COLUMBUS, Ohio – Governor John Kasich has lost ground to a virtually unknown challenger in a new poll of Ohio voters.
According to the Quinnipiac University survey, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald has cut a 14-point margin in June in half. Kasich led FitzGerald 44-37 percent, but that was a narrowing of his 47-33 percent lead on June 25.
“John Kasich enters his reelection year with only a seven-point lead over a largely unknown challenger. On the plus side, his approval ratings mark a huge turnaround from his first two years,” Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said.
Ohio voters approve 52-33 percent of the job Kasich is doing and gave him a 41 percent favorability rating, according to the poll.
As expected Kasich, a Republican, has the support of 88 percent of GOP voters while 74 percent of Democrats go to FitzGerald. Kasich holds a 43-31 percent edge among independent voters.
For FitzGerald, name recognition is clearly his biggest challenge: 71 percent of the voters surveyed said they didn’t know enough about him to form an opinion.
Increasing the number of people eligible for Medicaid was a good idea to 51 percent of the voters, but Kasich’s successful expansion inspired only 19 percent of voters to say they’re more likely to vote for him because of it; 23 percent say they are less likely and 54 percent said it made no difference to them.
The poll of 1,361 registered voters conducted Nov. 19-24 has a margin of error of +/- 2.7 percentage points.