Poll beautiful to three guv candidates

All three major candidates for Ohio governor found something nice in the latest public-opinion poll, conducted last week by the Ohio Republican Party.

Secretary of State Ken Blackwell liked it because it said he had a 10 percentage point lead over his GOP primary rival Jim Petro, Ohio's attorney general.

The telephone survey of 800 people likely to vote in the general election, including 400 likely Republicans, was taken Jan. 23-25 by McLaughlin & Associates of Washington, D.C., It had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percent. It showed Blackwell was leading Petro 40 percent to 30 percent with a large number of undecideds, at 29 percent.

Petro's campaign also liked the results because it found them faring better in a head-to-head match against Democratic frontrunner Ted Strickland.

And Strickland, a U.S. congressman from Lisbon, liked it because he led Blackwell and Petro in both matchups.

The poll found Strickland running ahead of Petro by 39 percent to 36 percent and ahead of Blackwell by 39 percent to 33 percent.

"Polls are all over the map,'' Petro said at a Statehouse news conference today. "This is not about polls. This is about ideas.''