BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
By any measure, Tuesday was not the best day Ohio Gov. George Voinovich has had in politics.
In the primary election, the state sales-tax increase for schools that was born in Mr. Voinovich's office and tagged by some Democrats as the "Voinovich tax increase" went down in one of the most lopsided defeats in Ohio history, with 80 percent voting no.
Compounding the problem for Mr. Voinovich was the Republican U.S. Senate primary, where Mr. Voinovich was the party-endorsed and heavily-favored candidate.
Most candidates would be dancing for joy to win 72 percent of the vote as Mr. Voinovich, but given that his GOP primary opponent was an unknown first-time candidate who had almost no campaign organization, Ohio Democrats woke up Wednesday morning feeling that Mr. Voinovich is now damaged goods politically.
David McCollough, a 31-year-old school teacher from Blue Ash, who ran an almost invisible campaign, received 206,720 votes to 538,439 for Mr. Voinovich.
That left Democrats from Columbus to Washington believing that suddenly Mr. Voinovich, who has been riding along with an approval rating near 70 percent, is suddenly vulnerable.
"George Voinovich's force field has been penetrated," said Steve Fought, spokesman for the campaign of Clevelander Mary Boyle, Mr. Voinovich's Democratic opponent for the Senate seat. "He's had his hat handed to him. It's a race now. A real, live Senate race." Ohio Republicans were saying that the showing by Mr. McCollough was not a protest vote, but a fluke.
"If you stick your name on the ballot, you are going to get some votes," said Hamilton County GOP chairman Mike Allen, a member of the party's state central committee.
"At the end of the day, George Voinovich is going to be elected to the Senate and that is all there is to it."
But the Democrats wasted no time trying to take advantage of the governor's apparent weakness.
"Voters blow U.S. Senate race wide open," screamed a headline on a press release from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) Wednesday.
In the release, DSCC communications director Michael Tucker said that if 28 percent of Mr. Voinovich's Republican support "is already lost, he's in serious trouble."
Some Ohio Democrats were pointing to a similar situation in the 1974 Democratic gubernatorial primary.
In that election, James Nolan, a virtually unknown candidate, took 29 percent of the vote away from Ohio Gov. John Gilligan, a Cincinnatian, in the primary election. Ohio Democratic party leaders were concerned that it meant Mr. Gilligan was in trouble. He was. He lost the fall election to Jim Rhodes by about 11,000 votes.
Caryn Candisky, a spokeswoman for the Voinovich campaign, said any comparison with what happened in 1974 is "silly."
"It would be a mistake to read anything into the vote that McCollough had," Ms. Candisky said. "You still have to describe 72 percent as a great victory."
Ms. Boyle, a former Cuyahoga County commissioner, is still well behind the two-term governor in statewide polls, but the resounding defeat of Issue 2 may have breathed some life into her campaign. The Boyle campaign spent about $250,000 in the final weeks of the primary campaign on TV ads in which Ms. Boyle urged voters to vote no on Issue 2 and pointedly called the sales-tax issue the "Voinovich tax increase."
Wednesday, Ms. Boyle said she could not comment on the GOP primary election, but said she will continue to hammer at Mr. Voinovich for what she calls his "lack of leadership on education."
Issue 2, she said, "was a flawed plan and it was his plan; and 80 percent of the people knew it was flawed," Ms. Boyle said. "It's his responsibility as governor and he is going to have to answer for it."
