Condoms and gay marriage failed to distract Hamilton County voters. Outrage over the Bengals' stadium deal carried the day.

        Democratic challenger Todd Portune wound up with 48 percent of the vote to 43 percent for Republican incumbent county Commissioner Bob Bedinghaus, with Libertarian candidate Paul Naberhaus at 9 percent.

        If Mr. Naberhaus had not been in the race to draw off anti-Bedinghaus votes, the Portune victory would have been massive.

        Mr. Bedinghaus was in trouble from the start of the campaign early this year, with many Hamilton County taxpayers — many of them Mr. Bedinghaus' fellow Republicans — angry over Mr. Bedinghaus' stewardship of the stadium projects, replete with cost overruns and generous terms for the Bengals.

        So Mr. Bedinghaus and the Republicans tried to change the subject.

        In the waning weeks of the campaign, GOP leaders looked at their polling and found one thing that shocked them and another that gave them a glimmer of hope that could pull Mr. Bedinghaus' fat out of the fire.

        The internal Republican polling showed that much of the anger at Mr. Bedinghaus over the stadium deal was coming from the extremely conservative voters in Republican bastions such as Green and Delhi townships.

        Those people are fiscal conservatives, so the Republican Party leadership probably shouldn't have been so surprised that they were the ones most angry at a stadium deal that gave the Bengals every advantage and ran up at least $45 million in cost overruns.

        But the other thing the GOP leadership learned looking at their polls was that those same Republican voters did not know much about Mr. Portune or his record on Cincinnati City Council, a body to which suburban voters pay little attention.

        The Republican Party, in the final two weeks of the campaign, pumped $200,000 into a TV ad campaign aimed at defining Mr. Portune in the minds of those disgruntled Republicans as a wild-eyed liberal on social issues.

        What gay marriage, teen curfews, condom distribution and racial quotas have to do with a county commissioner's race is anybody's guess.

        But those are exactly the issues the GOP focused on in its “LiberalPortune.com” ad campaign — a campaign made possible by a $100,000 donation to the party by Cincinnati Reds owner Carl Lindner, who will be the next sports-team owner to have a ball park built for him by the taxpayers.

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