Sittenfeld’s Senate announcement gets national attention

Cincinnati City Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld’s announcement that he will run for U.S. Senate in 2016 has started to grab national headlines. Ohio, as usual, will be a pivotal state in the presidential election next year, when Sen. Rob Portman is up for re-election.

Sittenfeld recently told Soapbox he’d been “thinking seriously about that race and have been genuinely overwhelmed at the level of encouragement people have offered.”

The Huffington Post has the first national interview with Sittenfeld since his annoucement yesterday, saying, “If elected, Sittenfeld would be one of the youngest members of the chamber, where the U.S. Constitution sets the minimum age for service at 30. He faces an uphill battle against Portman, 59, who already had $5.8 million in his campaign war chest as of early January.

“But Sittenfeld too has been laying groundwork, traveling around the state on what National Journal recently called a ‘months-long networking campaign’ to introduce himself to activists and voters outside of Cincinnati. He brought on board the high-profile campaign firm 270 Strategies, which boasts several veterans of President Barack Obama’s two bids for the White House, to handle his announcement. And his interview Thursday was filled with carefully tailored policy specifics that largely dovetailed with what Obama put forward in his State of the Union address this week.”

Read the full Huffington Post story here. There’s also coverage in Politico and The New York Times.