OHIO GOVERNOR Poll puts Montgomery as lead candidate for '06

The state auditor lost only in the Mahoning Valley, the poll shows.
By DAVID SKOLNICK
VINDICATOR POLITICS WRITER
A poll of the 2006 Ohio gubernatorial candidates shows Auditor Betty Montgomery is the person to beat.
The poll has Montgomery with 32 percent of the Republican vote, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell with 23 percent and Attorney General Jim Petro with 17 percent. Twenty-eight percent of the Republican vote in the poll is undecided.
The Tarrance Group, based in Alexandria, Va., questioned 800 registered voters from throughout the state by telephone between Oct. 27 and Nov. 1. The margin of error is 3.5 percent.
The poll revealed that Montgomery and Petro would beat potential Democratic gubernatorial candidates, state Sen. Eric Fingerhut and Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman, in head-to-head races, with Montgomery beating the Democrats by larger margins than Petro. The survey didn't include potential races between Blackwell and the two Democrats.
"The Montgomery campaign has known all along that she's the front-runner, that she's better known and better liked," said Mark Weaver, Montgomery's campaign consultant. "This poll proves that. Since the poll, we've gotten calls returned from donors and gotten unsolicited calls from donors."
The head-to-head poll between the three candidates consisted of 333 Republican voters, with a 5-percent margin of error.
Valley results
The only area of the state in which Montgomery lost was in a three-way match-up was the Mahoning Valley, Weaver said. But only 16 Republicans in the Valley were polled, with Blackwell getting 32 percent, Petro with 24 percent and Montgomery with 12 percent.
Even though Montgomery's campaign paid for the poll, the Tarrance Group is an extremely reputable firm that has done much polling for Ohio Republicans, and the results are credible, said John Green, director of the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.
Green said he wasn't surprised that Montgomery did well.
"But I'm surprised that Petro did so badly," he said. "I have no reason to dispute the poll, but the results are surprising."
The poll showed that Montgomery has a better image among voters than Blackwell and Petro. More people know who she is, 76 percent, compared with 70 percent for Petro and 60 percent for Blackwell. Also, she has a higher favorable image at 47 percent compared with 31 percent for Petro and 28 percent for Blackwell.
The poll did show that Democrats have a chance of breaking the Republican stranglehold over the governor's office.
Of those polled, 42 percent said they would vote for a Democratic candidate for governor with 35 percent voting for a Republican candidate, and 23 percent undecided. A poll done by the firm in July showed a Republican beating a Democrat for governor 40 percent to 36 percent with 24 percent undecided.
skolnick@vindy.com