(bright upbeat music) (graphic pops) - Hello and welcome to "Journal", I'm Steve Kendall.

Ohio is in the center of national politics, but of course there's also a lot going on within the state itself.

Joining us kinda get caught up on all of those things, where Ohioans are outside of the state of Ohio, and what they're doing while they're inside the state of Ohio is Karen Kasler, host of "The State of Ohio."

So Karen, thank you so much for being here today.

Obviously Ohio is in the national news because of JD Vance, but here in the state there's other things going as well.

But let's talk about JD Vance for a minute, because it's the first time since sometime in the '40s where an Ohioan has this level of profile on a national ticket.

So talk about the ascendancy of JD Vance, which is pretty mercurial when you think about it.

- Yeah, I believe it's the first time in 80 years an Ohioan has appeared as the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket.

And back then that was John Bricker, he did not win.

So obviously JD Vance is hoping for a little better luck than he had.

And I think that Vance really had emerged from the beginning as a top contender for Donald Trump's running mate, and had been setting that, I think for quite a while because when he earned Trump's endorsement back in 2022 when he ran for the US Senate, and then that vaulted him to winning the seven-way primary and then on to win the election, he was really very heavily on the side of Trump, and very strongly backing everything that Trump was saying.

He continues to do so.

This is quite a shift though, from the way he was in 2016, 2017, when he first moved back to Ohio.

He had been living in California.

He had been working with venture capital out there, but he came back to Ohio and started a foundation that sought to address some of the problems that he talked about in his book, "Hillbilly Elegy", problems of drug addiction, problems in low income parts of Ohio, in rural Ohio.

Though there's a lot of back and forth about whether he was ever in Appalachia, because certainly he's been claiming some sort of Appalachian roots.

But a lot of people from Appalachian Ohio are saying that's not, where he grew up in Middletown is not Appalachian Ohio.

But his foundation really kinda fizzled out.

He ended up being talked about as a candidate, but as a more moderate candidate for US Senate.

Well, that obviously changed as Trump continued to rise.

And JD Vance, who had called Trump terrible- - [Steve] A lotta bad names.

- He said he can't stomach him.

He had a text exchange with a friend where he suspected that Trump would be America's Hitler.

Well, he changed his tune quite significantly, and went back and scrubbed his social media.

And now we have him not only earning Trump's endorsement in 2022, but now earning what is essentially the ultimate endorsement from Trump, in that he is his vice presidential, his running mate replacing Mike Pence, who has said that he doesn't want anything to do with Trump.

- Right, well and the other thing with JD Vance, he's obviously a lot younger, and especially at the time that he was named as the Vice Presidential candidate by Trump, that was gonna be the angle.

"We've got a really young guy who's gonna take over for me," because Trump obviously can't run again, if he is re-elected in 2024.

So that would make Vance the heir apparent to the MAGA portion of the Republican party, or the Republican party.

Some people say that is the Republican party.

So it was an interesting move, because some of the other candidates were people like the Governor of North Dakota, who, although he had been on the podium as a presidential candidate, just didn't seem to have the same sort of charisma that JD Vance apparently has, and that Trump has picked up on.

- Well, and I don't know if it's straight-up charisma, there was a lot of debate about whether JD Vance has charisma.

But there was certainly the question of loyalty, and certainly the issue of some of the other things that Vance brings to the ticket.

He is young, like you mentioned, he's 39 years old.

He has military service in his background.

The idea was that he could speak to working class voters, but I'm not sure how that translates as well, because he did grow up in a lower income part of Ohio in a lower income family, and had a lot of family struggle that he's talked about in that book.

But also he went to Yale and he is wealthy in his own right.

So you know, the common experiences may not be all that common, but I think the idea that somehow Vance would bring along, for instance Ohio, you know, will Vance lead Ohioans to vote for Trump?

Ohioans were probably gonna vote for Trump anyway, in terms of overall statewide.

And there's a lot of evidence that suggests that a vice presidential candidate doesn't necessarily bring the state he or she hails from, and puts that definitely in the winning column.

So I think a lot of Trump's idea in maybe picking JD Vance was that Vance is very eager and willing to go out and do interviews.

He has been very strongly supportive of Trump.

I think all of these things have really led that train forward, so to speak.

- Yeah, and one of the things though too now, JD Vance, because there's mixed views on how this rollout has taken place, because JD Vance has so little time in the public eye.

As you said, 2016, he was a staunch anti-Trumper, said a lot of nasty things about Donald Trump.

Some of the things he said in other categories, some of the things he said about women and families and things like that, are things that typically would've been vetted had you been a candidate or an elected official in other positions.

Those things would've been out, you would've dealt with them.

But now you're at the vice presidential level, and he's dealing with his comments about cat women and things like that, that would've been taken care of years ago.

But he's a year and a half as a US senator or roughly, that's not a lot of experience.

But then as Donald Trump has proved, you don't have to be a veteran politician to get elected to the highest office in the land, or vice president apparently.

- Well, and I think JD Vance's progression from Trump critic to strong Trump supporter is kind of similar to the way that the Republican Party has gone, and a lot of people in the Republican party have gone, who were very skeptical and concerned about Trump initially, but have gone full steam ahead with what Trump has been talking about.

So it kind of really parallels what has been happening in the Republican party at large.

But yeah, JD Vance, while at first there was a lot of, I think, support for him in Ohio, because obviously he was a newly-elected US senator from Ohio, and a lot of thought about, this brings Ohio onto the national stage.

But he's been getting a lot of criticism for the childless cat lady comments, and for some of the comments he's made about women, some of his stances.

And as people are learning more about them, they're concerned about, you know, the childlessness issue, the abortion ban issue, some of these other things that Vance has talked about.

And he's done a lot of interviews.

I mean, while he doesn't have a big record in Congress, he's done a lot of interviews.

So we're continuing to see these interviews come forward, and some of these things have devolved into some really ugly rumors and memes that have had to be debunked.

But for the most part, mixed reactions I think is fair.

And there are polls now that show that he is potentially the most unliked and unpopular vice presidential candidate in recent history.

So not only mixed, but even going toward the negative, among his critics.

- [Steve] Yeah, well when we come back, we can talk a little more about that because obviously he was given the nomination as a vice president before the change took place in the Democratic party, which threw everything kind of into, not disarray, but definitely changed the way the table looked, as far as where the checkers and the chess pieces were landing.

So we come back, we talk a little bit more about JD Vance and what he brings to the ticket, because we know that there, he's from Ohio, as you said, Ohio's probably gonna be a Trump state anyway.

So what is the other piece?

And you alluded to that a little bit.

We come back, a little bit more about JD Vance, where Ohio is nationally and locally and regionally on some issues in just a moment with our guest Karen Kasler, host of "The State of Ohio", back in just a moment.

Thank you for staying with us on "The Journal."

Our guest is Karen Kasler, host of "The State of Ohio."

Karen, we left that last segment, we were talking about JD Vance.

The other thing, he is a sitting US senator.

Now Mike DeWine, governor of Ohio, Republican, will make the appointment.

That kind of sets up sort of this succession plan, because the thought is that the next governor will probably be a Republican governor.

So Vance moving theoretically to the vice presidency doesn't take a seat away from the Republicans in the Senate under the current line of thought.

Am I correct on that or not?

- Yeah, if indeed Trump and Vance win, that Vance seat is open for Mike DeWine to appoint someone.

And the jockeying for position for that will be pretty intense I think.

Because you do have a lot of Republicans who are coming to the end of their terms.

I mean, you've got all five executive office holders in Governor Mike DeWine, Attorney General Dave Yost, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, State Treasurer Robert Sprague, and State Auditor Keith Fabor, who are all term-limited.

They all have to find something else to do.

- [Steve] Ooh, okay.

- As well as Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted.

And so you're seeing some movement around it.

Houston is clearly on track to run for governor.

He's raised about $5 million toward that.

Dave Yost has also expressed an interest in running for governor, though his fundraising is far behind that.

But then you also have some other names that are out there.

I mean, Matt Dolan, the state senator who's run twice now for the US Senate.

You have former Republican Party Chair Jane Timken, who's also a possibility.

You have the Vivek Ramaswamy, who is from the Cincinnati area, and now I believe lives in Columbus, who was running for president for a while.

He's a tech entrepreneur.

You've got a lot of names out there of Republicans who would love to take that seat, and DeWine is most likely to appoint somebody who can hold the seat.

So, and somebody who can fundraise well, who can campaign well in Ohio.

But that's of course down the road.

I mean, right now we're looking at whether indeed Trump-Vance would win.

They're almost certainly gonna win Ohio, but whether they'll win nationwide is obviously an open question.

- And let me and I throw something at you we have had not seen.

Could Mike DeWine appoint himself if he wanted to be, I mean, would he be interested in going back to the US Senate?

Or is he kind of gonna be the senior sage of the Republican party in Ohio, and step back from the governorship?

But I assume that he could probably do that.

I don't know the legalities of it, but would he be interested in being a senator again?

- [Karen] I mean, he's 77 years old.

So I think that once again, you get into that discussion about age and whether it's time to hand the reins over to someone else.

But I mean, DeWine was in the Senate for a long time, knocked out of the Senate in 2006 by Sherrod Brown.

He clearly loved his time in the Senate.

But I think things have changed a lot, and I'm not sure that DeWine would wanna go back.

And I think he's really enjoyed being governor, and I think, you know, he has a huge family that he spends a lot of time with.

So I can imagine that that's not something that he would consider doing.

- [Steve] Well, and if you kinda look at it too, his time as governor, he sort of had that sort of contentious entertainment with his own party running the General Assembly.

So he'd probably be used to what it's like in the US Senate to some degree, because he is been dealing with his own, his own folks have been giving him as much trouble as the opposition party has, while he's been governor.

So maybe, yeah.

- Yeah, and I would add too that, you know, he's certainly a conservative, there's no question that he's a very conservative Republican, but when he was in the Senate, things were different.

There was a lot more bipartisanship it seemed.

There were times that he was able to deal.

I mean, he had some close dealings with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts.

I mean, and things are a lot different now on Capitol Hill than they were when he was in the Senate.

So I can't imagine that going into that environment, especially after dealing with, for instance the Ohio House, where you have a lot of back and forth over who is really in charge of Republicans in the Ohio House.

Maybe that's not something that would appeal at this point.

- Yeah, wouldn't jump back into that again, yeah.

Now you, you mentioned the fact too, that he'll appoint to the next person, DeWine will.

Sherrod Brown- - [Karen] If they- - [Steve] If they win, I got, yeah.

- [Karen] And that's a big if, I think at this point.

Because when Joe Biden stepped out of the Democratic nomination and Kamala Harris entered, I think it really changed the race.

Maybe not in Ohio, but I think nationwide it's changed the race, the polls are tighter now.

And so I think that's a big if.

- [Steve] Yeah, and one of the lines, as we talk about JD Vance and things that he says and comments he makes, conversation leaked out that he said, oh, Biden stepping away and Harris moving up to that number one slot came as a gut punch to their campaign, to the campaign of Trump and Vance, that they didn't see that one coming, didn't think it was gonna happen.

Now that's not something that you want the public to hear.

"Oh, that caught us by surprise."

But I guess maybe it shows the fact, as you said, he does a lotta interviews, he does a lot of talking, and things get out there then because of that.

Because there's a volume out there, a lot of things get out that some people go, "Wow, you shouldn't say that to anybody," with the chance that it's gonna leak in public, "Wow, we didn't see that coming," because no one ever says, "We didn't know what the opposition had planned."

You know, that's not a good look for a lotta people.

- But I think it's pretty evident that this was a surprise.

I mean, certainly the Republicans had been hammering on Biden as being weak and unfit, and possibly having mental decline.

And so when this actually happened, after Biden had said over and over he was not gonna step aside, he was not gonna step aside, and then all of a sudden he stepped aside.

I think it did kinda rock the Republican party in a sense, because they weren't necessarily prepared for this.

And now they have to figure out, after going for so long, campaigning against Joe Biden, spending their entire convention campaigning against Joe Biden, now they have another candidate that they need to come up with a strategy to fight against.

And you're seeing a lot of scattered ideas about, you know, for instance Trump himself talking before a group of Black journalists saying that he didn't know that Kamala Harris was Black.

I mean, that's quite a statement to make.

But then, you know, there's questions about her record and things like this.

But I think Republicans are having a hard time settling on a message and figuring out exactly how to go forward.

And I also think Republicans may have been surprised, given the discord among Democrats about whether Biden should step down or not, for the party to come together so strongly behind Harris, I think was a surprise to Republicans.

They expected a free-for-all at the convention, that it was gonna be up for anybody.

And yet when Biden endorsed Harris, the party really came strongly behind her.

There are some voices out there that are opposed to her, are concerned about her positions on the Israel-Gaza war and, and her past record as a prosecutor, but for the most part, Democrats seem pretty united behind her.

- Yeah, and we got a couple of minutes this segment.

The fact that she is now heading the ticket in Ohio, is that, because Sherrod Brown came out, he wasn't among the first, but when he came out and said, "I think Joe Biden needs to step back.

You know, done a wonderful job," but he was doing political calculus too, so he must believe that Harris at the top of the ticket, or someone other than Joe Biden, gives him a better chance in Ohio against Bernie Marino.

Would that be a reasonable statement?

- Oh, I think that's true.

And I think you've got the five people who were, the five Democrats who were voted into the US House, who are also looking at this as well.

I mean, I think Joyce Beatty in Columbus is pretty safe, but some of the other districts, Marcy Kaptur in Toledo, Greg Landsman down in Cincinnati, I mean, these are races that are gonna be very tough.

Amelia Sykes in the Akron area.

And so to have a different candidate at the top of that ticket, potentially could change their races as well.

And Sherrod Brown was really walking a kind of a fine line there for a while, where we were asking him at Democratic events, "Are you going to campaign with Biden?

Should Biden step down?"

And he kept saying, "I'm focused on my race, I'm focused on my race."

Till he came out and said Biden should step down.

And now we're asking questions, "Okay, are you going to campaign with Kamala Harris?"

And he's been saying, once again, "I'm focused on my race."

He knows the political stakes in Ohio, and where Ohio is likely to go, and he certainly wants to keep his seat, even if Ohio goes more toward Trump than toward Harris.

- [Steve] Yeah, which it has over the past time.

I know I saw in one of "The State of Ohio", someone's saying, "Well, the presidency always goes through Ohio."

Well, it hasn't the last couple of times because of the change.

Oh, we used to be a 50-50 toss up state, yeah.

Whoever won Ohio won the presidency.

That isn't as consistent as it used to be.

You mentioned Marcy Kaptur.

When we come back, she obviously won the last time in a new district.

She's gotta face that again with probably a little better opponent this time, it would seem.

So we can talk about, because redistricting's back, it seems like, among the many things, like I don't know, the sun up in the East, Ohio talks about redistricting all the time.

So we come back, we can touch on that a little bit, because DeWine obviously weighed in on that one already, about what he thinks of the plan, Citizens versus Politicians.

So back in just a moment with Karen Kasler, host of "The State of Ohio", here on "The Journal."

You're with us on "The Journal", our guest is Karen Kasler, host of "The State of Ohio."

We left that last segment Karen, the R word came up, redistricting.

And it seems as if just like algae blooms on Lake Erie, redistricting is a part of our day-to-day life now in Ohio.

No matter how many times it comes to things, like citizens' initiatives on the ballot, however it gets out, it's always back at the top.

So redistricting, you mentioned Marcy Kaptur's district, a change district the last time.

Here we are again.

So talk about what's happening with redistricting in Ohio, our daily driver it seems, yeah.

- I think a lot of people thought redistricting was settled after a vote in 2015 and a vote in 2018 to replace the old apportionment board with the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which was supposed to give minority party members more of a buy-in and more of a voice in how those district lines are drawn.

And then we saw the maps that came out after the 2020 census, and over and over the Ohio Supreme Court, the Court's Chief Justice, a Republican, and the court's three Democrats all voted that all of those maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered.

A federal court ruling had to put those into place so they could be used in 2022.

And so of course, Democrats have said many, many times that Ohio's state legislature and congressional delegation were all elected under illegal gerrymandered maps.

So here we are now again, and all of this, if you'll recall last summer, when Ohioans were being asked to vote on a proposal to make it harder to amend the state constitution, to require a 60% threshold of voter approval to make the constitution and amend it, well that was rejected, but part of the reason Republicans wanted to put that forward was not just abortion, which they knew was also coming, but also a proposal that would change the redistricting process once again.

And so here we are where Republican former Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor is involved with this group Citizens not Politicians, to change that process of drawing those district maps, to throw out the seven-member Ohio Redistricting Commission and replace it with a 15-member panel made up of an equal number of Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

And so this is where we are right now.

That issue is going to be before voters this fall, and signs are certainly pointing to that passing.

And I think that's part of why Governor Mike DeWine came out recently saying that he was opposed to the Citizens not Politicians proposal, though he had said a couple months ago that he thought the governor didn't need to be involved in redistricting, kind of suggesting that maybe he would support a plan that didn't involve the governor, but he doesn't support this one.

And so that's what we're gonna see going forward , is a lot of Republican pushback on the Citizens not Politicians plan, Republicans saying it's not gonna work, it's too complicated, it's gonna result in more gerrymandering.

All of these things as this battle heats up to try to pass that proposal.

- [Steve] Yeah, and I know that on your show you have had people on who have talked about redistricting in other states.

And I know the topic of Iowa came up, and Iowa is a very conservative state now.

It's not considered a state that goes purple.

It's basically a red state.

They went through some redistricting there and it seemed to work the way people thought it was going to, at least that's the conventional wisdom.

Ours in Ohio, depending on which side of the aisle you're on, it's either worked incredibly well or it's worked incredibly badly.

But as we said, here we are again, just like every year, redistricting is somewhere in the discussion, if not on the ballot.

When you look at Mike DeWine, and he comes out that forcefully against something, because usually he is not hard-nosed about a lot of things, or sometimes he is, and then he finds a moderate position or a compromise position with whoever he's dealing with.

This one obviously as the entire Republican party in Ohio on his side on, so there's not gonna be that pushback he gets normally from the really conservative people in his party.

Is this something, as he, you know, starts to go out as governor, is this something he wants to make part of his legacy, to prevent another ballot initiative or an initiative about redistricting?

Is that gonna be his legacy as governor, that he was here for all these redistricting efforts over the last several years?

- Well, I think that there's an indication that this issue is likely to pass, in listening to DeWine talk about how he wants voters to reject this issue and to trust him and state lawmakers to come up with another way, to lean more toward the Iowa proposal, the Iowa plan, which involves the state legislature approving maps that are largely created by a non-partisan agency that is not allowed to take partisan data into consideration in drawing district lines.

So they're not allowed to try to group Republicans or Democrats together, not allowed to try to protect lawmakers of one party or another.

That's been the goal of the Iowa plan.

The Iowa plan and the Ohio, the way that Ohio is situated, they might not work together.

I mean Iowa has, well Ohio has like four times the population of Iowa.

Ohio has a lot more major cities and big urban areas, and huge stretches of rural parts of the state where Iowa is really mostly- - [Steve] More rural.

- And so you know, all of these things together.

But I think the timing of DeWine's announcement that he wants to work with the legislature on coming up with something else, this is what happened last fall when he asked voters to please don't pass the Reproductive Rights Amendment, that he and state lawmakers would come together and come up with some exceptions for the six-week abortion ban.

And voters didn't apparently- - [Steve] Yeah, believe that.

- Believe that he would do that, or believe that lawmakers would do that.

And so I wonder how they're gonna react to this.

The signs again are pointing to this amendment having success, but of course we don't know until we know.

- Sure, yeah, and the track record of the response to the abortion, the Reproductive Rights passing in Ohio was grudgingly to move toward some of those things, but to almost like contest it all the way in the legislature to say, well, "We're not gonna move on this," the way people thought they would, because there's still pieces of that that people say, "You should be pulling some of that back, basically voting things back out, taking those out of the laws."

The reality is a lot of it's still there.

So if you didn't trust them on that, and I'm not saying one way or the other, can you, if you look at their record on the way they responded to the Reproductive Rights Act when it was passed, what does it mean for redistricting?

Will they react the same way, well sort of enact it, sort of, kind of when we get around to it kind of thing, which, yeah.

- Yeah, and I think, you know, when it comes to the Reproductive Rights Amendment, state lawmakers have made no moves to withdraw or repeal or change any existing laws related to abortion.

They basically said the courts can handle all this, and that's what's starting to happen.

And, you know, some activists to change redistricting will point to, "Hey, the 2015 and 2018 amendments were supposed to take partisan politics, or at least maybe not take them out of the process, but tamp them down a bit, and look what happened."

You ended up with Republicans actually gaining seats in the House and Senate under those maps that were approved by the Ohio Redistricting Commission that the Supreme Court said were unconstitutionally gerrymandered.

And Democrats won more seats in Congress under those maps, and that's an interesting thing to point out there.

But I mean, I think the idea that voters should trust the legislature to do something different, when the legislature hasn't been doing a whole lot, because of this squabble between House Speaker Jason Stephens and Senate President Matt Huffman over who's going to be the House Speaker next year, has resulted in almost no legislation moving forward, other than mandatory things like the budget.

So I'm not sure how this will go, but it is worth mentioning that of course Ohio is likely to vote for Donald Trump.

And so whether those voters who are likely to put Donald Trump on the top of their ticket, whether they would vote for a plan to change redistricting, that's a real question.

- Yeah, and I guess we'll have to wait and see, because we're out of time here.

Obviously between now, as someone said, you know, a week in politics is a lifetime, so we've got a long ways to go.

And obviously we'll have you back on with, you know, some of our usual cohorts in crime, talking about politics, to kind of keep our fingers on what's going on as we move toward November.

So thank you so much for being here and bringing us all the insights into the machinations in Columbus and the things that are going on down there, and how people are reacting to Ohio being in the national news with a candidate on a national ticket again.

So lots to talk about, so thank you again so much.

- [Karen] It's great to be here, thanks.

- You can check us out at wbgu.org, and of course you can watch us each week on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time, goodnight and good luck.

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