LOL Jon Husted is such a Senate non-entity, Ohioans think Sherrod Brown is still in the job but just hasn’t been very active

Chalk this up as the funniest bad news Jon Husted could possibly have just about a month out from the midterm election.

Apparently, Jon Husted is such a Senate non-entity, Ohioans think Sherrod Brown is still in the job but just hasn’t been very active of late.

Republican senators vying for re-election this year have had to contend with a cratering economy and an unpopular president. Senator Jon Husted of Ohio appears to have an additional challenge: Even some of the state’s most devoted conservatives don’t know who he is.

[…]

“I don’t know a whole lot about Husted,” said Debbie Grenko, 67, a Republican, as she stroked her pony, Spirit, at the Delaware County Fair in central Ohio last week. “It’s Sherrod Brown in there, right?”

Ted Hull, who on Wednesday night was watching a “wiener dog race” at the Delaware County Fair. He said he planned to vote for Mr. Husted. Mr. Hull, 72, said that Mr. Brown, who he thought was still in office, seemed to have “become lazy” on the job.

“There should be term limits,” Mr. Hull said.

Incredibly enough, Husted’s campaign is leaning into this, trying to make it look like Brown is the incumbent and he’s the challenger.

We suppose that if Mr. Hull is more representative of Ohio swing voters, well, that might mean the approach will work for Husted.

But Ms. Grenko is a Republican— so of the two voters quoted in the piece, 50 percent of them should really be voting for Husted anyway. And we don’t know Hull’s partisan affiliation.

If he’s a Republican, too, well, basically all this approach is doing is getting Republicans to vote for a Republican. Which would be a not terribly impressive feat.

We’ll see what happens, but we think Husted has already lost this race. And we think getting this piece in the NYT is more about signaling to establishment donors that they should keep bolstering pro-Husted efforts, despite the fact that the race seems to have gone South quite some time ago.

Now, that might work. But probably not.

In any event, it’s pretty funny that this is even a line the Husted people can run, because it underlines exactly how much of a non-entity Husted has been in the Senate over the last ~ 2 years.

LOL.