From a reader:

Jonah, I live in John Kerry’s would-be favorite county, Cuyahoga. As surely as New Jersey does not produce popes, modern Ohio does not produce small-government, pro-market, hawkish rightists. But for small pockets of certain suburban districts, one will elect a Democrat or a “Southern Republican.” Your purist correspondents are either out of state or out of politics. DeWine’s apparently consistent 10-point deficit is more valuable as an indicator of the season’s odd polling. A good bellwether is Betty Montgomery — the current State Auditor, who is running for Attorney General — because the woman is an archetypical Ohio Republican. She is unremarkable but therefore inoffensive. The campaign of opponent Marc Dann ran the most well-executed and entertaining series of radio advertisements I have ever heard, and yet Grendell has been trailing Montgomery the whole season long. No surprise — Montgomery’s an incumbent and a moderate. That is what Ohioans like. But that’s what’s discrepant. DeWine’s work in the Senate is precisely what his electors expected, having sent him to Washington in 2000, Democrats and Republicans, two-to-one. He is a product of Ohio politics, not an aberration. That a cohort of leftward newspapers endorsed DeWine makes Sherrod Brown’s purported lead all the more suspect.