SCARY MATH FOR OHIO DEMS: democracy guy is peeved at Chris Bowers of MyDD for this call for support for Paul Hackett as the Democratic challenger to Dewine next year. It's hard to argue with Tim on this one.

It's possible that Hackett's lifetime total of blog entries now exceeds his lifetime total of votes received. (Update: I checked and his technorati count is only 3,216 posts, whereas he got almost 56,000 votes just in the general against Schmidt. But google "+hackett+congress+2005" and you get 130,000 links... so I guess this wasn't an entirely cheap shot.) This is not Hackett's fault, of course; he racked up a lot more votes in his one big race than anybody expected when he entered. There's a good argument that Hackett should be running for something statewide next year.

But the top of the ticket? Pleeeee-uz!

Here's a cold hard fact for Hackett's netrooters, and others unfamiliar with Ohio politics, to contemplate: Going back at least to 1970, only one candidate of either party has been elected U.S. Senator or Governor in this state without either a) running and losing in a statewide general election at least once before, or b) running successfully for a statewide office "down ticket". That single exception was John Glenn in 1974 -- and even the world-famous astronaut lost his first Democratic primary for the job (to Howard Metzenbaum in 1970).

Ohio elections are fought out in five significant media markets and a dozen smaller ones. Paul Hackett is known to more than a handful of voters in just one -- the third biggest, Cincinnati. Rep. Tim Ryan, the other much-mentioned Senate candidate in blogland, is well known only in Youngstown, which doesn't even make the major market list (though he's also been covered on Cleveland TV).

Short of being the first American to orbit the earth, or hosting a popular national television show, the only way for a rising candidate to get known to voters in all these markets is to run for statewide office. In a year like 2006, where the top of the ticket is shared by the U.S. Senate and Governor races, turnout averages about 3.5 million. All these folks vote in the top races, so winning there takes 1.75 to 1.8 million votes. (The last Democratic Governor, Dick Celeste, got more than 2 million votes to win in 1982 and 1986.) But with some falloff down the ballot, it's possible to become Attorney General or Secretary of State with smaller numbers; Lee Fisher won the 1990 Attorney General's race with 1.68 million votes (a stunning first-time performance) but lost it four years later with 1.63 million. Hence the rule... the first time you run statewide, you run for a down-ticket office, and/or you lose.

The Democrats' big problem for 2006, in an otherwise extremely promising environment created by the GOP's Coingate Follies, is this: There are no candidates for U.S. Senator or Governor who've taken that first run.

Here are the Democrats who've gotten more than 1.4 million statewide votes in non-Presidential years since 1990:

Lee Fisher, Attorney General, 1990 -- 1,680,698 (won)
Lee Fisher, Attorney General, 1994 -- 1,625,247 (lost)
Sherrod Brown, Secretary of State, 1990 -- 1,604,058 (lost)
Lee Fisher, Governor, 1998 -- 1,498,956 (lost)
Mary Boyle, U.S. Senate (vs. Voinovich), 1998 -- 1,482,054 (lost)
John Donofrio, State Treasurer, 1998 -- 1,472,940 (lost)
Mary Boyle, State Treasurer, 2002 -- 1,459,113 (lost)
Charleta Tavares, Secretary of State, 1998 -- 1,404,081 (lost)

Fisher led the Democratic ticket each year he ran. Boyle led the ticket in 2002, when the Democratic candidate for Governor was Tim Hagan. Both are from Cuyahoga County, and neither is presently in office or running for anything, though Fisher keeps flirting. (Boyle went to nursing school after her last campaign.) Sherrod Brown has decided to remain a Congressman. Donofrio, the longtime Summit County Treasurer, is now the county's "Fiscal Officer" and seems happy where he is. Tavares is a busy Columbus City Council member who will probably run for higher office... eventually.

All of these people are, like, a million votes closer to having a statewide voting base of 1.8 million than Tim Ryan... or Marcy Kaptur... or Ted Strickland or Michael Coleman, for that matter. And they're way, way closer than Paul Hackett. Which is why the Ohio Democratic Party has a big problem, despite all those titillating stories from the GOP Statehouse and Dewine's tanking poll numbers. Outside their own districts and the blogosphere, nobody knows who the "mentioned" Democratic candidates are.

You can't beat somebody with nobody. If 2006 was going to be an up-or-down referendum on Ohio Republicans, they'd be in terrible trouble. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Send in the lions. But that's not the way it works.

Ohioans will have to vote for somebody for each of those offices. The GOP candidates at the top of the ticket will be well-known statewide candidates, neither of whom will be named Taft. They'll have huge financial resources to boost their recognition and define their opponents. Meanwhile, it seems all the Democrats will be introducing themselves to most of the state for the first time -- and despite the netroots' touching faith in the power of online fundraising, they are not gonna outraise the Ohio and national GOPs, with a Senate seat and major state government both on the line.

This adds up to a very uphill slog for Ohio Democrats in 2006. Of course Taft might make it easier by hanging in there, and the Coingate Curse might continue to spread. National and international developments (yes, Tim, I mean Iraq among other things) might make conflicted Republicans like Dewine even more vulnerable. And the guys at MyDD might come up with a way to raise a million dollars a day for their favorites.

That's a lot of "mights". What's certain is that some Democrats with no statewide history have to figure out how to get 1.8 million votes by November 2006, or lose trying.

History says they can't do it. Maybe history is bunk this time.

But that's some scary math.