Dollar. Dollar. Bill, ya'all.

Campaign finance reports are due later this month for those running for office in Ohio.

These reports will provide us info on the contributions, expenditures, and total cash-on-hand for each candidate.

Of particular interest will be the Kasich-Strickland numbers.

If you'll recall from July, we determined that since Kasich only entered the race one month prior to the deadline, it was much more fair to gauge each candidate's success in raising money on a dollar raised per month basis, rather than overall raised. This made sense since Kasich didn't have the same amount of time Strickland did to raise money.

Obviously, this way of gauging success didn't hide that Kasich was facing an uphill battle in the fundraising war. After all, Strickland had a 3 year head start.

So, with our per month gauge of success, we learned from the reports that Kasich raised $467,000 per month, while Strickland raised $416,000 per month.

One month in, and Kasich was already performing better than the Governor.

So, what can we expect from this latest report?

Well, frankly I'm expecting a lot from Kasich. While he bested Strickland's per month total, he needed to do much better if he wants to catch up to Strickland's totals come Fall.

I heard some good things about fundraising the past couple months so that's why I'm betting Kasich improves his per month totals by around 1/3 and raises about 625k a month. That comes to $3.75 million raised.

For comparison's sake, Ted Strickland has never raised more than $2.5 million in one reporting period. No, not even in 2006.

Keep in mind Ohio's own Rob Portman pulled in about 433k a month to score 1.3 million in the third quarter - that won him this glowing headline in Politico. So yeah, I'm praying/asking/hoping for a lot. But unfortunately it takes more than just ideas to bring down a sitting Governor.

So what about Jello Ted? Despite his plummeting numbers, you have to assume an incumbent governor is going to improve his numbers. I'm going to guess conservative and bet Strickland improves his fundraising by 20%, coming in at $3 million raised.

A near 4-3 ratio ain't bad. Keep your fingers crossed at the end of the month.