(upbeat music) (graphic pops) - Hello, and welcome to "The Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall.

The Democrats and Republicans have held their National Conventions, and the race to November 5th is now underway.

Joining in the studio to talk about that and a lot of other things, Dr. Melissa Miller and Dr. David Jackson from Bowling Green State University, and from Columbus, the host of "The State of Ohio," Karen Kasler.

Welcome, everybody, to "Journal."

Lots going on in the last 30 days.

You mentioned the National Conventions, we'll get to that.

But Karen, something that's gonna be on the ballot against the wishes of a lot of people, but a lot of people like the facts on the ballot is the Citizens Not Politicians, another attempt at Ohio to figure out how to redistrict.

And as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, whenever the ballot board meets, they tend to get a lawsuit, and the same thing has happened here.

So kind of take us to where we are now with the ballot language for Citizens Not Politicians, redistricting, the ongoing saga in Ohio that's as consisted as the sun coming up in the east every morning.

- You know, the ballot board has existed since 1974.

It was created to basically come up with summary language so voters could read that as opposed to reading whole big amendments when they go to vote.

And for most of that time, there have been no controversies and lawsuits.

Up until last year, I think there was one time that language by the ballot board was taken to the Ohio Supreme Court.

The last three times the ballot board has agreed on language, it's been taken to court.

And this most recent one, Citizens Not Politicians, is objecting to the language that was written by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose that really is very pointed and they say extremely biased and partisan.

It makes it sound like to them that the amendment would require that the 15 member independent commission gerrymander the maps instead of what they say the amendment will eliminate gerrymandering.

And it's a lot of complicated word changes and that sort of thing, but the language is really very pointed and it's long.

It's three pages of a summary as opposed to a paragraph or something shorter than that.

- [Steve] Now, when we look at redistricting, and Melissa and David, feel free to jump in here, I mean, this has been a situation Ohio has attempted back in 2015 with this constitutional amendment, 2018, a constitutional amendment.

And yet we still haven't been able to figure out, here we are six years later, nine years later, still trying to sort this out.

So any idea as to why this is such a difficult issue for Ohio to wrap its arms around and get something that first of all will be constitutional muster, because as Karen has talked about, the Ohio Supreme Court found maps drawn the last time around as unconstitutional.

That doesn't seem to have phased anybody on the ballot board or on the people that draw up the redistricting rules.

So why is this so difficult in Ohio suddenly when it wasn't 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago?

- [David] Well, because power doesn't like to relinquish power.

So whatever party is in charge in a particular state when elected officials are the ones who are allowed to draw the districts want to keep that power.

And that crosses, you know, partisan lines.

The other thing that's interesting about redistricting and the vote on that is that if we look at the states of Ohio and the states of Michigan, and I know I talk about this frequently I come on this show is, you know, in 2016, Ohio and Michigan both voted for Donald Trump.

Different margins for sure, it was much stronger, you know, in Ohio than in Michigan.

However, since then, lots of structural changes have been implemented in the state of Michigan that included Citizens Redistricting Commission, that included automatic and same-day voter registration, that included votes on popular referendum such as marijuana legalization and protecting a woman's right to choose.

Ohio is now sort of, in some ways you could argue, catching up makes it sound like, you know, Michigan's doing the right thing, but doing some of the same things that Michigan's been doing.

We saw with marijuana and abortion referenda nearly the same percentage approval in Ohio as in the state of Michigan.

And now we're seeing a referendum to put in a Citizens Redistricting Commission, which Michigan implemented with some bumps for sure.

It was not a completely smooth process, but it definitely affected the composition of the state legislature to make it much more nearly reflective of the partisan preferences of the state overall.

And so if this is in fact voted in favor of in Ohio, and that the attempt to, I would argue, confuse the voters is ultimately unsuccessful, we could see some shifting because people will say, well, look, you can't gerrymander an entire state.

So if a state goes 8% for Trump, then that says, well, look, you know, the state is, you know, 8%, you know, in favor of the Republican.

But there certainly is a case to be made that you can, in a sense, gerrymander a state in that if you do enough gerrymandering for enough time, you eliminate the bench of the other party.

So in Michigan, when Debbie Stabenow decided not to run for reelection, instantly there were half a dozen, 10 candidates who were credible opponents for, or credible potential nominees.

Here in Ohio, if Sherrod Brown had decided to step down, who is the credible person who would step up, who served, you know, as a county commissioner and then a State House member, then a state senator, and you know, develop themselves into, you know, an effective potential leader?

And so in that sense, by sort of decimating the bench, you can have long-term effects through gerrymandering on the quality of candidates at the state level as well.

- [Steve] Melissa?

- [Melissa] Well, I was going to say, first of all, how Karen and Dave have described this, I think is right on top.

I just wanna emphasize one point, which is this is a presidential election year, and this is not a hot social issue, the redistricting.

It's sort of an evergreen issue in Ohio every few years, right?

There's a movement to try to get gerrymandering eliminated, try to wipe it out for good.

But because it's a presidential election year, I think this is really under the radar for most voters.

And that's where the language that's on the ballot really will matter.

It will really matter because I hate to say it, but I don't think voters are gonna be paying close attention and really go into it knowing here's what a yes vote means, here's what a no vote means.

My concern with the ballot language, and as Karen points out, there's a lawsuit of course about it that it's now, it's sort of stacked against the Citizens Commission in a way, at least that's the argument that's being made in the lawsuit.

But if that language is three pages long, you're gonna have a ton of ballot drop off where voters just, you know, they've walked in to cast that vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, and they're encountering three pages of single space text and they just won't vote.

So I think there will be ballot drop off almost for sure, even if the language is made shorter because it's just an under the radar kind of issue.

So it'll be interesting to see where it turns out.

- [David] And then following up on that point, it's interesting that in Ohio, the choice was made to pass or to put on the ballot the choice and marijuana initiatives and referenda during a special election in an odd numbered year.

And so they create no coattails for a gubernatorial candidate or a presidential candidate.

And that may end up being perceived of as a strategic error.

On the other hand, we also had the opportunity in Ohio, but they didn't get enough signatures to get the minimum wage on the ballot.

And that is of course, you know, a more hot button social issue where a lot of progressives would argue that Democrats every election should put the minimum wage on the ballot to try to gin up turnout for their folks, but that was unable to secure a sufficient number of signatures.

- [Steve] Okay, well, when we come back, we can talk more about this obviously redistricting and what's gonna happen between now because obviously we're getting close through the election day, which means that language, you gotta get straightened out soon.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Melissa Miller and Dr. David Jackson and Karen Kasler, the host of "The State of Ohio" here on "The Journal."

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

Our guests are Karen Kasler, host of "The State of Ohio," and from Bowling Green State University's Department of Political Science, Dr. David Jackson and Dr. Melissa Miller.

Karen, we started with redistricting, we'll pick it up again here.

You've talked to various people about the language and other experts who talk about, is this that big an issue for the average voter, that kind of thing.

So kind of give us some of that background that in the interviews that you've been able to do recently.

- Well, when I spoke with Kyle Kondik, who's an Ohio native, and now the managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, I asked him about that because it is kind of interesting to have an amendment that really has a lot of democratic support on the ballot in the same year as a presidential and US Senate race.

We expect, what we saw in 2016 and 2020, that he, at least Kyle Kondik does, that Trump will win Ohio.

And he says it may, you know, it was eight points in 2016, 8 points in 2020.

He says it could be between five and 10 points.

But this redistricting amendment could have an effect here as well.

And it's true that it is, like Melissa was saying, a little bit lower on people's radar.

But I don't know if that's gonna be necessarily the case as we get into the last weeks of the campaign because the folks who are pushing this amendment, Citizens Not Politicians, raised $25 million and they've bought ads, they're ready to go to try to convince people to vote yes even though the complicated language and the three pages of summary could lead people to not vote or to vote no, because a lot of voters, when they're confused, they vote no.

So I think it's really gonna be something to watch to see what the effect issue one, as it's gonna be known, will have on the presidential race and especially the US Senate race because that's gonna be really tight in Ohio.

- [Steve] Okay, yeah, Melissa?

- Well, I totally agree with Karen.

We have yet to see what Citizens Not Politicians will do in the remaining weeks.

And with that kind of money, we could see a real drive to educate voters about it.

One thing we do know for certain though, is that that US Senate rate will most likely drive turnout.

Why?

It's one of only three US Senate seats that are truly considered a toss up in the United States.

And when there is a close, when voters perceive that the race is going to be close, that just overall, regardless of whether you're talking about a presidential race, a congressional race, a US Senate race, that drives up turnout because voters think, "My goodness, my vote could make the difference.

Holy cow, I better get to the polls," right?

It's when it looks like it's gonna be a wipe out that people stay home, right?

"Oh, I don't need to show up for this particular candidate.

They've got it in the bag."

The fact that the race for US Senate between Bernie Moreno and Sherrod Brown does at this point to appear to be a tossup, national pundits, local pundits are saying it's a tossup, that will drive turnout.

It will also drive dollars into the race on both sides.

Right now, it's the second most expensive US Senate race in the country.

And that's for a reason, because it's a tossup.

What happens?

Big money comes in to try to flip it one way or the other because it's sort of, you know, it could go either way.

- And you know, the Harris-Walz campaign I've read isn't entirely ignoring Ohio either.

I think that's probably in part because they don't want the top of the ticket to be too big of a drag on Sherrod Brown.

The BGSU has recently created a network that studies, you know, democracy and public policy, and we're about to put out the director of that, Rob Alexander and us are about to put out a poll.

And one of the things that I'm most interested in finding out are people who say they're gonna vote for Trump and people who say they're gonna vote for Sherrod Brown and find out, you know, ideologically and partisan and region who those individuals are.

And then also we know that the Harris-Walz campaign is not ignoring Ohio in this odd sense I've read that they're taking out ads in the Toledo market and the Youngstown market less to drive things in those two markets, although those are places, especially Toledo, where they could be expected to do better, but to get some spillover effect into both Michigan and Pennsylvania.

And so I think the closer that that the number is to five rather than 10 on the Trump side, probably the better that will be for Brown.

- [Steve] Yeah.

Now, when you talk about money coming in, would part of that simply be to say, let's make the other side spend money too to spend it here versus someplace else where there's a close race, or is that minor compared to the spillover effect you talked about?

- [David] Well, I mean, because of this weird thing called the Electoral College, campaigns at the presidential level do probably play somewhat of a strategic game trying to convince the other campaign that they're gonna be more of a player in one state than they actually are.

I can remember a long time ago, back in the aughts, as we say, presidential campaign, when Ohio was still much more competitive saying, and we have moved our operations from, I think it was Georgia to Ohio to compete in Ohio.

And as a cynical political scientist, my thought was, well, that just means you're surrendering Georgia.

You're trying to put a positive spin on it.

- [Steve] Yeah, we're doing, it's a positive thing, but the reality is we've given up on Georgia.

We're gonna try our shot now in Ohio, interesting.

When you talk about turnout, and we talked about this close Senate race, Ohio, like in a lot of ways too has shifted from having democratic senators before the aughts, obviously.

And is that a reflection just of the direction the state has gone over the last 20 years?

Because that's not a result of gerrymandering because that's a statewide office.

Or is it part of the bench that you guys were talking about?

There is nobody behind Sherrod Brown realistically who could have stepped in like there was in Michigan.

Is that part of this, is that a long term strategy, I mean the gerrymandering thing to do to decimate the other side by basically removing any candidates they might have as backup people?

- [David] Well, I would argue it has that effect.

And whether the, you know, sides are that strategic, you know, is the beta- - [Steve] Thinking that long.

- [David] Yeah, I mean, the point is, you know, to win the new cycle, to win the day, to win the week, to win, you know, that adds up and to go over.

But yeah, it's a situation in Ohio where lots of factors have contributed to, you know, the relatively low success of the Democratic party.

Some of those are strategic choices.

You can ask, you know, former representative Ryan, his opinion about National Democrats and their resource allocation in the 2022 campaign.

And whether or not, you know, they spent the money in the right places.

Some of the candidate choices that have been made by the Democratic party in Ohio have been questionable and problematic.

And there is the fact that the state of Michigan, when last, my colleague Dominic Wells and I did the research and it wasn't that long ago, Michigan has 1.7 million fewer people than Ohio, but has more registered voters.

- [Steve] Ah, you've mentioned, yeah, you've mentioned that, yeah, yeah.

- [David] Now that may have changed since we last looked at the data, but it seems unlikely.

- [Steve] Yeah, yeah.

When we come back, we'll pick up on that a little bit too, because we know that that Senate race could decide who controls the US Senate, right now the Democrats do, but it's a extremely narrow, almost invisible margin that they have.

So that's gonna be an important thing.

Back just a moment with Karen Kasler, David Jackson, and Melissa Miller here on "The Journal."

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

Joining us are David Jackson and Melissa Miller, professors from the Bowling Green State University Department of Political Science, and Karen Kasler, the host of "The State of Ohio."

Karen, you wipe away all of this stuff that we've talked about to some degree.

In the end, it comes down to who shows up to vote.

So any inkling of what turnout looks like or is there any effort to push turnout one way or the other by each of the parties here in Ohio?

- Well, every election comes down to turnout, but this year I think there's a renewed effort on that, especially on the democratic side, because Democrats are looking at what came out of the Democratic Convention and feeling that they got a boost potentially with the Harris-Walz ticket and are hoping to translate that into some more democratic turnout, especially for Sherrod Brown in that close Senate race.

But also Republicans are very concerned about this too.

And just last week, Republicans announced here in Ohio, they will have started an effort to train and recruit thousands of volunteers who will be poll observers and poll workers trained by Republican activists to make sure that the election runs smoothly, not only election day, but also early voting.

And this is really interesting because voter fraud is extremely rare.

And you could say that, well, we should still worry about it, but it is extremely rare.

And of course there are concerns about whether these poll workers, what they would do, whether there would be voter intimidation.

They say that these workers will be trained very carefully, so there won't be, but it really shows that even though Ohio is no longer a swing state, the Republican party is looking at doing this effort in Ohio and 17 other states most likely because of that close US Senate race.

- Yeah.

And Melissa and Karen raised the issue that there's discussion of election integrity now, which was never, usually, again, if you go back past the aughts or whatever, there was never that big a concern.

The assumption was that elections were running correctly, legally, officially correct, that there wasn't a lot of fraud going on.

Now, whether there is, whether you can document it or not, which has been very difficult to show there's been much documentation of significant voter fraud.

Now it's become an issue, it's been made an issue.

Maybe not necessarily based on the facts of what's been going on, but how will that sort of thing affect if people, would people be intimidated by people having their vote challenged when they walk in or their ability to vote being challenged by people?

- It's a difficult question to answer.

There were some states, I believe Arizona was one where there were volunteers who were watching the polls in 2020.

But I wanna point out some of the irony here is that the Republican party is launching this poll watching initiative in order to crack down on this ostensible voter fraud.

And yet the Republicans have controlled the Secretary of State's office and actually managed the elections.

And actually Ohio has been considered sort of one of the most well-run election operations in terms of election integrity in the United States.

So while I don't, I can't say with certainty how big of an effect it will have if the election is close, particularly the US Senate race, any little thing at the margins could make a difference.

- [David] Well, and I guess it depends too on what the observers are doing.

I mean, I've seen observers almost every time I've gone and voted and it's a person standing quietly off to one side.

There are other places, not here in Ohio, where people show up, you know, in a very different appearance.

You know, open carry concept happening and that's, or at least I've heard about that.

I haven't heard anything like that in Ohio.

But theoretically, if you have somebody standing, you know, 500 feet away from the door, you know, with a open carry, that could have a different effect on whether somebody, you know, feels like they should go and vote or not.

- [Steve] Yeah.

And I know when you look at, when you go through poll worker training, there are specific things.

You can't just show up and say, "Oh, I wanna observe today."

You have to have been vetted, documented, fill out forms, all of that sort of thing.

But still, it is another layer now that people might technically have to go through.

When we talked about the ballot language, this particular thing that has come up in the three pages, when the reproductive rights thing on there, the thing covered a whole table.

And I know when people, some people came in to vote at the precinct I was at, they would vote and then go over and look at it and read it after they voted as if that somehow, oh, determining whether they made the right choice or not after the fact.

Anything it would seem that would slow down the process and make you stay in line longer, has that ever been proven, do people, once they're there in line, I know we're talking anecdotal and there maybe a lot of stats here.

Do people abandon their place in line if they have to wait too long?

Is that still a concern?

- Well, the law has been that if you are in line before the polls close, then while the line is not allowed to extend past the closure of the polls, anyone in line is able to vote.

And we have seen in past elections that that sometimes happens.

One of the key issues that political scientists have studied and has been of concern to campaigns is where the lines are longer.

Are they longer in the suburbs or are they longer in the urban areas?

Where is there sufficient voting equipment such that the line can be sort of a reasonable weight for folks?

So that's another thing to look at.

I think it was the 2004 election, if I'm not mistaken, where lines in urban locations in Ohio were very, very long.

And there was a lot of pushback about that.

So have not heard as much of that about that kind of problem in recent elections.

But, you know, how elections are run does matter.

I do go back to however, that Ohio has been one of those places that actually is considered sort of quality elections.

Those poll workers who are there in official capacities, not the volunteers, but are bipartisan in every precinct.

And so that really does help to boost the integrity of Ohio elections.

- The long lines in 2004 are part of the reason why we have 28 days of early voting, because there was real concern about people not getting an opportunity to vote.

But the long lines still are around, especially you see them in early voting, we're gonna see them in October on the weekends.

The people who have to wait in those lines, the question is, do they have the time?

And certain people have more time to wait in line than other people do.

If you have multiple jobs or you have other obligations, it's harder for you to wait in line than it is if you don't.

And so all these things do matter.

- Yeah.

Well, and isn't there too, the discussion, and maybe I'm wrong, I thought I heard something about you're only allowed, there's used to be people come along, they would offer you water if you were standing in line on a hot day, and there was discussion about limiting that, that someone couldn't just walk along and say, "Oh, are you thirsty?

Here's a bottle of water while you're waiting in line to vote."

When you drill it down to that level of saying, oh, someone can't just walk up and hand you a bottle of water because you look like you need a drink because you're standing in line to vote.

And as you said, most Ohio has had pretty much the gold standard of elections, and yet we're looking at all these little pieces as if somehow there's something underlyingly wrong with our system, but at the same time, as you've said, the Republicans have held the Secretary of State's office for how many years now.

They should have had all these problems ironed out by now if it was that bad, I would think.

- [Melissa] Yeah, I mean I think that's the irony in this focus on election integrity in Ohio.

We have not been the focus, saved for 2004, all right, which was a very close presidential election.

And as I recall, it did come down to Ohio.

But that's no longer the case.

But again, we're talking about margins, and as Karen points out, people who have a child to pick up after school or they have to get home because of the babysitter or they stopped after work and the daycare is going to close, that's where this line length really can make a difference.

And if it's close again, we don't necessarily anticipate Ohio will be close in the presidential election, but in that US Senate rate and potentially also in the ninth congressional district race, which is one of the few tossups in terms of US house races in the country.

- Yeah.

Now, and we've got like a minute here, if we looked at the US Senate race today, and I know you guys don't like to make predictions, but as it stands right now, it's just incredibly close.

Can you even make a prediction on who may win when we're basically two months away from election day?

- Polls are only a reflection of the moment- - [Steve] Where have I heard that before?

- And as such, I mean they have limited predictive capacity because I've been digging into, as the network that the department is creating and the poll that, you know, is gonna go into the field and we've looked at this and I was looking at a poll, had 400 likely voters and the initial data, 5% of those voters were African-American.

That means 20 people were African-American.

But to get the percentage up to being reflective, they had to weight the poll, which means they had to count those people who more.

- [Steve] It's 1.5 instead of 1.01, yeah.

1.8 or something to- - And it showed something like, it showed something really skewed.

One particular result looked really bizarre.

And that's because weighting to, because the people who respond are not necessarily, you have to say at some point, well, if we have 40% Democrats responding, but we think it's only gonna be 35% Democrats turning out in the election, then you've got a problem.

And so for a poll to work, the sample has to be a completely accurate reflection of who's actually going to turn out.

And you can't know in advance who's going to turn out, which proves that polling is more of an art than a science.

- Okay.

We'll have to leave it there.

Good answer.

Good answer, by the way.

You can check us out and we'll get back together between now and the election a couple of times and we'll thread that out a little bit more.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Goodnight and good luck.

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