Everyone is noticing. Even Youngstown.

When Youngstown calls you out for badly handling a scandal, you know you're in deep.

Gov. Strickland's Troopergate and his less than stellar response to the mess was recently editorialized by Marc Kovac at the Youngstown Vindicator:

Public officials telling lies is unacceptable. Public officials in charge of law enforcement duties telling lies is inexcusable

They should have prompted the governor to take some kind of action, or at least make a strongly worded reprimand against the individuals caught lying.

Instead, this is how Strickland responded: “I believe that the decisions in this case were made by people acting in good faith. If decisions were made in order to protect me from some kind of embarrassment, that was unnecessary. I remain confident in Director Cathy Collins-Taylor, Col. David Dicken and Lt. Joseph Mannion.”

He couldn’t have gift wrapped a better election year present to his Republican challenger.

The current unemployment rate in Youngstown's Mahoning and Trumbull counties averages a drastically high 14.6%.

In 2006, Ted Strickland won those same two counties with 76% and 74% of the vote, respectively.

With the jobs crisis hitting the area harder than the rest of Ohio and a scandal that continues to pick up steam, I think it's safe to say Strickland can't count on anywhere close to that amount of support come 11.2.10.