2016 Ohio primary

  You can’t really say that the people of Ohio’s 8th Congressional District – an overwhelmingly Republican stretch of land – despised their congressman, former House Speaker John Boehner of West Chester.

After all, they elected him to Congress every two years from 1990 through 2014, never with less than 60 percent of the vote. In 2012, the Democrats in the district didn’t even bother to field a candidate. They looked at it and said, what’s the point?

For nearly a quarter of a century, voters in the 8th Congressional District of Ohio sent Republican John Boehner back to the U.S. House by huge margins every two years.

It gave Boehner the kind of clout that allowed him to become Speaker of the House in January, 2010.

All of that ended last fall, when the West Chester Republican was pushed into resignation by a rebellious House GOP caucus, many of whom thought he was too eager to compromise with the Democrat in the White House.

The election of a county recorder is not unimportant  – it is – but elections for Hamilton County Recorder are generally sleepy affairs, with the candidates involved largely ignoring each other as they try to build name recognition.

Not this year. At least not on the Republican side.

The contest for the GOP is between two well-known Republicans, one looking to return to elected office, the other looking to stay in public office.

  John Kasich - who was re-elected as Ohio's governor  in 2014 with 64 percent of the vote - is trailing Republican front-runner Donald Trump by five percentage points among likely Ohio GOP primary voters, according to a poll released Tuesday morning by Quinnipiac University. 

The Quinnipiac Poll had Trump with 31 percent support among Ohio Republicans, compared to 26 percent for Kasich. 

News from Lake Wobegon: Garrison Keillor’s popular Saturday night show will be cut short by NPR stations for coverage of election results.

WVXU-FM and other National Public Radio affiliates will cut away from “A Prairie Home Companion” at 7 p.m. for live coverage of the South Carolina Republican primary and the Nevada Democratic caucuses.

Keillor’s entire show will repeat noon Sunday on WVXU-FM, as usual.

Wednesday marks the first of 27 days of early voting before Ohio's March 15th primary election.

Ohio's 88 county boards of elections can begin mailing out absentee ballots to those who have applied for them; and voters can cast ballots at specific times at board of election offices.

Because this is a presidential primary election for both Republicans and Democrats, election officials like Sherry Poland, Hamilton County's elections director, are preparing for large numbers of early voters.

Well, no need for John Kasich to pack his bags, come home and go back to his day job as Ohio’s governor.

He had a very respectable second-place finish in New Hampshire last Tuesday, even though his 16 percent of the vote was less than half of that of the 600-pound gorilla in the room, Donald Trump.

Democratic voters in the 31st Ohio House District have no less than six candidates from which to choose to replace incumbent Democrat Denise Driehaus, who is term-limited out of the Ohio House this year.

There is but one lone Republican on the primary ballot.

This should tell you something about the 31st – it is a heavily Democratic district.

In fact, the 31st Ohio House District was something of a gift that the Ohio Apportionment Board, controlled by Republicans, gave Democrats after the legislative district were re-drawn following the 2010 Census.

Ed. Note: This is the first in a series of profiles of some of the contested races in the March 15 Ohio primary.

Democratic Party leaders in Cincinnati really weren’t expecting a primary contest in the 32nd Ohio House District in the March 15 primary election.

After all, the freshman incumbent, State Rep. Christie Bryant Kuhns of Northside won the heavily-Democratic district with ease in 2014, despite it being her first time on the ballot.