From the Political Director - We Get Closer!

A supporter with Robin on election day

Thanks to everyone who contributed to our efforts to help capture Ohio's 5th Congressional District for the Democrats yesterday. Robin received 42,563 votes. Unfortunately it was not enough to win in this massively Republican congressional district. Though the odds were long, Governor Strickland and Senator Brown campaigned for Robin and Ohio Labor did an outstanding job reaching out to their members in the district. The Ohio Democratic Party played a key role in helping put together field resources and provided voter file assistance to the campaign. The DCCC jumped right into this race from the beginning and offered its invaluable assistance to the campaign.

I want to particularly say thank you to the 1,224 donors who gave money through ActBlue. They contributed $93,753.

The point is those who could pitched-in to help run a vigorous northwest Ohio campaign that forced national Republicans to spend a lot of money to defend a safe seat.

We were quite happy to raise enough money to pay the salary of one field organizer for the campaign in the last week. Jesse Gannon was the northwest Ohio coordinator for Sherrod Brown’s U.S. Senate race. He took a week off from his duties in the U.S. Senate to go to Defiance, Ohio and get-out-the-vote there.

Finally, this race was a warm-up for the 2008 battle for Ohio. I hope everybody realizes we have our work cut out for us as we look ahead to next year. Nonetheless, I am very optimistic about our ability to win Ohio.

Yesterday’s results are a harbinger of things to come: the Republicans are on notice. We are going to fight them throughout the state for every vote next year.