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

I'm Steve Kendall.

Early voting's underway in Ohio, but we're just days away from the November 5th presidential election.

Joining us in the studio, Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and Dr. David Jackson from Bowling Green State University, and from Columbus, the host of, "The State of Ohio, Karen Kasler.

Welcome again to, "The Journal."

As we do this episode prior to the election, it'll be the last one we do before the election, we got a lot of ground to cover.

Karen, Issue 1, the redistricting amendment, the previous show you talked about the fact you had the person on who was an advocate for Issue 1.

Recently you had someone on who is not a proponent, is against Issue 1.

So talk about that conversation and the arguments that were made, why you should not vote for yes on Issue 1.

- Well, when I talked to the people who are supporting Issue 1.

I talked to Republican, former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor.

This time I talked to Ryan Steuben Roush, who is a Republican strategist.

And while the coalition citizens, not politicians is seeking to pass Issue 1 is pretty clearly defined.

The coalition that is trying to defeat it is a lot more diverse in terms of groups that the folks are coming from.

But they are all almost exclusively Republicans.

And that's why I note that he is a Republican strategist.

But the issue for some people is the confusion about the yard signs, vote yes on Issue 1, ban gerrymandering, vote no on Issue 1, ban gerrymandering.

And so I asked specifically Steuben Roush about that, and he said, "Well, they do believe that Issue 1 would require gerrymandering because it would require maps to be drawn based on this proportionality formula."

And it would create districts that are not competitive.

And so that's why they feel that putting the redistricting process in the hands of a 15 member citizens commission instead of the seven elected officials on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, that's one of the reasons they're opposed to it.

But they're also concerned about accountability, which is interesting because we did have seven times the maps that the Ohio Redistricting Commission approved went to the Ohio Supreme Court, and yet those maps were still eventually used in 2022.

But the no on one side says these 15 members, these 15 citizens on that commission would not be accountable, voters wouldn't elect them, and they would be selected by retired judges.

And so they're concerned about the ability of that panel to be responsive and to listen to people.

But there are a lot of public hearings and public meetings in that proposal that would give people an opportunity to raise concerns if they had any.

- Well, it's interesting because the arguments that you just made that they said, here's why we don't think it's a good idea, are very similar to the system that exists right now in terms of the outcomes that we've been getting, that they aren't accountable.

The panel that approves those maps isn't accountable to anybody, not even the Supreme Court in Ohio.

So it's interesting that their argument is the system won't work when the system we have appears not to be working very well either.

So, that's interesting.

- I think a lot of people who are against Issue 1 will say that, hey, things, it's not working very well right now, including Governor Mike DeWine, who's come out and said that and he's a member of the redistricting commission.

He said it's clear that that is not something that is working.

I mean, the Ohio Redistricting Commission, that was the first time they had drawn the maps after the approval of the amendments that created it in 2015 and 2018.

So it was kind of an experiment in a way in how to do, put into place these amendments.

And so DeWine says if indeed voters do reject Issue 1, he wants to work with state lawmakers to create a new system based on what's done in Iowa, which a lot of redistricting experts say is a really good system.

But you know, DeWine is not the legislature, so there's no guarantees that the system would change if voters do not wanna change it themselves.

- Yeah, did you address anything regarding the way the ballot language will be seen on the ballot versus the way the original language which was approved to be on the ballot played out?

- Yeah, you're talking about the ballot summary language that the Republicans on the Ohio ballot board approved and the opponents of that language, who are the supporters of Issue 1, took that language to the Ohio Supreme Court saying it's really unfair and biased.

The Supreme Court said, well, for the most part it can stand, and so they let the most controversial parts of that stand and ordered some tweaks in some other language.

But I asked Ryan Steuben Roush about that, and he said that the language is accurate and truthful, and he hopes that people will look at it and read it.

It's three pages long.

- [Steve] Okay.

- And so that makes things difficult for people who are trying to vote and read it.

And you have to keep going through the pages, whether you're on a voting machine or whether you're looking at your ballot.

And so, I'll be interested to see what the drop-off rate is from people who just give up and say, "I'm too confused.

I don't know how to do this.

I don't know what's going on."

And if you don't vote on Issue 1, then that is essentially a way to keep the status quo in place because it takes yes votes to actually change Issue 1.

But it is a confusing and complicated amendment, it's 26 pages, but the folks who are supporting it say, read the whole amendment.

And that should answer your question.

So it's hard to explain though, in a short period of time, and certainly in short words.

- Yeah, now, when it comes to that ballot language, and obviously we've heard anecdotal pieces that people have said, "Well, I couldn't figure out how to vote on Issue 1, I hit next, and there was no place to say yes or no, and I didn't go back and try and figure it out."

That could be a problem then, because obviously to change it requires a yes vote.

Not voting is in essence leaving the system in place.

Is that a concern you think for the Issue 1 people that there could be ballot drop off on the very first thing on the ballot?

- [Karen] Oh, I think so.

- [Steve] Oh, Karen's gonna jump in, okay.

- Okay.

- [Karen] I'm sorry.

- [Steve] No, it's okay, go ahead.

Go ahead, go ahead, yeah.

- I think there is.

I mean, it's down at the bottom of the ballot where you've got people who are clearly coming out to vote for president and then Ohio Supreme Court and the US Senate.

Those are the top issues there.

And then you've got all the congressional and all the other things.

So yeah, I think there is a concern that there will be that drop off and certainly there's a concern that voter confusion is going to create a situation where more people will vote no because it's if voters are confused, they tend to vote no or not vote.

So yeah, I think that there is a little bit of... And this is the, I think a lot of voters too.

This is the third time that we've been asked to deal with something regarding redistricting.

So there can be a little potentially confusion and fatigue and, Hey, didn't we already settle this?

And all of that.

So, there's that as well I think possibly.

- [Steve] Yeah.

And we've got just a couple of minutes, Dr. Hughes.

I know you wanted to weigh in on this too.

- Well, I was just gonna say that this is part of a larger strategy that we're seeing nationwide in states that do have direct democracy, which enables provisions like this to get on the ballot, is if the state legislature and essentially the people in power and the state, not necessarily the citizens, but the elected officials don't like the direction that the citizens are taking either with initiatives for reproductive healthcare or for redistricting and anti gerrymandering provisions.

One of the easiest strategies that they take, and we've seen this all over the country, is they make the policy language and the ballot language very, very difficult to understand.

And if you confuse voters, because the easiest choice, right, as Karen just mentioned, is to not vote or to vote no, because no is the status quo.

If that's the easiest voice.

And if you confuse people and you essentially just obfuscate the issue, then that's kind of the strategy they're taking because that doesn't necessarily, doesn't violate the letter of the law because people are still given the opportunity to vote.

It might violate the spirit of the law a little bit, but that's kind of the easiest, the lowest hanging fruit effort to take of making it so that you can kind of lock in the status quo just through ballot language or through complication.

And so we're seeing that not just in Ohio with three pages of ballot language here, and I think a kind of a higher level of confusion than we see around other issues.

But you're seeing that all over the country with other initiatives.

- Yeah, and then Dr. Jackson, we come back, because I know there in the survey, the BGSU survey, the poll, it talks about awareness of Issue 1 and how that has changed how people view it.

So we can talk about that when we come back, because Issue 1 obviously is at the top of the ballot.

It's there for people in Ohio and is an important, potentially an important change in how we redistrict.

So back in just a moment with Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes, Dr. David Jackson and Karen Kasler here on, "The Journal."

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

Our guests are Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes, Dr. David Jackson, and Karen Kasler.

Dr. Jackson, we were talking about redistricting, direct democracy, how that all plays out.

Talk a little about what the results were in the BG issue poll regarding Issue 1 and also Ohioans feeling about direct democracy, because those two things.

Issue 1 could be considered a direct democracy position, so talk about that a little bit in the polling.

- So the Democracy and Public Policy Research Network at BGSU, which was started up this fall, has conducted two statewide surveys of likely voters.

So it's very important to note that these are surveys of likely voters, not just registered voters.

And so there's an attempt made to model the sample to look like who we expect to actually vote in November.

Based on that, what we see, for example, is that it's a Trump plus seven electorate and it's a Republican plus about 6% electorate.

So this is a measure then I'm pointing out of who we expect to vote, not the overall sentiment of the people in Ohio.

- [Steve] Okay.

- [David] That being said, given what we expect the electorate to look like, in the previous poll support for Issue 1 was around 60%.

Now it's around 57%.

So not a statistically significant change.

- [Steve] Numatic Change, yeah.

- [David] And frankly in line with where some of the other recent experiences in direct democracy with regard to reproductive freedom in amending the constitution landed as well.

- [Steve] Okay.

- So that we're fairly confident in that number.

And that also we noticed that the number of people who had never heard anything at all about Issue 1 dropped from the September poll to the October poll.

So there are a lot fewer people who know nothing about it, and a lot more people who know something about what's going on with Issue 1, which again, is as expected because when last, you know, we surveyed, there'd been some campaigning, a lot of yard signs, but now we're seeing television commercials, we're seeing mailings, we're seeing more money and effort being spent by both sides in media, earned media and in advertising to get a message out about it.

So again, that's as expected in terms of what we do, see in terms of people knowing more about the issue.

And then also we find that it somewhat crosses party lines.

Democrats are very much in favor of it, but even a substantial number of self-identified Republicans are in favor of it.

Which leads us to the thought that questions of basic fairness and basic process and procedure seem to resonate with people, seem to have the ability to not totally cross partisan lines, because partisanship still means almost everything in electoral politics.

And then I would just say also that I think we're with this campaign or kind of missing an opportunity, but we can take it here because of where we are in terms of the kind of broadcast that this is to educate people about stuff like this.

- [Steve] Sure.

- [David] Because processes and procedures may be boring, but people care about basic fairness.

But processes and procedures and rules and structures and the way that votes are counted are choices.

Everything that we do in terms of translating people's raw votes into representation is not something that is sort of handed down from a mountaintop on stone tablets.

It's a choice that people make.

So the very nature of electoral districts choosing one person and having that person win if they get a plurality of the votes, has an effect on how many political parties you're gonna have.

There's lots of these things that political science knows about.

And I think it's good for us to have an opportunity, although we're not really using that opportunity statewide with Issue 1 because there's people who are for it, people who are against it, so it's still demonizing the positions of each other.

But I think it's really important to stress as frequently as we can to the general public and the voting public out there, that nothing is set in stone about the way that systems are designed and the choices we make about how we design electoral systems have consequences about how many political parties you have, how competitive politics are, what kind of policy outcomes come out of the system.

And a lot of this gets decided by a small number of people.

- [Steve] Of people.

- [David] And this is a chance for the public.

The public overwhelmingly based on the survey, is in favor of direct democracy.

So this is an opportunity for the informed citizenry to make their voice heard about how they think the counting of votes ought to translate into representation.

- [Steve] And then kind of put their vote where their response to your poll was, in other words.

And you say all of that.

And that's makes perfect sense and all good.

But, Dr. Hughes, people tend to vote, at least I think to some degree, vote on emotions, vote on perceptions, vote on how they feel at a given moment.

And it's, as Dr. Jackson said, it's maybe hard to make people understand why it's important.

Like this process is important, even though it's not exactly from a emotional point of view, it doesn't grip a lot of people.

If you're a campaigner, how do you bring that forward at the same time appeal to people's emotional wants when it comes to things like that?

- I think it becomes really difficult.

I think the institutional rules and the processes and the structures are not necessarily the spiciest part of politics.

And I think if you're someone who's directing a campaign, particularly for an issue like this, the best thing to do is to make it what's essentially known as an easy issue.

Make it something that people don't have to think about and make it something that people can understand using kind of easy language.

We don't usually see that as often, particularly with issues like this, because you do end up with one side that really wants to make it difficult and complex and another side that kind of doesn't.

But rules are hard and rules are complicated.

And even in states that have made changes to their rules, you've seen some states move to a rank choice voting system where you, instead of you just pick one, you rank your preferences.

And if your first choice doesn't get it, they allocate it down to the next preference.

Some states have done that for certain elections.

And even that, one of the arguments that states have used against that is that it's too hard for voters to understand.

And there's bills in the Ohio legislature now that would actually ban Ohio from ever considering that type of choice.

- [Steve] Wow.

- Because it changes the status quo.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And people who are in power, this tends to kind of transcend party across the country.

You're there by the status quo and you may not want that to change.

- [Steve] Want to change, yeah.

- And so having kind of trying to communicate these complex rule issues to the voting public requires people and campaigns to just do a little bit more work.

- Yeah, yeah.

And, Karen, I'm gonna ask you a question real quickly.

And I know we didn't talk about this ahead of time.

When you went out to find someone to talk about, no one won.

You ended up with a Republican strategist, not an elected official, not someone within the system.

Was that the way you intended to do it?

I mean, was that what you went out looking for?

Let me find a party strategist talk about this.

Or was it difficult to find someone on the Republican side, an elected official Republican party person to talk to you about this?

- Well, you do have a lot of Republican office holders who have talked about it publicly.

I've sat with Senator President Matt Huffman who was instrumental in the 2015 and 2018 elect amendments.

He's been talking about this.

I mentioned Governor Mike DeWine, Auditor Keith Faber has been publicly talking about this as well.

So I went to the group, Ohio Works, which is the group that speaks against Issue 1.

And they sent me a Republican strategist.

- [Steve] Oh, okay.

- And so I that it is interesting to note that you do have this mix of Republicans who are speaking on Issue 1.

But it's important to note that almost everybody, I can't think of too many people who are not Republicans who are speaking against Issue 1.

You do have a couple of Black former lawmakers who have said that they are concerned.

Some of those lawmakers have difficult relationships with the Democratic Party, and so that I guess is something to at least note there.

But there is the question about what Issue 1 would do to Black majority districts, because in Michigan apparently there's been some problems with getting, making sure that there is Black leadership still represented in the legislature.

- Okay, all right.

Okay, well, and we come back.

Thank you for that, 'cause that was a question I had.

When we come back, we can talk about the Senate race in Ohio because obviously it's the most expensive race in the country and it's being seen as the tipping point on who will control the Senate.

So back in just a moment here on, "The Journal."

Thanks for staying with us, "The Journal."

Our guests in this segment, Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes, Dr. David Jackson.

Karen Kasler was called away at the Statehouse for an emergency situation down there, so she's covering something for the State News Bureau right now.

We've talked about a lot of things.

The state Supreme Court races are up, there are three of them.

Dr. Hughes, talk about why it's important that people not just skip over that part of the ballot because state supreme court justice, they aren't like, they're not colorful, they're not, as we talked about earlier, there's not a lot of spice there generally speaking.

It's like who are these people and why are they on the ballot?

It's a lot of how people, so again, "I'll just skip over that.

I don't know anything about any of them.

Nevermind."

So, talk about why it's important people not do that.

- So there's a couple different reasons that we should vote, right?

Voting is great, it's fun.

You get a sticker.

Good times.

You get to make your voice heard.

But if you actually look, there's a ton of other stuff on the ballot other than president, the presidential race.

And so the State Supreme Court races are some of those.

And with those, the state Supreme Court really does have the final say in a lot of these important state matters.

And if you think back to kind of our first segment talking about the redistricting and the seven times unconstitutional districts that we had this, that was decided by the Supreme Court.

- [Steve] Correct.

- So when you think about who is serving on those, they feel really abstract in the immediate.

Most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about who serves on our state Supreme Court relative to our president or even our member of Congress or state legislator.

But if you actually look, they do make really big decisions and they have really important decisions.

And if you look across the country, you see state Supreme Courts making huge decisions on how people can access the voting franchise, on what reproductive rights are available, on the role of unions and states.

And so you have these state Supreme Courts weighing in on these complicated questions.

And if you want to kind of get a chance to also weigh in on these complicated questions, one of the ways to do that is through voting for these candidates.

And the thing to also consider is that not every state, people in every state don't have this opportunity.

So not every state selects their state judicial positions the same way.

Some use elections, some use appointments, some use a hybrid mechanism.

And so the fact that as Ohio voters, you get the opportunity to weigh in on that, maybe that's the thing that kind of motivates you to turn up and vote.

But it's a unique opportunity that not every American has just based on the structure of the judicial system in which they live.

- Yeah, and that's the direct democracy we talked about.

You literally get to vote for the person that sits there, not through some process that then, oh, that's your information's taken and then, yeah.

The other big thing that's going on in the state is obviously the US Senate race, the most expensive one in the country.

Some people have said this may be the race determines who controls the US Senate.

So, Dr. Jackson, talk about the polling you've seen about the Brown-Moreno race in Ohio.

- Well, in the September poll that BGSU did, compared to the October poll, the lead for incumbent Democratic senator Sharon Brown has been cut in half.

And in both cases it was within the margin of error, but now it's really- - [Steve] Within the margin of error.

- Within the margin of error.

And that's in some ways not unexpected, given that undecided Republican voters who weren't sure about Bernie Moreno have sort of come home, as we say, you know, as the election comes closer.

He is obviously, I think, able to close the deal as it were with the base.

And it leaves us in this interesting situation where Donald Trump is expected to win Ohio by somewhere between five to 10 points is what's generally said.

He is up seven points in both of the polls that BGSU has done.

And so that's a very difficult terrain for a fairly progressive democratic senator, even if he's the incumbent to compete on.

And so one thing we looked at in the poll was to take a deeper dive into the 7% or so of voters who are undecided.

And given the lateness of the process, it does come as a surprise to people who spend more time immersed in politics than the typical voter that there would still be undecided voters, but there.

There are people who make up their minds late in the process.

- [Steve] Or maybe when they walk into the ballot booth.

- [David] Yeah, and what we find is we can look at the characteristics in this survey of the undecided voters and almost 80% of the undecided voters are women.

And so we can expect closing arguments in this campaign- - [Steve] Targeted ads.

- [David] To be strongly based on that.

And that's, in fact the campaigns, especially the Brown campaign that we've looked at, has tailored its message it seems to split ticket voters who vote for Trump and possibly Brown, which one would expect them to do, because they cannot win unless they get a lot of split ticket voting.

And they will be targeting their message to moderates, independents, women.

And so I guess what it proves is that the survey data that we're generating probably also exists within the campaigns.

And they're making their messaging fit with what they think the undecided voter and the split ticket voters need to hear.

- Yeah, now the Marino campaign.

So what is their approach then?

Just to keep hammering at the base to say, stay here, stay here, stay here, yeah.

And they're reinforcing that then.

- [David] Right, so I mean, if you look at people who are split ticket and undecided, you see a lot of people who are independents and moderates, and so the Moreno campaign is trying to paint Senator Brown as too liberal, too progressive, too extreme for Ohio, phrases like that used in the commercials.

And that's exactly what you would expect to hear based on who the undecided and split ticket voters are.

- [Steve] Yeah, okay.

And real quick too, and I know we've got just about two minutes left.

The rhetoric of the campaign, both sides accuse each other of using inflammatory rhetoric, hate rhetoric, damaging rhetoric, et cetera, et cetera.

But then last night, well, as we're recording this last night, Donald Trump held a rally in Madison Square Garden, which is his hometown and all of that.

Not necessarily a Republican stronghold obviously.

But, Dr. Hughes, the rally had some people, not Donald Trump necessarily, but he dips his toe in the water occasionally in some of those things, if that's one way to put it.

But some people who said some pretty inflammatory things about certain groups that make up the American citizenry.

If you're a campaign, do you not know what someone you've invited to be at a rally at Madison Square Garden is going to say in front of 25,000 people and a TV audience?

Are you not that aware or just say, "Hey, let them say what they want."

How does that work?

- None of the people who were invited to speak to warm up the crowd prior to Trump coming on were unknowns.

- [Steve] Okay.

- And so none of these people were people we had not heard from before, either on the political circuit or in like the media and popular circuit.

So none of that was unknown.

And so it gives you a little bit of wiggle room if you're the campaign and someone says something like really kind of offensive where you can be like, 'Oh, that's a surprise."

But it's not.

Campaigns are not in the business of surprises, they do not like surprises.

(Steve chuckles) And so they know exactly what they're getting when they ask certain people to speak.

So none of that should have been that big of a surprise.

There's been a little bit of communication from the campaign trying to walk some of it back.

But it's you know what you're getting when you invite certain people.

- [Steve] Okay - And so I think they got exactly what they were looking for.

It's definitely made all of the news stations this morning.

And the campaign and Trump has kind of always gone with all press is good press.

- [Steve] Yeah, no, there's those things as bad publicity.

- And so that seems to be kind of what they're embracing and they've gotten people talking about it.

And I think that might just be the goal.

- [Steve] Yeah, okay.

Well, and before we're gonna leave it there because we are out of time, but yeah, it was interesting because it reminded people, I mean, when I saw it, it reminded me of 1939 February when the American Bund did an America first rally.

And it was all about a lot of similar themes.

America for America.

- [Nicole] At the same location as well.

- [Steve] Americans, yeah, and same location.

So I'm wondering, not necessarily just an accident, it was at Madison Square Garden either, but maybe that's reading too much into it.

Thank you for being here.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 PM on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Goodnight.

Please go out and vote, and good luck.

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