(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . OH-Sen: Poll Shows Majority Of OH Voters Support Abortion Rights, Legal Weed & Sen. Brown (D) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-18 Here’s some very encouraging news today out of Ohio: x Issue 2 (Marijuana) leads 57-35 -- no horserace polls, but fav/unfavs Biden: 37/61 Trump: 48/52 Brown: 44/38 Dolan: 21/23 LaRose: 31/27 Moreno: 16/23 https://t.co/MPkb8815ff — Dj (@DjsokeSpeaking) October 18, 2023 Click here for the full results from the Baldwin Wallace University poll. Now for comparison, Emerson College released their polling last week and showed a toss up race: x OHIO POLL 2024 U.S. Senate Matchups Matt Dolan 38% Sherrod Brown 36% Frank LaRose 39% Sherrod Brown 38% Bernie Moreno 33% Sherrod Brown 35%https://t.co/L31eLhN9TU pic.twitter.com/F6BrIPTD4V — Emerson College Polling (@EmersonPolling) October 10, 2023 An Emerson College Polling survey of Ohio voters finds incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in a tight re-election campaign with potential Republican 2024 U.S. Senate candidates. In a matchup between Brown and State Senator Matt Dolan, 38% support Dolan and 36% support Brown. Against Frank LaRose, 39% support LaRose, 38% Brown. In a matchup with Bernie Moreno, 35% support Brown, a third of voters (33%) support Moreno. “With just over a year until the 2024 Ohio U.S. Senate election, many established Democratic demographics, like voters under 30 and Black voters, are demonstrating a lower level of enthusiasm toward Brown,” Kimball noted. “It is not that these voters are supporting the Republican candidate over Brown, they are choosing to select someone else or note they are undecided at this point. About a third of voters under 30 indicate they would vote for someone else or are undecided in a Brown/Dolan matchup; 38% of Black voters indicate the same.” “An encouraging sign for Brown is that he leads Republicans by several points among independents voters,” Kimball said. Emphasis Mine. FYI, Trump leads Biden in Ohio 45-33 in Emerson’s poll. There’s also another encouraging sign for Brown: With $11.8 million in the bank, incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has far outraised his Republican challengers, who continue to pour their own money into the tightly contested 2024 U.S. Senate race. But Brown’s war chest may not win him reelection. A poll from Emerson College last week predicts the three-term Democrat losing in a matchup against state senator Matt Dolan (R-Ohio) by two points and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) by one point. The poll, which has a 4.5% margin of error, has Brown defeating Republican businessman Bernie Moreno by one point. Republicans could stand to flip the U.S. Senate if Brown loses reelection. Once a bellwether, Ohio has taken a recent rightward shift, electing Sen. J.D. Vance (R), who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, to the Senate in 2022. Brown is the only Ohio Democrat to be elected to a non-judicial statewide office since 2008. Still, Brown has retained his ability to fundraise and attract grassroots support. The incumbent Democrat raised $5.8 million from July to September, a 15% increase from the previous quarter. At least 31% of his funds came from donors who contributed $200 or less, an OpenSecrets analysis of third-quarter Federal Election Commission filings found. LaRose came closest to matching Brown’s grassroots support, with 21% of his funds coming from small donors. Less than half of one percent of Dolan’s funds came from small donors and small donors accounted for 3% of Moreno’s third-quarter fundraising haul. Moreno and Dolan each loaned $3 million to their campaigns in the last three months. Dolan raised an additional $1.1 million and Moreno raised another $1.2 million. LaRose, who began his campaign in July, loaned his campaign $250,000 and raised another $792,000. Here’s where it also gets pathetic: x Notable in #OHSen: LaRose team claims he outperformed JD Vance's first quarter in the 2022 race by a lot. But they aren't comparing apples to apples. LaRose and Vance both ended up at $1 million after loans. Vance also brought forward $$ from a committee set up before his launch. pic.twitter.com/G402BUMr1I — Henry J. Gomez (@HenryJGomez) October 17, 2023 x Memo circulating from the Bernie Moreno campaign in #OHSen largely ignores Matt Dolan but goes hard on Frank LaRose — and also seems to include a suggestion that putting paid advertising behind Sen. JD Vance's endorsement of Moreno would push Moreno ahead of LaRose in the polls. pic.twitter.com/zArivKEc5H — Henry J. Gomez (@HenryJGomez) October 17, 2023 FYI, here’s some more shady shit from LaRose: Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose last week flatly refused to answer questions about whether he’s campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate from the same building where he’s moving his state offices. If he is, it raises questions about whether the state’s top elections officer will be blurring his duty to run a fair election with his attempt to win one of the state’s most coveted offices in the same election. LaRose’s refusal to comment comes after he certainly appeared last month to do a campaign interview with provocateur Steve Bannon from the building at 200 Civic Center Drive. Perhaps tellingly, LaRose’s office didn’t answer questions before that story was published, nor did it dispute it after. The state’s top elections official has claimed that he has no headquarters for his Senate campaign. “I don’t have a campaign office, we’re a lean and mean operation,” LaRose told IHeart Radio’s Brandon Boxer on Sept. 21. “I work out of some borrowed space at the state party sometimes or wherever else.” But that’s hard to credit when you’re trying to win a state of nearly 12 million people. “You need space,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of the watchdog group Common Cause Ohio. “You need space to organize simple things like yard signs. A robust campaign actually needs at least one office — often more than one — if you’re going to be successful. Think about the number of media markets you have in Ohio. The secretary of state is running for the U.S. Senate.” And here’s where LaRose is even more pathetic: Few Republicans these days are threading a needle quite as microscopic as Ohio’s chief election officer. LaRose is not an original MAGA Republican, declining to endorse Trump even in 2020. But LaRose made a point of backing him for the first time this summer, ahead of a dinner at Trump’s New Jersey golf club. LaRose isn’t as far right as many Ohio Republicans, but this year he became a leading proponent of a doomed ballot measure aimed at making it harder to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio’s constitution. LaRose does not directly deny the results of the 2020 presidential election but has noticeably dialed up his rhetoric on election fraud since then. Skeptics of LaRose, one of the leading candidates to challenge Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in a battleground state, do not quite buy his slow march from occasional Trump critic to MAGA believer. LaRose’s main competition for the nomination is businessman Bernie Moreno, who aligned himself with key members of Trump’s menagerie of allies, including former Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell and Arizona’s Kari Lake, the queen of election denial. The two men appear locked in a battle for Trump’s affections ― and possible endorsement. “The switch — I guess we’re getting used to that with people like [Ohio Sen.] J.D. Vance, that people are changing who they are,” said David Pepper, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party from 2015 to 2020, who was an outspoken critic and sometimes legal opponent of LaRose over ballot access and GOP-led gerrymandering. Pepper, who has sat in court hearings and on panels with LaRose, called his transformation “disturbing” and said, “This was somebody who literally said a couple of years ago he wouldn’t endorse in any campaigns because he didn’t want the secretary of state position to be questionable.” LaRose is one of only three GOP secretaries seeking a promotion to higher office in 2024, and the only one running for U.S. Senate. But LaRose, unlike West Virginia’s Mac Warner, who is running to replace Republican Gov. Jim Justice, has not called the 2020 election stolen — failing a major MAGA litmus test as he seeks, at the very least, for Trump to stay neutral in the Ohio race. Warner was among the first secretaries of state to question the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory, siding with the majority of GOP voters who still refuse to accept the outcome of the last presidential election. Early Voting has already begun in Ohio. Click here to find your polling place to this time vote Yes on Abortion Rights and legalizing marijuana in Ohio. Health and Democracy are on the ballot this year and next year and we need to make sure Senator Brown is re-elected. Click below to donate and get involved with U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown’s (D. OH) re-election campaign and his fellow Ohio Democrats campaigns: Sherrod Brown Emilia Sykes Greg Landsman Marcy Kaptur Shontel Brown [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/18/2200169/-OH-Sen-Poll-Shows-Majority-Of-OH-Voters-Support-Abortion-Rights-Legal-Weed-Sen-Brown-D?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/