Another Ohio Poll Shows Vance and DeWine Leading

Last week, an Emerson poll found Republican J. D. Vance leading Democrat Tim Ryan by three points in the U.S. Senate race and Republican governor Mike DeWine leading his Democratic opponent Nan Whaley by 16 points. A new poll released today by Trafalgar has similar results: Vance+4.6 and DeWine+15.9.

DeWine obviously has the advantage of incumbency, and his traditional GOP brand of politics has fared better among the general Ohio electorate since 2016 than Vance’s brand of Trumpian populism. In 2016, mainstream Republican Rob Portman defeated former Democratic governor Ted Strickland by 21 points in the U.S. Senate race, while Trump beat Hillary Clinton by eight points. (Before 2016, of course, Obama won Ohio twice and George W. Bush only carried the state twice by low single digits.) In the 2018 “blue wave,” DeWine won the governor’s race by 4.3 points, while Republican Jim Renacci lost the Senate race by 6.4 points.

The polls in the 2022 races for Senate and governor could converge. But, as I noted last week, perhaps the most interesting thing about the polling split between DeWine and Vance (as well as Kemp and Walker in Georgia) is that it very likely is not due to abortion politics:

Both DeWine and Vance are pro-life. DeWine is the governor who signed into law Ohio’s ban on abortion after a baby’s heartbeat is detectable about six weeks into pregnancy, with an exception for when the mother’s life or physical health is endangered but not when the pregnancy is the result of rape. If the abortion issue were a decisive factor for any given voter, it’s hard to see why that voter would cast a ballot against Vance and for DeWine.

Ever since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade at the end of June, political observers have been trying to detect how much the issue might help Democrats in November, and there have been a few data points suggesting that Republican prospects have been diminished over the last couple months. The congressional GOP’s 2.3-point lead over Democrats on the generic ballot has turned into a 0.5-point lead for Democrats according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls. Republicans have not met expectations in a couple of congressional special elections. And at the beginning of August, Kansas voters (by 59 percent to 41 percent) rejected a referendum that would have held a right to abortion is not protected by the state constitution.

A number of Senate GOP candidates have seen lackluster polling as well. But the strength of pro-life GOP governors in those same battleground states suggests that the Senate GOP’s diminished electoral prospects may have more to do with candidate quality than abortion politics. It’s not just Ohio. In Georgia, Republican governor Brian Kemp signed into law a heartbeat act that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is endangered. But Kemp leads Democrat Stacey Abrams by 4.2 points in the RCP average of polls, while Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker (who has a lot of baggage) trails Democratic senator Raphael Warnock by 4.4 points.