COLUMBUS ? A fractured party. Tales of sharp-elbowed politics spilling into the news. A prolonged public spectacle pitting prominent Republicans against each other.
And that was before the GOP presidential circus arrived.
Continue ReadingOhio, it seems, isn?t just Super Tuesday?s biggest prize. It?s also the scene of an unseemly intra-party brawl that has drawn in high-ranking elected officials, lobbyists and operatives throughout the state.
The timing is especially inopportune: The struggle for control of the state party, which has consumed top Republicans in Ohio for more than a year, has experts and operatives fretting about the possible reverberations in Tuesday?s competitive presidential primary ? and in November.
?For Republicans, the lackluster reaction to the presidential field, coupled with the infighting and internal squabbles, are simply turning voters off,? said Paul Beck, a political science professor at Ohio State University. ?It all threatens to drive down turnout Tuesday and create a very bad image of Republicans with the independent and swing voters who are critical to winning the state for them in November.?
Added one senior GOP Ohio strategist aligned with Romney: ?It?s a mess that will not go away.?
With 66 delegates at stake ? the most offered by any state to date ? Ohio is indisputably the next big plum as leading contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum steer their traveling road shows toward Super Tuesday?s 10 contests.
But this year, the GOP presidential contest has some competition for center stage. Gov. John Kasich and state Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine have been locked in their own pitched battle in a state where Republicans currently hold all the levers of power in Columbus.
The dispute was triggered when Kasich was elected in 2010 and met with DeWine to ask him to step aside. The move stunned state politicos since DeWine was coming off of one of the most successful GOP sweeps in the country ? Republicans ran the table in 2010, winning the governorship, flipping the state House, expanding their margins in the state Senate and picking up five congressional seats.
DeWine ? who is elected by a state central committee that governs the party ? declined the request. A few months later, the committee unanimously reelected DeWine.
Kasich?s allies say the governor simply wanted a loyalist in the highly political job. And since that time, they have aggressively and publicly criticized DeWine?s political judgment in efforts to discredit him.
But as the governor?s approval ratings plummeted to hover around an abysmal 40 percent, it began to look like he would be better served putting his energies elsewhere.
DeWine claims the governor?s goal is to have a monolithic party that only he controls and brooks no dissent. ?I will not let this party be dominated by a single officeholder,? DeWine recently told the Columbus Dispatch. ?The Ohio Republican Party serves every Republican candidate from the federal level to the local level.?
Neither has backed a presidential candidate, and Kasich?s office has said he will not endorse before the Tuesday primary. Doug Preisse, a close Kasich ally who has been involved in the efforts to oust DeWine, joined Newt Gingrich?s leadership team this week.
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