White House race overshadows Ohio attorney general contest

State candidates aren’t guaranteed advertising.

COLUMBUS (AP) — This fall’s unexpected race for Ohio attorney general will feel about as short as the presidential race does long.

With only five months until Election Day, neither Democrats nor Republicans have picked a candidate to run for the state seat, vacated last month by scandal-scarred Democrat Marc Dann. And the high-stakes presidential contest will consume much of the media attention and TV ad time needed in this political swing state to wage a decent fight.

Voters won’t know what hit them.

“It will be completely overshadowed,” said Democratic consultant Jim Ruvolo, a former chair of the state party.

Political advertising guidelines guarantee access for TV and radio advertising to federal candidates, but not to state candidates, he said — which means attorney general candidates may have trouble buying access during the most visible time slots.

Ohio figures to be key in the presidential race, again. It gave President Bush the electoral votes he needed for re-election in 2004.

The attorney general is both the state’s top attorney and its chief law enforcer. The post is generally viewed as second to the governor in the power it wields.

So with revelations that a Dann aide and close friend sexually harassed two junior staffers and that Dann, 46, had an extramarital affair with an employee, Democrats reeled and Republicans rejoiced.

Dann, just 17 months in office, also conceded publicly at the time that he had fostered cronyism by hiring unqualified friends and that he felt unprepared to run the massive state agency. Those statements prompted fellow Democrats — led by Gov. Ted Strickland — to lead a charge to pressure him out of office.

But how to go about filling the slot, which Dann could legally have held for two, four-year terms?

Strickland has named Nancy Hardin Rogers, a respected dean of the Ohio State University law school, as a temporary replacement to Dann — to restore order while Democrats field a more seasoned politician to run in the fall. Republicans, likewise, formed a committee to begin screening likely candidates.

Widely recognized names — Treasurer Richard Cordray, former U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, Lt. Gov. and former attorney general Lee Fisher — began to surface, in part because it is difficult to imagine how anyone without statewide name ID would have time to build support among voters.

But Nancy Martorano, a professor of political science at the University of Dayton, said the presidential contest may be more than a simple distraction in the attorney general’s race: It may be an asset.

Ohio’s statewide races typically enjoy the limelight. They take place every four years — on a cycle so they don’t coincide with presidential races. Most recent state campaigns have taken shape, and begun raising money, two years or more ahead of Election Day. The first ad in the 2006 gubernatorial race ran in August, at which point the campaigns had already raised millions of dollars each.

Democrats have seen record numbers of new registrants participating in the lengthy presidential primary contest that culminated Tuesday in Obama becoming the party’s presumptive nominee. Martorano said that could tend to favor whatever candidate the Democrats pick for attorney general.

Republicans see hypocrisy in Dann’s fall from grace — and they intend to say so.

Dann crusaded into office on a pledge to clean up the Republican “culture of corruption” in Ohio. He surprised everyone, including himself, when he beat veteran Republican officeholder Betty Montgomery, who had served as both state attorney general and state auditor.

Among 1,738 Ohio voters interviewed between May 29 and June 2, 23 percent said they would be less supportive of the Democratic Party because of the Dann scandal. Sixty-seven percent said the scandal would have no effect on their view of the party. The margin of error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.