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

I'm Steve Kendall.

The midterms election Ohio are now in the book, so how does Ohio's political scene look?

Joining us from Columbus to analyze this and talk about what's going to go on in Columbus is journalist, reporter, and producer for The Statehouse News Bureau, Jo Ingles.

Jo, thank you for joining us here on "The Journal" today.

- Well, thank you for having me.

- And as I mentioned, you know, we've just cleared the midterms a few days ago.

Let's talk a little bit about what happened, the big picture, then we can kind of dive down into some of the individual races and what the Statehouse looks like, but what's the overall view?

Has Ohio changed a lot since that election in terms of who's going to be back in Columbus?

- Not really.

I mean, pretty much the Republicans who were here and were running for reelection, most of them were reelected.

And this legislature is not going to be substantially different.

Republicans will have more of a super majority down here.

The redistricting really played a part in the way that this all panned out.

As you know, we had maps for House and Senate districts, Ohio House and Senate districts, that were not considered constitutional by courts, were ruled, repeatedly ruled, unconstitutional.

What that did is that set up districts and races that in many cases favored the Republicans.

So they will have a stronger super majority.

And just to kind of show you how that all panned out, there were 22 House races that where the person who ran, either a Republican or a Democrat, they ran without opposition.

There wasn't anyone else on the ballot.

So what that says is no one really wanted to take 'em on because they felt like it was maybe a lost cause in that district or something.

And then where there was opposition, there were nine different House races where one of the candidates had 80% of the vote or more, 22 House races.

So that tells you, you know, when you start looking at those, you're like, "Wow, 31 House races, you know, with either a very lopsided outcome or there wasn't, you know, there weren't multiple candidates."

So it kind of tells you the story about the Ohio legislature and redistricting and the effect it had on the election.

- And when you mentioned redistricting, you said the Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly said maps are unconstitutional.

One of the things that will change, it appears, and we'll jump ahead a little bit to one of the other results, the Supreme Court is going to look a lot different compared to the court that was ruling those maps unconstitutional.

Because we're gonna have to go back and do some redrawing of the maps again in the next two years, because they didn't meet the criteria that was laid out in the constitutional amendment.

So how will that new court affect redistricting?

Simply because before that court was saying, no, it was a 3:2, no, we don't like your maps.

This court looks like it's gonna be a lot different than that court in terms of how they could rule on a case like that.

- Yeah, because the rulings in the past have been 4:3 with Republican, she's a Republican, Maureen O'Connor, she is leaving the court because of age limits.

And so she is the Chief Justice.

Once she gets out of there, she will be replaced with a member of the court who thought the maps were okay to begin with.

And the other two people who are coming into the court are also Republicans, Mike DeWine's son, Pat DeWine, Justice DeWine, and also Justice Fischer.

And the court is thought to be much more friendly to Republicans, much less likely to rule on this redistricting.

And if that's the case, you know, this redistricting might not change a lot because if the court says it's okay, unless some court above that says it's not okay, you know, Ohio could end up with still having very gerrymandered maps.

Now, the thing that is likely to happen at some point, we do know that there are groups out there who are talking about having a reform measure put on the ballot that would possibly even take politicians out of the equation altogether.

But you're talking time.

That's not gonna happen next year.

It's not gonna be implemented next year.

So you're talking a period of time there where redistricting is going to be a big issue.

- And if you look at the state just to the north of us, Michigan, they changed the way their redistricting panels were laid out for this election and had a totally different outcome.

Their Statehouse, the two sides of the Statehouse, flipped from Republican to Democratic because the districts were extremely competitive, as whereas you just said describing Ohio, there were a big chunk of districts that it was either pointless to run against whoever else was running, or the way it was laid out it was overwhelmingly one party or the other, and generally probably people would look at it and say probably more overwhelmingly those districts were designed to be Republican versus Democratic districts.

So as you said, that kind of an initiative could change, but as you said, it's gonna take more than just a few months to do that.

Probably not by the next time we do this, probably.

- Probably not.

- And as you said, we'll be looking at probably the same kind of districts as we have now.

- And one thing about Michigan, I'd like to interject there, is that Ohio's makeup is very different than Michigan.

When you look at Michigan, you're looking at a lot of Democrats in statewide office now, you know?

Governor DeWine was reelected by 32 points, I think it was, but it was, you know, he was reelected by a landslide over the former mayor of Dayton, Nan Whaley, the Democrat.

And, you know, that didn't really have a redistricting angle to it because those are statewide offices.

So when you start looking at Ohio and how it's different from Michigan, how it's different from Pennsylvania, Ohio is older, it's an older state.

We continue to get older.

And even though we have a lot of wonderful universities like Bowling Green State University, for example, you know, we have wonderful universities and we have a lot of students who come, they go to these universities, get a great education, and then they leave.

And so we still have this brain drain.

We've had it for a while.

It's getting worse.

If anything, we're seeing, you know, more that are going out of state.

I teach at a college here in this area, and my students, all of them are talking about, you know, constantly looking at going out of state, you know?

I rarely have a student that says, "Hey, I wanna stay here and work in this area," you know?

It's like, okay.

Now, they do get a lot of out-of-state students there too, but still it's, you know, I think we have an issue with our demographic that Pennsylvania, that Michigan doesn't have.

And so that makes a big difference in how things are handled here as well politically.

- Yeah, and when we come back, we can talk a little, I know that when we've talked with our political scientists here at the university about that.

They do talk about the population and the different demographics and that sort of thing.

When we come back, we can again continue touching on what the terrain looks like moving forward, and of course, obviously, between now and the end of the year, we'll touch on the fact that there is what they call a lame-duck sessional.

It's gonna be made up of a lot of the same people who'll be back in January.

But we can touch on that when we come back.

Back in just a minute with Jo Ingles from the Ohio Statehouse News Bureau here on "The Journal."

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

Our guest is Jo Ingles from the Ohio Statehouse News Bureau, journalist, reporter, and producer there.

As we were talking in that first segment, Jo, the state legislature and basically all the statewide offices, those people, the faces aren't gonna change a lot there.

But also along that same line, Governor DeWine, who was reelected overwhelmingly, didn't have the best relationship at times with his own Republican super majority legislature.

So what's the thought about how that may play out now that they're all back for another go around here?

Is it gonna get better?

Are they still gonna have the same kind of pushing and pushback that they're going to have?

Or what's the thought down there in Columbus?

- It has the potential to get worse.

In most of the races for House and Senate, the person who won the GOP primary in those Republican areas, the person who won the primary won the general.

Now, you know, nationally we saw that a lot of, you know, the candidates that won the primary were too far right for the general election.

That's not the case here in Ohio.

Most of them were winning.

And the candidates that won were talking about culture war issues, you know, making a lot of promises on a lot of things that were issues that not necessarily embraced and talked about a lot by Governor DeWine.

If you noticed, his campaign pretty much fully focused on the economy, on new jobs, manufacturing, you know, that kind of thing.

And so the way it was passed, who won, that's different, right?

Also, there weren't public debates for the most part in a lot of races, including governor's race, so a lot of the opposing points of view were not really out there, taken into consideration.

And so now what's happened is you've got these people elected and it's going to be harder, probably, for Governor DeWine because of more kind of extreme, you know, right kind of people being in there.

And, you know, you remember back a couple of years ago, Governor DeWine was pushing gun reforms, gun reforms that, by the way, were pretty popular according to polls with Ohioans.

Things like, you know, stronger background checks for guns, you know, keeping guns out of the hands of people who could be dangerous, these kind of things.

And Governor DeWine had a 17 point plan that he proposed, and none of his Republicans back then would embrace that plan.

And in fact, Governor DeWine ended up going the opposite direction and signing into law a couple of gun bills that made it easier to keep and own guns.

So I think some of these popular issues like gun reform will not likely get passed, or not much of it will get passed with this legislature.

Now, maybe they'll surprise me, but just the way it's stacking up it doesn't look like it would be amenable to that.

And also, you know, we also are looking to see how the governor will react.

I mean, this could be his last office, his last term.

He's in his eighties and he may not run again for anything.

So that comes with a bit of freedom actually.

So will the governor play hardball on some of these issues, some of these things he wants?

He hasn't in the past, you know?

In fact, that's been a criticism.

One of the things that Nan Whaley said throughout the campaign is, "Governor DeWine doesn't stand up to his own people.

He doesn't, you know, have a spine."

But, you know, now we might see that change since, you know, he's not running for reelection in his office.

So, you know, where does he stand?

Is he going to push back more?

Is he gonna, you know, wheel and deal?

That's a possibility.

- Yeah, well, and you make a good point because there was a time where, of course, with COVID, he was very pretty much leading in a lot of ways.

And it was funny because you could, again, I'm referencing Michigan a little bit, he was doing a lot of the same things that the Democratic governor of Michigan was doing, and the Republicans up there hated it.

But here you had a Republican governor doing the same thing down here in Ohio, and his own Republican legislature was like, "You've gone too far."

But then there was a point somewhere, you know, people like to get reelected, we all understand that, where it seemed as if the governor then sort of eased back and said, "Okay, I'm gonna go along with the legislature," because there was talk of, you know, that he was too far to the left for the Republicans, which I found a little interesting because no one ever accused Mike DeWine of being, you know, left of center very far.

But he became leftist according to his own legislature.

Yeah, so it makes a good point that he may now say, "Look, I'm outta here in a few more years.

I'm gonna put an agenda through that I believe in, not the one that the legislature has kind of moved me toward."

But at the same time, does it also put him a position where people saying, "Well, Governor DeWine's not gonna run again.

Does that make him a lame-duck, so we're not gonna pay any attention to him at all if we don't have to?"

Is that a possibility for him?

- Well, I don't think so because, you know, being governor, he has to sign into law any bill that's passed.

So, I mean, he's crucial.

If they wanna get their agenda through in the legislature, they're going to have to work with him to get him to sign it because otherwise... Now, they do have a super majority- - Right, so they can override.

- So if they can override something with a super majority, then that's something they could do.

But, you know, you figure not all the bills that they're going to wanna pass can be overridden with super majority.

So that's something they can do sometimes, but not for everything.

But they're gonna have to work with him.

And, you know, and the question is, where will he stand?

I'm kind of looking forward to seeing in the future how Governor DeWine operates the next four years versus how he's operated in the past.

He does embrace some issues and agree with Democrats on issues such as, you know, like early childhood education, for example.

Or he's got his wraparound programs that help with low income kids in low income areas, providing them with healthcare, things they need to be successful in school.

So he does embrace some things that Democrats have been talking about for 20 years.

And he finds common ground there.

And even his Republican legislature, they embrace a lot of that now more than they did, you know, five, 10 years ago.

So I expect we will see more in that direction as well.

And we'll just have to wait and see where he kind of, you know, lands after he gets, you know, a second term here.

- Yeah, and real quickly, we've got just a moment here in this segment, Jon Husted, obviously, would appear to be the, you know, the heir to the governorship.

He was in a lot of the Governor DeWine ads, in the background, being there.

So the assumption is he obviously would like to ascend to be the governor in four years.

Now, it's a little time to wait yet, but that seems to be where he would be the leading candidate at this point to run if Mike DeWine chooses not to run for governor again.

[Jo] Well, he can't run for governor.

[Steve] That's right, that's right.

[Jo] He's term limited.

[Steve] He's term limited, so.

- You're right, thank you, yeah.

- But I think Governor DeWine would probably throw support at this point, at least, to Jon Husted.

He's given them some, you know, Jon Husted has a very big role.

He is in charge of basically the business part of the governor's platform.

So he's, you know, dealing with JobsOhio, he's dealing with broadband, he's dealing with a lot of the job development kind of stuff that's happening in the state.

And that's definitely something that, if he decides to run for governor at some point, he can use that as a, you know, a sounding board in saying, "This is it, you know, this is where I stand."

- Okay, when we come back, we'll pick up on that and also touch on some other races that have an impact on how Ohioans will live their lives over the next four years.

Back in just a moment with Jo Ingles from the Ohio Statehouse News Bureau here on "The Journal."

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

Our guest is Jo Ingles, reporter, producer, journalist for the Ohio Statehouse News Bureau.

Real quickly, well, we've got a segment here, but one of the other elections that took place, people were elected to the State Board of Education.

And while on one hand that seems to be a race, those kind of fly below the radar a little bit, they still are very important because they deal with how children are educated in Ohio.

And obviously that's been a challenge for a lot of years.

We had the people on who are against the school voucher program that exists in Ohio.

And we know that school funding in Ohio goes back to the early nineties.

The Board of Education doesn't really deal with funding so much, but they set a lot of policies that go beyond just classroom activities.

So talk a little about how those races shaped up in the election a week or so ago.

- Well, you know, while Democrats had a lot of things that they didn't like on an election night, one of the things that they did find some, you know, a reason to celebrate was the state school board.

The teachers unions in the state chose to focus some energy and some resources there, and they were able to win three seats on the school board.

There were five seats up for election, and three of those seats were won by Democrats.

One in your area is former state senator Teresa Fedor.

She was elected to the school board, a former teacher herself, very interested in education issues as a lawmaker, and she will be coming in, but they've also elected two others that are, you know, people that they thought would be good for teachers, good for schools, and would continue the strategic plan, stay away from culture wars, that sort of thing.

So it'll be really interesting to see these new members come in and see what happens to, you know, some of these issues that have been surfacing at the school board, the state school board, like the transgender issue, see where that lands with the next state school board, that the members might not be as willing to entertain some of those things since there are more numbers that really kind of wanna stay away from 'em.

- Yeah, and one of the things too, and obviously the legislature will be looking at a new session beginning of January, but between now and then there's always the lame-duck session, and things can happen in that that it seems like things can happen a lot faster in the next two months or six weeks than have happened in the past two years.

So talk about what may be brewing in the lame-duck session, some things that may not get taken care of but things that might pop up and be done in just a matter of weeks that normally would take a lot longer.

- Yeah, you know, the lame-duck session is always wild, and I think it's going to be even wilder this year.

I don't know, something tells me it might be.

But, you know, we're going to see some of these contentious bills be able to go through and maybe go through without even public input.

You know, there's the bills involving transgender athletes and gender affirming drugs, you know?

Can someone get gender affirming treatment if they're under a certain age?

Those bills are out there.

These lawmakers are likely to look at those.

Also election reform.

You know, those ballot drop boxes, you know how you can have one per county right now, but there's also, you know, they're kind of looking at trying to figure out, well, do we want to, you know, change that?

How do we wanna change it?

Voter ID, do we wanna, you know, make it harder to vote by, you know, requiring a voter ID?

If so, what does that look like?

The distracted driving bill is there that would kind of make it tougher penalties for driving while distracted.

And then there's Aisha's Law, but they still haven't done anything with it.

I think the indications are that lawmakers would like to do something with it.

It's increasing domestic violence penalties, and that could get passed during the lame-duck session as well.

- Yeah, well, and it's funny you mentioned voter ID, and as I've mentioned on the program several times, I've poll worked the three elections this year in Ohio and there's a lot of discussion about voter ID.

Ohio has six or seven different ways you can demonstrate identification when you come into vote.

And my experience, obviously a small sample, three elections and one precinct, but there has been very little issue, at least when I've done it with the people I've been with.

Most people come in with an ID that matches what the state allows, and they move through the system and there isn't a lot of issue.

And if there is, there are different protocols to deal with someone who doesn't maybe have an ID that fits the six or seven criteria.

But yet there is a constant din of voter ID, and I don't know if they really mean picture ID, is that what they're really talking about?

Or is it just broader than that even?

- I think that there's a move that a lot of people would like to have you vote with your driver's license or a state-issued ID, and the thing about that is you get a lot of people who, a lot of it depends on the poll workers, honestly.

You know, if you move and you didn't change your driver's license to the address, then, you know, how do you verify that you're in the proper address?

Do you have to have an up to date ID with the right address on it?

Can you bring in a utility bill that shows, hey, you moved and this is your address, but you just haven't changed it on your license?

What about if you have a driver's license and your name on your voter ID doesn't match your driver's license?

And that's the way it is for a lot of people.

- [Steve] Yeah, that can happen.

- You know, a lot of times, you know, someone working the polls will say, "Oh, well, you're using the initial instead of the whole name."

Or, you know, "You're using a maiden name," or, you know, a married name, that kind of thing.

And they let it slide.

But then there are other people who are real sticklers and they're like, "Well, wait a minute, it's this way on the, you know, poll book, so it's gotta be this way on your ID."

So there's a lot of, you know, room for voters to kind of feel, you know, in different situations in different polling places when you come into voter ID.

And, you know, as it's been pointed out to me, Governor DeWine, the first name on his driver's license is probably Richard, because that's his first name.

[Steve] That's his first name, sure.

- But no one knows him by that, right?

So if he goes in and he has Richard M. on his ID, you know, are they going to, how's that going to work, you know?

That's really silly because everyone knows it's the governor and, you know.

But, you know, there's a lot of women who don't change their name on their ID when they maybe should or something.

So, you know, there's a way to disenfranchise voters with a voter ID if you're not careful in the way that you do it.

And also there's the concern that it could end up, you know, a lot of low income people don't have that kind of ID- [Steve] The government ID.

- They don't have a car to drive, they don't have a driver's license, they don't have a state issued ID.

So are you going to take low income people or people who maybe could be easily marginalized, and are you going to throw them out when you say, you know, you've gotta have a voter ID?

You know, are they going to be able to pay for that?

You know, there's a lot that goes into that decision.

- We just got about 30 seconds.

What do you think the first thing the legislature will tackle when they get back in January?

- Well, they're gonna have to look at redistricting.

I think they're also going to have to look at medical marijuana and abortion, because those are two things that are likely to go to a referendum at some point.

And they're going to have to figure out how to deal with that.

And if they don't deal with the voter reform, that might be, during lame-duck, that might be on the top of the list too.

- Yeah, so there's a lot to look forward to.

- [Jo] There's a lot to look forward to.

- In the upcoming year or so.

Okay, well, Jo Ingles, thank you so much for coming on from the Statehouse News Bureau to talk about the aftermath of the election.

Glad to have you back anytime.

And thanks for filling in for Karen Kasler this time.

But obviously we can have you on whenever as well, so appreciate it very much.

- Yeah, thanks for having me on.

I appreciate it.

It's a lot of fun.

- Okay, yeah, thanks again.

You can check us out at wbgu.org, and of course 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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