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

I'm Steve Kendall.

In the wake of Issue 1's defeat on August 8th, and the approval of two statewide issues to appear on the November, 2023 ballot.

Where do we head now, what's going on in Columbus?

What's the thought of the legislators and the party power makers?

What's their thoughts on what's gonna happen?

We're joined by Karen Kasler, host of The State of Ohio, which you can see every Sunday at noon here in WBGU-PBS.

Karen, thanks for being here.

Appreciate it.

- It's great to talk to you, thanks.

- Yeah and Issue 1, obviously we're a couple of weeks away.

I mean, the election now seems a long ways in the past.

It's not been quite two weeks as we're talking today, but Issue 1 continues to sort of roll through the future of Ohio because one side says, okay, this is what it meant.

The other side here is what the decision meant, but the talk's not over.

The discussion is not over about what this will mean and how it will impact as we move toward future elections.

So talk a little about, you had folks on your show talk of this, but Issue 1 turned out to be a different, kind of a different ending than people were saying.

The polls said it was going to pass, and the reality was it failed by what we considered almost a landslide margin, which is unusual in the state of Ohio for a constitutional amendment to see that kind of negative reaction.

[Karen] There wasn't a whole lot of reliable polling on this.

I think there were two polls, one showing it was close, but it was passing by a little bit, and the other showing it was failing.

[Steve] Yeah.

[Karen] But yeah, the overall results, and we could kind of see this as we were going forward through early voting and through the ads and some of the voices that were speaking out this coalition that was opposed to Issue 1, which to remind everybody was the proposal that would raise the voter threshold to approve constitutional amendments to 60% from a simple majority where it is now, and it has been for more than a 100 years, and would also require groups and citizens to gather signatures from all 88 counties, not 44, which is in current law.

And so that was the essential, the essence of the proposal.

And we were seeing some of the people who were speaking out against this coalition that opposed it.

I mean, it was democratic groups.

It was, there were some prominent Republicans, all four of Ohio's living ex governors, two Republicans and two Democrats, five former attorneys general including Republicans and Democrats.

You had even some conservative groups like the Ohio Round Table, which is a conservative group out of the Cleveland area.

The libertarian party was against this.

I mean, it was a huge coalition that spoke out against it.

And the ad war, I mean, we're talking about millions of dollars in ads for an election in the middle of summer that wasn't even on the schedule until May.

[Steve] Right.

- It was really kind of amazing.

- Yeah and of course then you had to, and one of the things that that would sort of flash by occasionally was, oh, we weren't supposed to have any other August elections.

That was, that largest general assembly had said, "Those are a bad idea, never and never again."

Although I noticed that, I believe it was Frank LaRose said, "Well, we just meant for local issues.

We didn't mean state issues."

But I think it appeared that sort of resonated with people who were like, wait a minute, six months ago August was a horrible idea.

Now we're having an August election.

And that seemed to make people think, well now wait a minute.

What's so urgent now that wasn't urgent in December last year.

[Karen] Yeah, I think that was kind of one of the things that got people who were paying attention to this really questioning that law that banned most August special elections past last year was signed earlier this year.

The first election that it affected was the May primary because it required voters to show photo id.

It was a law that did an awful lot of things when it came to elections.

But this banning of August special elections, when the legislature set the Issue 1 proposal for an August special election, there was a lawsuit.

Because we can't have an election in Ohio- without having a lawsuit.

[Steve] Without a lawsuit.

- And the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that law did not apply to legislators who were trying to put an amendment before voters, which for some people seemed a little bit hypocritical against what the law actually was intended to do because it was intended to eliminate elections that have low turnout and high cost.

[Steve] Right.

- And this election, potentially there was $16 million in the budget for this election.

Don't know if it got all spent.

We'll be finding that out hopefully soon.

But the turnout was good for an August special election.

[Steve] Yes.

- 38 and half percent, but it's still only 38.5%.

[Steve] Right.

- Yeah and that's pretty low in terms of raw numbers.

[Steve] Yeah, a typical election.

And then if you look at, of course, the last, the August 22 election, which was legislative primaries, general assembly, primaries, I mean, the turnout there was incredibly low, even lower than a typical August 6th.

So that- [Karen] Yeah, like right around 80%.

[Steve] Yeah, that's like an outlier completely.

But it showed the difference in an issue that even like this, which was extremely presented as presumably extremely important, still only, as you said, got less than a 40% turnout, which does speak to August elections to some degree, as being these ones that sort of fall in this sort of black hole sort of a thing.

It was interesting because there was of course, obviously a, it was almost as you described it, a bipartisan opposition to it, as you said, a broad spectrum of entities that normally don't agree on a lot of things.

And yet in this one, they seem to agree that they didn't believe this was a good idea to pass the Issue 1.

[Karen] Right, and there the arguments had ranged from, hey, this would be something that would give the minority power over the majority because it would just take 40, 41% of voters to say no for an amendment to not pass.

So there was real concern about, well, the power of my vote to pass a constitutional amendment could potentially be diminished by this.

[Steve] Right.

- But then there were also some arguments that, hey, if you wanna do this, and some people do wanna make it harder to amend Ohio's constitution, it's already hard enough, but some people wanna make it harder.

Is this the right time to rush this through with virtually no education?

Because there wasn't time to do a whole lot of that.

[Steve] Right.

- And a turnout of 38.5%, would that really be fair to make such a sweeping change to the Constitution with so few voters actually making that change?

[Steve] Yeah, and you make a good point because the argument for August was people don't pay attention to it.

They don't turn out, and I said, even this important issue generated less than a 40% turnout across the state, which kinda speaks to, maybe they were right about the August elections back in December, and yet still tried to sort of go around that to do this one this year.

[Karen] But it's very clear why they did in August.

I mean, they were aiming for the November ballot looking at what's gonna be on the November ballot, which we now know is gonna be the abortion and reproductive rights amendment.

It was very clear that they wanted to have the 60% threshold in place before that Abortion Rights Amendment.

Because in other red states, abortion rights have been upheld, but not by 60%.

[Steve] Right.

[Karen] And so while you had some lawmakers saying, this is about more than abortion, it's also about redistricting, which I know we'll talk about a little bit, there was still this drumbeat of this is about the amendment on abortion that's coming up and this is why it needs to pass.

And that was the message that I think a lot of people who voted for Issue 1 got.

- And when you describe that to, because I know in watching the state of Ohio, there was a list of states that were traditionally not traditionally, our red states that passed reproductive rights.

And those margins were generally 53 to 57%, somewhere in that range.

Because some people said, well, why is 60 such a arbitrary number?

Well, you could look at the results of some of those.

Because there were surprises.

I don't think anybody, when they looked at Kansas said, "Well, Kansas is gonna uphold reproductive rights.

It's a very conservative state."

And yet that was a 56, 50% yes margin.

When we come back, we can talk a little more about that.

Because obviously you interviewed a lot of the players in this who were not only talking about what happened on August 8th, but what they think will happen moving forward.

So we can talk a little more about Issue 1, which we'll be talking about for quite a while, obviously, back with Karen Kasler from The State of Ohio here on "The Journal" in just a moment.

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

Our guest is Karen Kasler, the host of The State of Ohio, which you can see every Sunday at noon here on WBGU-PBS.

Karen, you of course spent an entire show talking about Issue 1 the Sunday after the election.

And I think one of the things that, as you were talking with various people, this isn't just about what happened on August 8th, there is still a discussion about what this means going downstream for other legislation, other constitutional amendments.

I know one of, I think it might've been Matt Huffman, said, "Well, we'll have to revisit this kind of thing regarding the Constitution, but maybe in a different time, a different mindset or whatever."

So it isn't like this is never gonna come back up again.

It seems there will probably be an effort to change how we amend the Constitution downstream again, this effort obviously failed for whatever reasons.

So what's your feeling when you talk to them that they haven't given up on changing the way we amend the Constitution, have they?

- I think it was a really interesting thing to hear him say that right after he knew that 57% of Ohio voters had rejected it, to bring that back up and say, hey, we're gonna do this again.

I think that is an interesting strategy to bring that up right then.

But this is an idea that's actually been brought up before it was discussed in the Constitutional Modernization Commission back in 2013.

There have been other proposals to raise that voter threshold in previous legislatures.

They just haven't gone anywhere.

They went somewhere this time because again, there was this abortion access amendment that's coming in November.

But also there's some other things.

I mean, redistricting, for instance, when former, when Republican former Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor left the Ohio Supreme Court, she had to, because of term limits, she said she really didn't like the way that the process went.

And so she wanted to see an independent commission take over redistricting.

That's another thing that Republican lawmakers really don't wanna see happen.

And so putting the idea of that 60% voter threshold out there, they wanted to do that as soon as they possibly could.

They tried for May, didn't happen.

They got to August.

But now, the idea of bringing that back right now, especially since they've claimed that voters were confused and that's why they voted it down.

Well, I think for a lot of voters they weren't confused at all.

And the idea of somehow you can bring that back so quickly, just, I think Republicans need to figure out why people voted no if they wanna try this again.

- Yeah and I know when you, and you were talking with various people like Matt Huffman, David Pepper, Mark Weaver, people from both sides of the aisle.

Part of the discussion was that, well, we believe that because of the confusion and the mixed messaging, maybe on the yes side that confused people even more.

We had this limited timeframe, but a lot of it still felt like the limited timeframe was almost someone else's fault.

And they didn't wanna say the name, at least not in the interviews that you did.

But there was an implication that, well, because of these Republicans that opposed it, that gave other people a place to then say, well, if Republicans don't like it, then I don't like it either because their own party is opposing most, as you said, that coalition of people that normally would side with the Republicans on an issue were not there.

And it was almost, it was like we're blaming them for it.

Not the fact that the voters maybe just didn't like the what we were trying to do or what the language said.

So did?

[Karen] Yeah.

- As you said, clarifying the message, finding out why people voted no, and saying, well, it's because people on our own side said vote no.

That's why people voted no.

Well, that they should have that much power over people.

But okay, yeah.

[Karen] It is interesting to hear the reasoning and even the blaming that's going on.

[Steve] Right.

- There's a lot of blaming among Republicans on why this failed because Republicans, the party and leading Republicans all backed if they said they were voting for it, and yet it failed.

And so, Matt Hoffman had a couple of different reasons on election night why it failed.

He mentioned that there were prominent Republicans like former Attorney General Auditor Betty Montgomery, former Governor Bob Taft, former governor John Kasich who should have been speaking for Issue 1 who were against it.

I'm not sure that really resonates with a lot of voters though.

[Steve] Yeah.

- The other thing that he said was that there wasn't enough time to build a winning campaign for Issue 1.

Again, they voted it onto the ballot in May.

It went onto the ballot in August and voters rejected it.

There have been other, many, many other examples of times when lawmakers have put something before voters and they didn't have much time.

And it still passed last year, for instance, in 2022, there were two constitutional amendments that were put before voters on non-citizens voting and on bail reform.

They were voted on in earlier in the year, I think February.

And then they went on ballot.

No, I think they were voted on in August maybe.

And then they went on the ballot November.

[Steve] November.

- And they both passed.

So, you know.

[Steve] Yeah.

- Even though one of the two amendments on redistricting that was put before voters by the legislature in very short order from the time they passed it, and voters approved it.

So it's an interesting thing to hear a lawmaker who says that's the reason when, of course, he was the one, one of the many that set the timeline.

He helped put it on the ballot.

And yet then later says, well, we didn't have enough time to build a winning campaign.

[Steve] Yeah and it does make the argument, you said that there were things that have operated in this same sort of shortened window, if you want to call it that, that were approved.

So it wasn't simply the amount of time.

There was something deeper than that that went on.

It was interesting though.

I know when you talked to Matt Huffman when you were interviewing him, that he said, "We're not done with reproductive rights."

Whatever happens November happens November.

But again, almost like in a way saying the voters will vote the way they are, but we're not gonna, depending on how it comes out, we're not gonna, if it isn't the way we want it, we'll revisit this again in some form or fashion again speaks to that thing of like, well, we're gonna talk about how we amend the Constitution again at a time when obviously 57% of Ohio and said, we don't like this idea and implied that we know what you're trying to do here and we don't like it.

And yet he doubled down on constitutional amendment changing and reproductive rights of the two things that probably drove the no voters.

And yet somehow they're, that's just sort of sliding by somehow.

[Karen] Yeah, it really was kind of amazing to hear him talk about, for instance, if the Abortion Rights Amendment does pass in November, that there might be an attempt to try to pull that back.

[Steve] Right.

- And once again, once you put something before voters and they vote in a particular way to try to put that again before voters and expect a different result is kind of an interesting perspective.

[Steve] Yeah, yeah.

- But I will note that the next time there will be an opportunity to put something like that before voters will be in March, and because we're coming up on a presidential year, primaries are in March rather than in May.

And this March primary is gonna feature two very high profile Republican races for president.

[Steve] Right.

- The nomination and the nomination for US Senate.

So there's gonna be a lot of Republican voters and a lot of Republican primary voters who are definitely on the further right side than many Republicans who will be voting in March.

So I don't know if that makes a difference here or not, but it's certainly something to think about.

- Yeah and depending on, because it would be interesting to see if they did something late in the legislative session or in the lame duck and go, well, you know, we didn't have enough time in this August 2023 election.

But between the lame duck session and March, plenty of time to deliver our message for those sort of things.

We come back, obviously you mentioned gerrymandering and I know you had Maureen O'Connor on, as you said, was really one of the people that, on the state Supreme Court now off because of term limits, who really kept saying no to what the legislature was trying to, or the commission was trying to do with setting up districts.

And obviously we're gonna be revisiting that because we didn't get it done the way everybody thought it might get done.

So when we come back, we can talk about that and maybe whatever other pieces we wanna talk to is obviously Issue 1 deals with coming in November, recreational marijuana, which will be a law and not a constitutional amendment.

And there was even some discussion about what we'll do if that passes, I thought was kind of interesting too, back in just a moment with Karen Kasler, host of The Ttate of Ohio here on "The Journal."

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

Real briefly on Issue 1, I know there was a discussion afterwards with both sides, and I know you asked the question to several people, does this change Ohio's status as basically being a red state back to being a swing state?

Is this a different roadmap now for Democrats and Republicans given the coalition that opposed this?

Is that a longer term thing?

Or is this just a onetime sort of this issue drew those groups together and then they'll go back to being where they were on other issues?

- I think Ohio's clearly a red state.

I mean, looking back at the last several election cycles, there's no question that Ohio is a red state.

I think this shows maybe the limits of what some Republican voters want, but I don't think there's any way that you could look at 38%, 38.5% turnout and decide that that is somehow a major change for Ohio's political climate.

It does potentially give democrats the opportunity to show where they could gain some strength potentially, especially in areas where they've lost strength, like in the Youngstown area and the Toledo area.

[Steve] Right.

- But Ohio's still a red state, I think, there's no question.

But this fall's vote is gonna be very interesting because there are no statewide candidates.

[Steve] Right.

- And so to have abortion rights and legalization of marijuana before voters with no political candidates leading the way, we could get a really interesting picture of what Ohio is thinking about those things.

- Yeah, it will sort of talk, it'll be sort of the culture war vote kind of in a way that should we legalize recreational marijuana, should we put reproductive rights into the Constitution?

So two issues that float around.

I know obviously there's gonna be a lot of advertising, a lot of contentiousness around those two issues, but yeah, and it's interesting you point out the 38%, because on one hand, that's not too far from the 41% that could have prevented a constitutional amendment from becoming law.

So on one hand, yeah, it's interesting that that doesn't seem like a fair sample of the voter population yet it wasn't that far from what Issue 1 would've put in place.

So we'll just have to see how that plays out.

Recreational marijuana is on the ballot, it's gonna go on as a law, which you were real clear about that in the show, which means it is subject then to reversal or modification by the general assembly.

What's the, I know that came up when you were talking with people on both sides of the aisle, mainly on the republican side, that they were kind of saying, well, we will have to look at that if it passes, we may modify that.

That again seems a little interesting because if voters say, we like this idea, is it the legislator's, legislature's responsibility say, well, no, you were wrong about that.

I mean, it does fly in the face of the whole Issue 1 thing in a way that, well, the voter said this, but we really don't think they understood what was going on.

Is that the argument they'll make about legis, about recreational marijuana?

Well, they didn't really understand the ramification.

So at what point do you quit trusting how people vote if you're a politician?

I guess never, you never trust the people's vote as politician.

I don't know.

- I know there are a lot of high profile Republicans who don't wanna see marijuana legalized.

There are some Republicans who do wanna see marijuana legalized, and this vote potentially in the fall could really bring out a lot of younger voters who are concerned both about legalization of marijuana and a reproductive rights.

So I think that this could be a very, I think this is gonna be one of the most talked about elections in Ohio in a very long time because of these two important issues.

But of course the backers of the legalization issues say it's gonna pass by such overwhelming numbers, but the legislature wouldn't dare try to repeal it.

I don't know that's necessarily the case.

[Steve] Yeah.

- If there's enough of a strong group of people who want to see it.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- So I don't know if there's enough of a group of legislators who want to see marijuana stay the way it is, where we got medicinal marijuana and that's it.

The opposition's gonna be potentially pretty big here as well.

There's already a group of children's hospitals and law enforcement, possibly manufacturers joining in on that who are opposed.

And certainly the dispensaries that exist, they're gonna be concerned about this as well.

[Steve] Sure.

And I know you interviewed on the show a mother whose son had gone to, I wanna say California, but don't quote me on that, who said his life changed when he was in a state where there was recreational marijuana and it wasn't a good ending.

And she said, "I just don't think it's a good idea to turn recreational marijuana loose in Ohio."

So there'll be, she'll probably be in an ad probably, I'm guessing, and or maybe, but it speaks to an issue that's every bit as contentious in its own way as reproductive rights.

So you've got those two almost national issues on the ballot in Ohio and everybody from all over the country, all the news media will be here watching what happens in Ohio again.

So in one way we'll be sort of a little bit of a bellwether state again with regard to that.

So that'll be interesting, that'll be interesting.

[Karen] I think that is really a good point.

The whole idea of how Ohio views this could potentially show how other, how it's being viewed across the country.

The Ohio's population is older and it's less diverse than other states, which is why we've lost our bellwether status, essentially.

[Steve] Yeah.

- But to really see where Ohioans fall on this is gonna be very interesting.

And there's gonna be a lot of money.

I mean, if you didn't like the ads for Issue 1, you're really not gonna like the ad war on Issue 1 and Issue 2, which is gonna be, we're gonna find out later this week by the time this airs, we'll know which one is Issue 1 and which one is Issue 2.

[Steve] Yeah, it'll be interesting to see because yeah, it will attract is a media attention from all over the country because of the issues that are there.

One of the things we've touched on as we've gone through this is gerrymandering.

And one side calls it gerrymandering, other one calls it redistricting.

Obviously Maureen O'Connor thinks it's been gerrymandered.

And she obviously, when she was on the Supreme Court, said, "No, no, no, your maps are wrong.

They're not good, they're not good, they're not good.

They're unconstitutional."

She's no longer in that position.

But now she's part of a group that says, we've gotta rethink this redistricting set of rules that we currently have because they just don't work.

That issue is going to keep coming back too, because we're gonna have to redistrict again because of the way we didn't do it the last time with the rules from the amendments that were in place.

What's your, how is that gonna play out?

Because that's another issue that really affects what goes on in the state.

It didn't attract as much attention maybe as some of these other issues, but it's going to be out there again.

And both sides had opinions on what should or shouldn't be done.

I know, I think it was David or Mark Weaver said, "Well, she's just wrong about it, what we have seen is working fine.

We don't need to change it."

More or less, that's not the exact words.

She, on the other hand said, no, no, the system's broken.

It didn't work, and we've gotta do something differently.

A citizen's Commission nonpartisan, as much as it's possible, don't put politicians on there.

What's the thought on where that's going to go now because you think we were done with it, but we're not, obviously.

[Karen] Well, certainly the Republicans who supported the maps that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled five times at the state level and then twice at the federal, the congressional map were unconstitutionally gerrymandered.

The Republicans who supported those maps are going to be opposed to this process.

And they'll point out things like Ohioans had the opportunity to put an independent commission in charge of redistricting in 2004 when they voted it down.

And so there's a real question about whether, what the accountability is for an independent commission.

Well, the accountability really kind of didn't exist for the members of the redistricting commission that passed the unconstitutional maps.

But the real, there's some real questions about the complexity of this proposal.

I mean, we're talking about a 15 member citizens commission.

And again, no, like you just said, no current or former politicians or lobbyists, anybody who's a professional partisan couldn't be on that board.

Who does that leave out potentially?

Who does that leave that could on be on the board?

[Steve] Right.

- And the whole process is very clearly defined, but Republicans are gonna point out that the process that exists now they think worked fine.

It was the Supreme Court's viewing of it that they thought was problematic.

[Steve] Okay, yeah.

- So, I think there's a lot that this is gonna, there's a lot of attention for this amendment if it's even approved, because it has, it's just started right now.

[Steve] Right.

- And we haven't even gotten to the point where it's gonna be on the ballot.

[Steve] Yeah.

- Well, we're gonna have to, we'll leave it there because obviously we've covered a lot of territory here and the Supreme Court's different now than it was when Maureen O'Connor was there.

So that's one less speed bump depending on your perspective to go through.

So Karen, thank you so much for being here.

We always appreciate the fact that you're available to us to provide a lot of insight into this.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every week on WBGU-PBS Thursdays at eight o'clock.

We'll see you again next time.

Goodnight and good luck.

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