A long and contentious battle for the Ohio Senate has ended in a victory for incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown. Even as late as Monday though, the latest Rasmussen poll showed that Josh Mandel had some a long way in closing the gap with Brown. He was just down 2 points among likely voters.
The three debates held by the candidates, could at least be described as 'heated,' and at times vitriolic, but in the end, Brown prevailed in yesterday's election by a fairly wide margin, 50.36% - 45.05%, despite reports of big outside money coming in to Mandel's campaign.
Martin Gottlieb, editorial writer for the Dayton Daily News says money just wasn't enough to bolster a candidate that wasn't quite ready for the office.
"It certainly put a scare in Brown," says Gottlieb. "And I guess I have to agree again with the conventional wisdom that without that, there wouldn't have been any race at all. Josh Mandel just really doesn't have the political strengths that one normally expects in a statewide race in a hard fought race. The truth is, he got the nomination because no one else really wanted it. He was not really ready in terms of his credentials, in terms of his public identity and was asking an awful lot of the money for it to put him across."
Josh Mandel still serves as Ohio Treasurer, and he's proved that he at least had the ambition for higher office so we could see him run again. As Martin Gottlieb said, Mandel received a good deal of name recognition as a result of the race.