Election Day is approaching, however, with the FitzGerald campaign imploding on itself who really needs to take it to a vote?

We all knew Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald’s chances of winning the Governor seat over incumbent John Kasich were small, but FitzGerald has made them practically non-existent. Things looked bleak from the beginning. When it came to financing their campaigns, Kasich was leading FitzGerald by about $20 million and reports from July 31, 2013 showed Kasich had out-raised FitzGerald by a 4-1 margin that period. Things only got worse from there when FitzGerald had no choice but to remove his hand-picked running mate from the ticket. The removal took place after it was revealed that the lieutenant governor nominee, State Senator Eric Kearney and his wife owed nearly $1 million in unpaid taxes.

While it seemed members of Ed FitzGerald’s campaign were bogging down his chances of winning, he made sure to finish the job himself. On August 1 the scandal broke about FitzGerald being caught with a woman, who was not his wife, in a car at 4:30 a.m. in an industrial complex in Westlake.

One of FitzGerald’s only conceivable means of taking the election was winning the majority of the female vote. In a Quinnipiac University poll, it showed Kasich was only leading the female vote by a 43 to 41 lead. However, with this recent turn of events, FitzGerald can kiss his female vote goodbye. And as if his personal life wasn’t hurting him enough, it was also recently discovered that the Cuyahoga County Executive hasn’t had a valid driver’s license for the past decade.

The idea that someone could display such wrongness and stupidity on something as simple as a driver’s license goes beyond comprehension and says a lot about a person’s character. With things looking abysmal for FitzGerald, it doesn’t look good for the rest of the Ohio Democratic ticket either. The gubernatorial ticket has a powerful pull in statewide elections. So FitzGerald’s campaign virtually being destroyed has inflicted a lot of damage on the races below it. Democrats should be embarrassed that they put Fitzgerald up as their choice for the highest ranking position in Ohio. They have not being able to run an effective gubernatorial race in a crucial swing state, and this election does not speak well to how they will perform in Ohio in 2016.

Contact Jennifer Hutchinson at [email protected].