Kasich declared that the rest of America watched what happened not only on Tuesday, but what has happened in Ohio over the last four years.
“All across America, people are beginning to understand it's not your old man's Ohio anymore,” he told a happy crowd at a downtown Columbus hotel. “It's a modern, exciting, new innovative Buckeye State.”
Polls had suggested that the race had been over for months, but voters made it official and possibly took the McKees Rocks, Pa., native a step closer to a presidential run in 2016.
ELECTION RESULTS: 2014 election was a night for incumbents
His Democratic challenger, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, conceded early at an Ohio Democratic Party event in Columbus. With 93 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Kasich had 64 percent of the vote compared to 33 percent for Mr. FitzGerald and 3 percent for Green Party candidate Anita Rios.
“Nothing good is ever lost,” Mr. Kasich said. “Anything you ever do to lift someone else, to give them a chance, to improve lives, give them some hope -- if just one person -- it will be recorded in the book of life and will follow you through eternity. ... Over these next few years we need to reclaim our communities, reclaim our schools, reclaim those who are isolated like senior citizens too much of the time. We have to be bold to challenge the status quo.”
Mr. Kasich successfully shed the embarrassment of his first year in office when voters soundly rejected Republican-backed restrictions on collective bargaining for public employees.
The debate immediately began over whether a large margin of victory represents a voter mandate for Mr. Kasich’s agenda, which includes more broad income tax cuts, higher taxes on oil and natural gas drilling, and welfare reform.
The re-election chances of the former U.S. congressman, state senator, Fox News political show host, and regional director of failed Lehman Brothers at one time had been written off by many in late 2011 when his poll numbers tanked.
But instead he was expected to receive a margin of victory that has some national political pundits taking note of him as one to watch for 2016, particularly given Ohio’s role as a battleground state. He noted that he won some areas of the state where Republicans traditionally don't do well.
That included heavily Democratic Lucas County. With 91 percent of the county's vote counted, the governor was winning 50 percent to Mr. FitzGerald's 44 percent.
That trend continued in the state’s Democratic stronghold, Cuyahoga County -- Mr. Fitzgerald’s home county -- where Governor Kasich won 52 percent to 44 percent, with 166,774 votes for Mr. Kasich and 142,838 votes for Mr. Fitzgerald.
"We waged a campaign against a great concentration of wealth and power,” Mr FitzGerald said in his concession speech.
“I don't understand it, and I'm humbled by it, but for some reason the Lord's hand has been on me,” Mr. Kasich said.
Ms. Rios, of Toledo, met her goal of surpassing 2 percent of the vote, the threshold that would give the Green Party a spot on future ballots alongside Democrats and Republicans.
Mr. Kasich’s decisive win was in sharp contrast to some others in his 2010 class of GOP governors, who found themselves locked in tight races or facing defeat despite following much of the same Republican playbook that Mr. Kasich followed.
“After the repeal of Senate Bill 5 at referendum, there was some talk that the Republicans and the governor would still try to advance their goals by other means, but they didn’t,” said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute for Applied Politics at the University of Akron.
“In the case of Scott Walker, the issue pursued him…,” Mr. Green said. The collective bargaining restrictions enacted by the Wisconsin governor and fellow Republicans survived in that state, and Mr. Walker later survived a recall election. That kept the issue alive.
“In one sense Kasich was fortunate that his big rebuke came early, and then he moved on,” Mr. Green said.
It also helped that Mr. FitzGerald’s campaign never caught fire, as Democrats counted on the coalition that struck down Senate Bill 5 remaining nearly as energized as it was three years earlier. But Mr. Kasich’s emphasis on borrowing to fuel infrastructure construction in the last couple of years won over support from the construction trades that previously stood against him on Senate Bill 5.
Mr. FitzGerald struggled to raise money as Mr. Kasich’s fund-raising shattered Ohio records a governor’s race. Then there were Mr. FitzGerald’s self-inflicted wounds.
His first choice for lieutenant governor turned out to be delinquent in taxes for his business and himself. An old Westlake police report surfaced that Mr. FitzGerald had been found in the wee hours of an October 2012 morning parked in a car at an industrial park with a woman who was not his wife.
Although he, the woman in question, and the police officer all said nothing improper occurred, the report led to the revelation that Mr. FitzGerald had been driving for a decade without a permanent driver’s license.
At the demure Democratic celebration, party Chairman Chris Redfern, of Catawba Island, said he would not step down as party chairman even as he lost his House seat representing Ottawa and Erie counties. He said Democrats will be back to work Wednesday morning to elect Hillary Clinton as president.
“Between now and then,” he said, “let's have some drinks.”
And with that, he walked out a side door before Mr. FitzGerald took to the podium to concede.
While a convincing win, it was not on pace with what Republican Gov. George Voinovich experienced in 1994 when he won re-election with 72 percent of the vote. Challenger Rob Burch got 25 percent.
Paul Kostyu, special to The Blade, contributed to this report.
Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.
First Published November 5, 2014, 6:02 a.m.
