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

I'm Steve Kendall.

Early voting for the May 2022 primary is now underway, but not all the political races that would typically be on that ballot are there.

We'll talk about that a little bit, and whether or not Netflix and Hulu should be treated like cable companies in Ohio, and some other things, too, out of Columbus.

Our guest is Karen Kasler, the host of "The State of Ohio", which you can view every Sunday at noon here on WBG PBS.

Karen, thanks again for being with us today.

- Always great to be here.

Thanks so much for the invitation.

- Yeah, and I noticed when I was watching the show on Sunday, "The State of Ohio", early voting's underway, finally, for a primary with races and issues and things on it, so talk a little about that.

I know you said on your program that, of course, turnout is low, which is not atypical for this year, this sequence of voting in a primary.

So talk a little where we are with early voting and the primary, May 3rd.

What's there and what isn't there?

- Yeah, primaries for midterm elections, the turnout tends to be really low.

There have been a couple of exceptions, but since 1986, turnout has averaged about 28% for these midterm elections in the primary.

So it's not unexpected that early voting would be slow at this point.

Some of the bigger boards of elections are saying, you know, a couple dozen people are showing up every day, but that's what they expect, because the turnout is predicted to be fairly low, and that's what history has told us over the years.

What people are also confronting a little bit, I think, here is the confusion over the primary.

Because we went through redistricting and are still going through redistricting, as a matter of fact, there's a lot of confusion among voters about what they're actually voting for, who's actually on the ballot.

And so, everything is on the ballot that was expected to be, the statewide offices for governor, auditor, attorney general, secretary of state, and treasurer, also the three justices for the Ohio Supreme Court, including the chief justice, and you've got the U.S. Senate race and you've got members of Congress, but there are no races for House and Senate districts.

Those were taken off the ballot after the third set of legislative maps that were passed by the Ohio Redistricting Commission were thrown out by the Ohio Supreme Court.

We still don't know when that primary is gonna happen, and now a fourth set of maps has been ruled unconstitutional by the court, so it appears that there's going to have to be a primary for Ohio House and Senate races.

We just have no idea when it is, and lawmakers are not making any moves to set a date.

- Yeah, 'cause I know there was discussion back and forth, the court saying, hey, you can put that date wherever you want.

You know, in their opinion, they could move the primary date.

In fact, some of them talked about pushing back the May 3rd to another date.

Why can't you do this in August, that sort of thing, and then there's been pushback from legislators and maybe even the governor, to some degree, other state office holders about, well, no, the Ohio law says this, so this is what we should do, and you're wrong for trying to make us change those dates.

As you said, the State Senate and state, well, the state legislative races are the ones that won't be there.

And as you said, too, there's no date right now for those, so what's the discussion like down there in Columbus with when that may or may not happen?

- Well, a lot of this is waiting on what might happen this week in a federal court.

There was a move by a group of Republican voters to take the whole redistricting question out of the Ohio Redistricting Commission and the Ohio Supreme Court and move it to federal court, and have a three judge panel decide what's gonna happen, because in their lawsuit, they said the Ohio Redistricting Commission is at an impasse, so let's move this to a federal court.

They wanted the federal court to implement a set of maps the Ohio Supreme Court had already ruled unconstitutional.

Well, the three federal judges didn't want to do that.

They wanted to give the Ohio Supreme Court a chance to rule on the fourth set of maps, which now has happened.

They've thrown those maps out as unconstitutional, and the court was really particular and specific on directions to the Redistricting Commission, saying, you folks need to go back and get us new maps by May 6th, and you really should use the procedure you were using in the fourth set of maps process, which was hiring outside map makers and having the whole thing livestreamed so people could watch them.

That was the way the court wanted the Ohio Redistricting Commission to go.

The federal court, those three judges, are kind of sitting this out until April 20th, so this week, trying to decide whether they want to get involved or not.

So, by the time this airs, we may already know, but it all, once again, is just completely up in the air.

- Right, and it's interesting, because you have this Redistrict Commission, which I guess, you know, the result of a constitutional amendment, and you hear discussion from legislators and other state office holders, not Supreme Court justices, that what we have here is two branches of government banging heads about this, and we've gotta change something, while the legislature, of course, has the opportunity to do, to some degree, what they would like to do, I guess.

But it is an interesting question.

You mentioned that the federal courts, who typically don't like to intervene in state election law, unless they're really, really forced to.

So there's, as you said, there's like an impasse all the way around on this until something gives somewhere.

And the question is where will it give and who will do the giving on this, I guess?

- Well, there is a provision in federal law that allows redistricting cases to go before a three-judge panel, and the three judges, just for people who are wondering, they are one judge who was appointed by President Obama and two judges that were, I'm sorry, one judge who was appointed by President Clinton and two judges who were appointed by President Trump.

So that's the panel that's being heard, that's hearing this case, and again, by the time this airs, we may already know what they've done, if they're going to do anything.

The question, of course, for most people is, okay, if I care about state politics, which everybody should care about what happens at the State House, in my opinion, you want to know when you can vote on your State Representative and State Senator, and right now we don't have a date for that.

The Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, who is a member of the Redistricting Commission and has voted for all the maps that have been ruled unconstitutional, he has said that August 2nd is the date that lawmakers should set that second primary for State House and Senate races.

He said that's the last possible dates that doesn't conflict with the general election on November 8th, because boards of elections need time to process elections, get everything buttoned up before they start moving on to the next one.

So we're still waiting on whether that's going to happen or whether lawmakers might do something entirely differently.

- Yeah, and that August 2nd date, 'cause typically Ohio seems to work in these 90 day before election type of windows, deadlines for being on the November ballot if you've got an issue has to be filed with the boards of election by that August 2nd date.

And then, of course, the state has to deal now with the fact that, if they don't use August 2nd, which typically has been a special election day, there's gonna be extra cost to hold a primary if it's another date.

And I know that when we talked the last time, I'm gonna be a poll worker this year, and I'm thinking, oh, okay, I get to do two poll working days instead of one this year.

And you said it just raises more confusion and that's where we, that's probably why people are wondering what is going on.

So, yeah.

- Well, Secretary of State Frank LaRose has said that the poll worker shortage or the recruitment of poll workers has really caught up, and that poll workers have stepped up and joined in for May 3rd.

The question is how many of those people like you want to come back again on August 2nd and then want to come back again on November 8th?

And so, there's been a difficulty in getting poll workers because cause of all this uncertainty, because you need Republican and Democratic poll workers to make elections happen.

- Yeah, and you're right, and it is confusing right now.

And when we come back, let's talk about two of the races that will be there.

We've got U.S. Senate primaries on both the Republican and the Democratic side.

The Republican side seems to be drawing a lot more attention just because of the involvement of at least one other person who isn't necessarily from the state of Ohio.

When we come back, let's talk about those and where they stand.

Polling's a little iffy, but we can talk about what's out there and see what the score is right now, knowing that we're early in the game, even on that.

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

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

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

We talked about the May 3rd primary and what's there.

The congressional race primaries will be there, and those districts are at least sort of in place.

But even that map, even though we're gonna be voting on Congresspeople, that map still has some concerns.

That's been controversial as well.

- Yeah, that map, it's the second version of the congressional district map, and remember, we went from 16 districts to 15, so the previous maps could not possibly be used.

And so, the first set of maps for Congress were thrown out.

The second set of maps were approved by the Ohio Redistricting Commission.

They were challenged in court, and because of the timeline on the courts, filing deadlines and all that stuff.

Basically, it got to the point where there was no way there was gonna be a decision on that second set of maps before the May 3rd primary, so the maps that members of Congress, or wannabe members of Congress, are running under are still under challenge by the Ohio Supreme Court.

There was a split there among two separate, two tracks of groups that had been challenging those maps.

One group, the League of Women Voters and the ACLU of Ohio said we know this is not gonna be overturned in time for the November 2022 election, so we are going to take our challenge and go into 2024.

We still think the maps are bad, but, okay, we're just gonna move our challenge to 2024.

Other groups, though, that have continually challenged these maps, they say that they're continuing their challenge over these maps in 2022.

But the bottom line is people who are voting in this primary are seeing candidates for Congress, even though the maps have not been upheld as constitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court.

- And that's probably a situation that nobody envisioned when the redistricting amendments came through, and no one thought we would be in this place.

- And I don't think anybody thought we were gonna be in this place anyway.

I mean, I think there was so much confidence coming into this process, that there were these two constitutional amendments that voters had approved to change the process and take partisan gerrymandering out of it, that it wasn't gonna be that difficult.

And yet, here we are, we're one of the last states to get this settled and we still haven't gotten it settled.

I think it's been very, very frustrating.

It's been confusing, and it's certainly not what anybody expected, I don't think.

- Yeah, and the other thing was, too, Ohio's maps, the previous maps that had been used, had been considered among the most gerrymandered in the country, so it's not as if we were starting at a good place there.

We were considered are extremely falling short on not gerrymandering our districts.

So here we are, we're still incrementally moving away from those, which weren't good to begin, in some people's opinion.

- Well, you bring that up, and I think that's interesting, because that was a signal, I guess, for people who are surprised by the fact that Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, a Republican, has voted with the three Democrats to throw out all these maps.

Those previous maps, approved in 2011, she voted to throw out those maps as well.

Now the majority prevailed then and those map stayed, but she already had concerns going into this redistricting process about the maps we were currently living under, so it really wasn't that big a surprise when she decided that the maps that were developed by the Ohio Redistricting Commission were not maps that she could support and she didn't think were constitutional.

- Which leads us to an issue that, of course, popped up as the frustration has mounted in Columbus among especially state legislators, is that there was talk of, well, she's not performing her constitutional duties as a Supreme Court justice.

Is there room here, is there a possibility to impeach her because she's not, in some people's minds, not performing her constitutional duties?

So we're where do we stand with that right now?

Because I know Frank LaRose said, well, I would take that under consideration.

So one of the Redistricting Commission members saying I wouldn't be opposed to at least talking about impeaching a Supreme Court justice.

So what's the situation like?

What's the temperature down there on that right now?

- Well, let's be clear, it's only Republican who are talking about impeaching Maureen O'Connor, but, of course, Republicans dominate the House and Senate.

And you mentioned Frank LaRose.

I spoke to him the day after it was reported that he had said at a Republican breakfast that he would be okay if the legislature did impeach Maureen O'Connor.

And he said he stood by those comments.

He said it was a decision of the state legislature.

Now, it should be noted that Frank LaRose is not a lawyer, whereas Maureen O'Connor, the chief justice, of course, is a lawyer.

And Maureen O'Connor is also a longtime member of the Republican party.

She was former governor Bob Tapp's lieutenant governor.

She has been on the scene for many, many years.

She's not running for reelection because she can't.

There is a limit when you're running for the Supreme Court, an age limit of 70 years.

And so, I think that the conversations that I've heard about impeachment, quite often on the record, Republicans will say, well, I haven't heard anybody talking about that.

Well, reporters will say, yeah, we have.

We've heard your fellow colleagues talk about this.

And so, I think that with this fourth set of maps being ruled unconstitutional, there might be more conversation about this, but there's also a movement that's going on on a totally different issue, an issue that Maureen O'Connor has really adopted as hers, about bail reform.

And there could be a constitutional amendment that could come forward in the next couple of weeks that specifically pushes back against what she wanted to see in bail reform.

And there's a suggestion that maybe that's part of why this is happening at this time.

Bail reform is something that was a bipartisan issue that lawmakers have been working on for years, and for all of a sudden to come forward and to really push against what she wanted, it makes you wonder.

- Yeah, and you would think, at least from the average person's perception, and maybe not everybody pays as close attention as everybody, some people do, but it would appear that impeaching a Supreme Court justice, on top of all of the redistricting rubble that exists right now, would simply look like pouring gasoline on a fire, almost like doubling down on not being effective about doing government.

And it just seems like that would look, would make Ohio look extremely bad to the rest of the country, that, okay, we don't like what's going on.

Let's just impeach the justice who's holding this up and move on, which doesn't seem the way government should work, at least in my opinion, anyway.

So, yeah.

- There's been a lot of attention on this specific issue on redistricting in Ohio, I mean, national and international attention on this.

And the whole idea was to take partisan.

- Out of it.

- Activities out of it, and yet it's become almost more partisan.

And, of course, that has something to do with the fact that we're in an election year, and you've got a real strong split among moderate Republicans and other Republicans who are really pushing toward the Trump wing of the party.

You've got Democrats who are deep in the minority and really can't do anything at this point here, other than continually challenge these maps.

So this is, there's a lot of attention on Ohio right now in this area, and some of it's not good.

Most of it's not good.

- Yeah, and it just seemed, because, as you said, this process was supposed to improve how we did this, smooth it out, make it nonpartisan, and the reality is, as you said, it appears to have just ramped up the partisan activity, not only between the Democrats and the Republicans, but actually within the Republican party, as you said, moderates versus the other group of Republicans who wouldn't be considered moderate, I guess, at least the way they're positioning themselves sometimes.

So, yeah, it's an unfortunate scenario that, as you said, nobody thought we'd be here, and here we are.

So when we come back, let's talk a little about this as we were in that previous segment, about the Senate races that will be there, because there will be primary voting for the Democratic U.S. Senate primary and the Republican U.S. Senate primary, and that's drawn a lot of attention as well.

So we can talk about that when we come back.

Karen Kasler, the host of "State of Ohio" is our guest here on "The Journal".

Back in just a moment.

You're with us here on "The Journal" on WBGU PBS, and our guest is the host of "The State of Ohio", and you can see that program every Sunday at 12 noon here on WBGU PBS.

Karen Kasler, one of the things people will be able to vote for on May 3rd will be the primaries for the U.S. Senate race, both on the Republican side and the Democratic side, so talk a little about what's going on there, because there's been a lot of spending, a lot of advertising, and a lot of fiery words going on, especially on the Republican side.

So where do we stand now with the races on both of those, for that U.S. Senate seat that Rob Portman is stepping away from?

- Well, there are two primaries, two big primaries going on on both sides, and I should mention that the gubernatorial primary on the Republican side and the Democratic side, and then, of course, the U.S. Senate primaries.

Those could be part of the reasons why more Republicans have taken out early votes than Democrats, because that U.S. Senate race is definitely getting a lot of attention.

But on the Democratic side, there is an active primary, for instance, for governor.

It's less active for the Republicans running for governor.

On the Senate side, the activity going on in the U.S. Senate race for the Democrats is a little less.

I mean, certainly you've got Tim Ryan, the Congressman, and Morgan Harper, the community activist.

There's another candidate in the race, TJ Johnson, but it's really Harper and Ryan, and it's really Ryan's race to lose.

He's been working for this for a while, raised more money than I think any Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in recent memory has raised.

So there's a lot of money going into that race, but then, on the Republican side, this is a race involving seven candidates.

There were eight, but then Bernie Marino dropped out the day after the filing deadline, saying that he had spoken to former President Trump about it.

And Trump is the character that's in the race that's not in the race.

He's the one that it really appears that the candidates are speaking to rather than even their own voters sometimes.

I moderated a debate with all seven candidates at Central State University in Wilberforce last month, and it turned out to be kind of a difficult event.

It was 90 minutes, seven candidates on stage.

I fact checked them.

They did not like that.

But when the question that we got most from people who wanted to know the answer, this was the question, they wanted to know how those candidates felt about the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

And all but one of the candidates on stage, that one candidate being Matt Dolan, State Senator from Northeast Ohio, they all had some varying degree of believing that the election was stolen.

I called them out on it, they didn't like it.

But that really sets the tone for what's happening in this race, that there is a lot of talking toward Trump and a lot of hope that Trump would endorse one of them, whoever it was.

He did endorse over the weekend.

He endorsed JD Vance, the author and venture capitalist, which upset a lot of Trump fired up Republicans, because many of them feel that JD Vance is not a true true representative of what they were wanting, because he has said many anti-Trump comments in the past.

He's spent a lot of time walking those back, but he indeed did a walk away with Trump's endorsement, and that's where we are right now.

- Yeah, and if you see the advertisements going on, and there is quite a bit of it, you're right.

Everyone was, every ad had a picture of whichever candidate it was with Donald Trump, and at the same time, then saying my opponents are not true Trump supporters.

I'm the only true Trump supporter.

So he, as usual, weighed in heavily, overshadowed, even, the individual candidates.

The polling that's out there is a little, is sketchy, I guess you'd say.

It's not the kind of polling we'd see for a presidential race and that sort of thing, so talk a little about, I know you wanted to say something else about the race, but we want to talk a little bit about the polling, too.

- Sure, and the polling, we haven't seen any really good independent polling, Quinnipiac, anything like that coming through and showing us who actually is leading in the race.

And I hope we get some of that, but I also think that there are some real problems with polling that still need to be addressed, the whole system and how it really indicates where people are at a given moment.

But, you've got these, you've got these five candidates, JD Vance, Matt Dolan, you've got Jane Timken, the former head of the Ohio Republican Party, Josh Mandel, the former state treasurer, and Mike Gibbons, a Cleveland investment banker.

And Gibbons and Mandel seemed to be kind of leading for a while, and a lot of this, really honestly, is Gibbons was spending a ton of money.

Almost everything that he's raised has been his personal fortune on the line, so to speak, or at least some of his personal fortune.

All five of these people that I just mentioned are very wealthy, and many of them are, basically, except for Mandel, have been lending their own campaigns millions of dollars to keep their campaigns going.

And it's really kind of stunning, the number of individual donations from average people, these candidates are just not getting them like other candidates in previous races have got.

This race has gotten very expensive.

I'm thinking, I saw a figure over the weekend, I think it was $23 million that these candidates have spent, but I think it's more than that.

I mean, we're getting to the point where, just for the primary, more has been spent than was spent in all of the last time we had a U.S. Senate campaign, and certainly this will be the most expensive campaign in Ohio history when it comes to the U.S. Senate, just because all of these wealthy candidates are willing to spend so much of their own money.

Now, the other question I have, though, that I was gonna weigh in on here is all those ads that you had been seeing, where Jane Timken talks about being Trump tough, and you know, these candidates all talking about how they want to be the Trump candidate.

Now that there is a Trump candidate, I'll be interested to see how their ads change, because Trump may weigh in and say nobody but JD Vance can use me to run for office, because he's my guy and the others are not.

- So, yeah, you can't, you can't imply that I'm involved in your candidacy at all or ever have been.

Yeah, that's an interesting take, because, you're right, and you think about that, that the brand now has been assigned to one candidate, which is why they were all trying to get that.

And as you said, too, there were moves within a lot of county Republican organizations to say don't endorse JD Vance, and yet Donald Trump did anyway.

So that's where we stand with that.

- And there are some Republicans who are really critical of that, saying that it appears Trump is endorsing the most famous person in every race.

They point to, say, Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, who had been polling really low in that race, that he was the candidate that Trump chose.

I think the influence of Trump, though, is undeniable.

You had candidates talking about how their whole campaign was pro-Trump.

Well, now they have to, I guess, decide what else they're gonna focus on.

- Yeah, 'cause you would see in those ads, it would say, you know, pro this, pro that, but always pro-Trump would show up in that line.

So you're right, they may, yeah, They can say they're still pro-Trump.

Maybe he's just not pro them, I guess, at this point.

Real quickly, we've got just a moment or two, Supreme Court was looking at something that dealt with media the other day, talking about Netflix and Hulu being treated like cable companies, which has some financial and other aspects to it.

Talk real briefly about that, and there was actually a little humor in that while they were doing it, too.

But, yeah, talk about that, 'cause that sort of flew under the radar for a lot of people, I think.

- Yeah, in a non-redistricting case, the Ohio Supreme Court was asked in Netflix and Hulu are video service providers, and if so, they would have to pay franchise fees to cities.

There's been a class action lawsuit filed by 2000 cities claiming that Netflix and Hulu owe them money, essentially.

And this is money that's about 5% of the total revenue from subscribers in each city.

So there's some money on the table here.

And so, Netflix and Hulu say, no, no, we are not video service providers.

We just put the stuff out there and the ISPs and the internet, that's the service provider.

So there was a real debate back and forth of what is a video service provider.

And the Supreme Court, it was noted, does provide video.

All of their sessions are streamed online.

And so, you know, there was a question of, hey, should we be taxed?

Should we be taxed like Hulu and Netflix?

And the lawyers then responded saying, oh, no, no, no.

You're not the same.

You're not the same as Netflix and Hulu.

And the justices were like, hey, wait a minute.

We offer entertainment, what's wrong here?

People are watching.

So it was a little bit of levity there, but it's still a serious issue for these communities, who feel like that money could be invested in broadband and other technology and it's not being.

- Yeah, and you're right.

And there is a shift, because there's a shift away from cable service to streaming services, and this is a way to capture that.

But, yeah, it was interesting to see the justices in sort of a humorous mood, saying we think we're entertaining.

We're thinking we're as good as the programming on the rest of Netflix and Hulu, so wait a minute.

Yeah, who are we?

It was, yeah, it was just, it was actually nice to see sort of a little humor injected into some of these topics, which we don't see a lot of anymore with any political or issue that comes before the court.

So, yeah, yeah.

- Exactly.

- Karen, thanks again for being here, and we'll get you back after the primary at some point to talk about what happened and where we're going with whatever happens next in Ohio's election cycle this year, but we appreciate you coming on and giving us the insight, again, on what we know at this point.

So appreciate that very much.

- Thanks so much.

- Yep, you can check us out at wbgu.org, and, of course, you can watch us each week, Thursday night, eight p.m., on WBGU PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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