Columbus, Ohio — There’s a lot for conservatives to keep track of today, but they might want to keep an eye on the House race in Ohio’s 15th district. Comprised of parts of Columbus and its western suburbs, Ohio’s 15th is the kind of bellwether district Republicans have to win if they want to be a majority party again. Ohio’s 15th has not sent a Democrat to Congress since the mid-1960s. Moderate Republican Deborah Pryce, who is retiring this year, has represented the district since 1993. Last year, Pryce barely won re-election, beating Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy by just over 1,000 votes. Almost immediately, Kilroy announced that she would run again in 2008. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sensed a pick-up opportunity and started pouring resources into her campaign. Her opponent is state senator Steve Stivers, a lieutenant colonel in the Ohio Army National Guard who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It is a sign of how bad things are for Republicans that this race is even close. Stivers is a strong candidate whose positions are a good match for this center-right, urban/suburban district. He favors a pro-growth tax policy, free trade and spending restraint. He would evaluate Iraq based on the conditions on the ground. (“I want to make sure we bring our soldiers home the right way, so that we don’t have to send them right back,” he says.) He supports drilling so that we’re producing more of the oil we use, but he also drives a hybrid and wants the U.S. to invest in alternative energy. He’s a moderate on social issues; he supports restrictions on abortion but not a total ban. Kilroy, a Franklin County (Columbus) commissioner, is a doctrinaire left-winger. She has adopted Barack Obama’s platform in this race, but in a former life she edited a left-leaning alterna-weekly (the Columbus Free Press) and was featured in a French documentary as one of the director’s “former leftist companions” in America. In a profile of the race, Time magazine referred to her as an “uncharismatic liberal.”

Despite the apparent mismatch, Kilroy leads in the polls heading into Election Day — the latest Survey USA poll has her up by six. It doesn’t help Stivers that pro-life Independent Don Elijah Eckhart is siphoning off conservative support — between 5 and 7 percent, according to the polls. Ohio Right to Life endorsed Eckhart over Stivers, even though Stivers routinely gets a score of zero from Ohio NARAL and Kilroy would vote for the Freedom of Choice Act.

The timing of the financial crisis is also working against Stivers, who previously served as vice president of government relations for Columbus-based Bank One. Kilroy and the state Democratic party have taken every opportunity to remind voters that Stivers was a bank lobbyist. Stivers says he didn’t work on regulatory issues related to the mortgage meltdown, and Kilroy hasn’t produced any credible evidence to the contrary. But any connection to a bank is a liability right now, and Kilroy is exploiting it.

In any other year, Stivers’s connection to one of the region’s largest employers would have been a plus. During his time at Bank One, he worked on a relatively non-controversial piece of deregulation: the Riegle-Neal Act, which allowed banks to establish interstate branching networks. He says, “Bank One used it to grow jobs here in Columbus, Ohio and central Ohio, from about 9,500 jobs when I got there in 1995 to around 13,500 when I left in 2003.” By contrast, Kilroy worked as a labor lawyer before leaving her firm to run for county commissioner.

Local issues aside, how does the 15th district vote? The district is about evenly split between registered Republicans and Democrats, though Democrats gained ground as a result of this year’s hard-fought Democratic primary. President Bush won the district by a comfortable margin in 2000, but by less than a percentage point in 2004.

Stivers says, “I would make the argument that Bush won the 2000 race by a much bigger margin because, if you listen to what he said and what he focused on in 2000, when he was the ‘compassionate conservative’, he was talking about things that mattered to suburban folks. “When you got to the 2004 campaign, his race in Ohio was really around social issues, which mattered more to rural voters,” Stivers says. “In rural areas in Union and Madison counties, he got a better percentage, but in the suburbs he did not do as well.” About 15 percent of the voters in Ohio’s 15th district live in rural areas, with the rest split between the suburbs and Columbus. On whether the district is a bellwether for national political trends, Stivers says, “If they choose me, it means that this district is the same as it’s always been, and that’s a moderate, fiscally conservative, fairly anti-tax district that is not in love with government. “If somehow Kilroy were to win,” he says, “it either means that there was an Obama tsunami, or it means that people in this district have, all of a sudden, given the financial problems we’re in, decided that government is the answer to every question, because that is her answer to every question.” Perish the thought. If an Iraq-war veteran and fiscal conservative like Stivers can’t beat a union-backed far-left-winger in a center-right district, then the Republican party, conservatives and the country have a serious problem. Either way, Ohio’s 15th district is one to watch. – Stephen Spruiell is an NRO staff reporter.