Dad helped Bush get endorsement

NDarrel Rowland

ow that they’re both gone, we can clear up the minor mystery behind The Dispatch’s 2004 presidential endorsement.

After backing the Republican candidate in every election since 1916, the newspaper’s support seemingly was up for grabs 14 years ago. Democrat John Kerry made a personal visit to the Dispatch Editorial Board. Time magazine and others wrote about the unusual quest for the endorsement of Ohio’s Greatest Home Daily, which had sharply questioned President George W. Bush’s government spending and actions in Iraq.

But shortly before the endorsement was published, former President George H.W. Bush quietly came to Columbus and took the late Dispatch Publisher John F. Wolfe to lunch at what was then theHyatt on Capitol Square and appealed for an endorsement of his son.

The personal touch apparently worked. The paper backed President Bush’s reelection a few days later.

How did she lose?

Running in a GOP-held Senate seat in eastern Franklin County, state Rep. Anne Gonzales, a Westerville Republican, picked up 14,000 more votes than Sen. Kevin Bacon did when she wonreelection in 2014, an analysis by Jim Siegel shows.

Gonzales outperformed Republican Mike DeWine in the 3rd District by 9.3 points. Every Senate seat is comprised of three House districts, and Gonzales bested the three GOP House candidates by 7.3 points. And she lost.

Yes, Gonzales was running in a district that had shifted more Democratic in an election year considered favorable to Democrats. But the former Westerville mayor had been a formidable House candidate, posting doubledigit victories. She was a decent fundraiser. The GOP caucus spent more than $1 million on her behalf, while her opponent raised $5,000. And she lost. Meanwhile, Democrat Tina Maharath, 28, was not endorsed by the Democratic Party. She survived the primary only because the Democrats’ preferred candidate messed up his petitions and got kicked off the ballot. She had a host of legal and financial problems from her days as a teenager and young adult that Republicans turned into savage television and radio ads. At one point, she questioned online whether she wouldcontinue campaigning.

And she won— by 725 votes, a margin of less than 1 percent. So what happened? Gonzales points to GOP campaign advisers deciding not to go up on television early enough to affectthe early voting period. She lost the early vote by nearly 2,900.

Sen. Dave Burke of Marysville, head of the Senate GOP’s election effort, said Gonzales would have lost by far more without the caucus’ help.

“We’re very proud that we were able to defend the largest majority in the chamber’s history, and the overwhelming majority of our candidates worked very hard to make that happen,” he said. “In this district, we did the best we could with what we were given.”

Some Republicans point to the race as indicative of how blue Franklin County has become. Republican county officeholders, including judges, largely have beenwiped out, and where legislative Republicans in 2008 controlled seven of the 12 legislative districts fully inside the county, starting in 2019, they will have two of 13.

And then there’s the Trump factor.

“The Democrats who were mad at President Trump came out and voted in an off-year election in numbers that they normally don’t come out and vote in,” said Michael Dawson, a veteran political consultant and election data guru. “That was enough in some of these suburban districts to propel the Democrat to victory.”

Statewide, turnout was 43 percent higher than in 2014, the largest bump ever from one off-year election to the next.

The fact that so many voters cast ballots for Maharath, an unknown who was getting pounded by negative ads, shows the Democratic intensity, Dawson said.

“It defies logic when you look at what happened in that campaign that Anne Gonzales would lose,” Dawson said.

drowland@dispatch.com @darreldrowland