Democrat Cordray wins AG post

Two incumbent Supreme Court justices won re-election Tuesday.

STAFF/WIRE REPORT

COLUMBUS — Democrat Richard Cordray, Ohio’s treasurer, won the race for attorney general on Tuesday, retaining the powerful office for his party after a high-profile scandal.

Cordray, 49, defeated Republican Mike Crites, a former U.S. Attorney who wooed voters with a tough-on-corruption message and a TV ad campaign painting Cordray as a career politician in the mold of former Attorney General Marc Dann of Youngstown, who was forced to resign in May.

Cordray won Columbiana County and had comfortable leads was leading in Mahoning and Trumbull counties at press time.

He called it a great night.

“I did run for this office 10 years ago, so it feels like we’re finishing a project at long last,” Cordray said.

Republicans hoped to regain control of the chief law enforcer’s office in the wake of the embarrassing series of events that ended with Dann’s resignation. He held the office for less than two years.

Independent candidate Robert Owens, 35, a Delaware lawyer, also sought to exploit the scandal as he offered voters a choice without ties to a major political party.

Both faced long odds against the better-known and better-funded Cordray. Cordray built on a campaign fund left over from his 2006 run to raise a total of $2.5 million in the truncated contest, compared with Crites’ $159,000.

Dann was forced out of office by fellow Democrats after seeing top aides implicated in a sexual harassment scandal and admitting to an affair with an employee. He had won election in 2006 as part of the party’s near sweep of statewide offices long held by Republicans.

Cordray campaigned largely as a front-runner, dismissing even the most serious of Crites’ attacks as byproducts of the “silly season.”

Yet Crites, 60, hammered away at Cordray’s response to the scandal, his management of the treasury and his receipt of a $10,000 donation from the stepdaughter of a Columbus-based salesman for Wachovia Securities two weeks after he took office in 2007. Wachovia reportedly saw an increase in its role managing the state’s bond trading after the donation.

Cordray returned the donation and said he had never traded state business for campaign donations.

In the race for Supreme Court justice, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Joseph Russo and Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court Judge Peter Sikora tried to break the all-GOP hold of the state Supreme Court and failed. Justice Maureen O’Connor, a former lieutenant governor to Bob Taft, and Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton, who sought her third, six-year term both were successful.

The were especially successful in the Mahoning Valley, with Stratton and O’Connor winning Columbiana County and having big leads in Mahoning and Trumbull counties at press time, according to unofficial results from the respective county boards of elections.