Week in Review: Strickland’s Meltdown

Sunday

Former Democratic state House Majority Leader Tracy Maxwell Heard was a guest on WBNS’s Face the State. Heard provided an impromptu endorsement of Strickland’s primary opponent, P.G. Sittenfeld, and offered the following analysis:

• “I’m not convinced Ted Strickland will be the one who comes through the primary on the Democratic side.”
• “He’s been a ghost, he’s not been speaking to any of the issues, he’s refusing to debate.”
• “You have to be on the field to actually be in the fight, and Ted has been invisible.”

Monday

Politico provided an update on the state-of-the-race in Ohio acknowledging that Strickland’s primary is no cakewalk:

• “…P.G. Sittenfeld has been a tenacious Democratic challenger, and a pro-Sittenfeld super PAC waits in the wings to cause primary mischief.”

Also on Monday, the Washington Free Beacon highlighted the growing number of Ohio Democratic leaders expressing doubt in Strickland’s campaign.

Tuesday

Keith Burris of the Toledo Blade criticized Strickland for being MIA on the campaign trail and not living up to expectations:

• “…Mr. Strickland has been disappointing, to put it mildly.”
• “He has been largely invisible, both personally and on the issues.”
• “Hiding makes you look like a wimp.”
• “I would expect him to engage for the sake of democracy…”

Also on Tuesday, Strickland released his disappointing fundraising numbers in hopes that they might get buried in coverage of President Obama’s State of the Union address. They did, but only after reports like this:

• “Rob Portman enters 2016 big financial edge over Ted Strickland”

and also this:

• “Strickland lags behind Portman in fundraising”

Wednesday

Things got interesting. P.G. Sittenfeld took Strickland to task for misrepresenting his position on guns:

• “Sittenfeld calls Strickland switch on gun restrictions ‘misleading fiction"

The Associated Press covered the news as well:

• “US Senate candidate challenges primary opponent’s gun stance”

Thursday

When Strickland probably started to think that his week couldn’t get any worse, National Journal highlighted Strickland’s litany of problems that came to a head this week:

• “…Ted Strick­land’s polit­ic­al comeback bid isn’t the jug­ger­naut party lead­ers once hoped.”
• ”…the former gov­ernor and con­gress­man has fallen short of fun­drais­ing goals, drawn cri­ti­cism for a lack of vis­ib­il­ity, and failed to shut down a little-known primary op­pon­ent.”
• “His fun­drais­ing has already fallen well be­low the early goals set for his cam­paign and is less than half the nearly $10 mil­lion Port­man raised in the past year.”
• “…Strick­land’s dis­missive at­ti­tude struck the wrong chord with some would-be al­lies.”

Also on Thursday, Portman’s campaign released a web ad:

• “Portman rips Strickland’s record in Ohio”

I don’t think any candidate in American is more thankful it’s Friday than Retread Ted.