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(exciting electronic intro music) (bell ringing) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, May 13th, and I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programming here at the City Club.

It is my pleasure to welcome David Pepper back to the City Club.

David Pepper has become a Household name here in Ohio with decades of service as a lawyer, writer, political activist, former elected official, and adjunct professor.

Lately he's become a significant social media influencer with a Twitter feed dedicated to educating followers on gerrymandering and redistricting using high tech media, like a whiteboard.

(audience chuckling) Pepper was born and raised in Cincinnati and was first elected to public office in 2001 when he served on the Cincinnati City Council.

In 2006, he was elected to the three member Hamilton County Commission and served as the commission president from 2009 to 2010.

He ran unsuccessfully for statewide office twice before serving as the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party from 2015 to 2020.

David Pepper has definitely been keeping busy since his days as the ODP chair.

Today, he's joining us as part of our "Authors in Conversation" series to talk about his new book, "Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-up Call from Behind the Lines."

In his book, he taps into his years of experience and suggests that the greatest threat to American democracy isn't the high profile antics of national politicians.

Rather, it is found right under our noses inside our own statehouses.

State legislators make critical decisions on economic policy, budgets, energy policy, criminal justice, education, and more, yet most Americans cannot name their state representative.

And on the heels of the Ohio Supreme Court dismissing the fourth set of redistricting maps due to gerrymandering, statehouse decisions can easily influence federal politics in favor of a single party.

So what is at stake for the future of statewide politics and how can ordinary citizens protect democracy in their own communities?

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text them to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

And you can also tweet them @thecityclub.

Our staff will try to work them into the second half of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming David Pepper.

(audience applauding) - Thank you.

Thank you so much, Cynthia, for the introduction.

Yeah, a whiteboard was as high tech as I got in addition to having my camera just filming me directly, but people have enjoyed them.

It is great to be back, it's an honor to be back.

Thank you, Dan, for the invitation.

I also want to recognize Bride Rose Sweeney is here and State Rep. Jeff Crossman is here, running for attorney general.

Great to see you both.

(audience applauding) I apologize in advance that I named the institutions you serve in as "laboratories of autocracy."

That was not meant to be personal.

So I'll cut right to the chase because I know I have a half an hour and then a half an hour of questions, and it's a pretty weighty topic.

And if I don't get to the end, it's all dark.

And I want to get to the solutions too, so I gotta get started.

What if, and this is relevant, especially given what's happening in the world, I'm gonna walk through a hypothetical.

What if we watch in another country, Europe or elsewhere, the following set of things happen all at once: we saw that country rig its legislative election so that 99% of the results were guaranteed and that a minority stayed in power, even when the majority of the voters voted for another side?

What if we saw that country and its government attack or take over the independent operations of elections and vote counting to assert greater control over the vote counting process?

What if we saw the other country attack the means by which the voters of the party they considered their opposition voted?

They specifically targeted the ways in which those who they knew voted against them voted, made it harder for them or impossible?

What if they attacked, by law, protestors who largely reflected the views of the opposition as they considered it?

What if they attacked independent courts, changed the way they were elected, changed the jurisdiction, protected themselves from those courts?

What if they repeatedly, this will sound familiar, and I wrote this long before the current gerrymandering process, what if they violated the elected will of their own electorate as expressed through referenda again and again with no accountability?

What if they violated their own constitutions repeatedly?

What if they changed laws, Jeff, this will be familiar to you, what if they changed laws to protect themselves from being held accountable for corruption?

What if they tried to cleanse history of elements that cast a bad light on their present day actions?

Or maybe most relevant today, what if they passed laws repeatedly that reflected only the deepest minority of the worldview of their constituents, but they just kept doing it and doing it?

If this were happening in other country all at once, we would look at that and we wouldn't simply say, "They attacked voters," or "They attacked this law we don't like."

We would say, "My God, this is a full-fledged attack on democracy itself.

They're going after the most foundational pillars of democracy."

If that happened in Russia, as it has, we'd see that, we'd say that.

If it happened in Hungary, we'd understand that.

I wrote my book because it's what's happening in Columbus, Ohio.

In Tallahassee, in Tennessee, in Missouri, in Indiana, in states all around this country.

The very set of steps that we would recognize in another place, in another country, are actually happening right in our own state capitals all over this country.

Almost every single one I just described, Jeff or Bride would say, "Yep, I voted against that law.

That that came right down the pike, it passed, probably didn't even create a story half the time."

This is the story of what's happening in our own country.

But because we don't pay much attention to statehouses and because we are very confident in our democracy, you know, mom's apple pie and democracy, that's what we're about.

We don't see the threat to our democracy in our own statehouses that we would very well recognize in other countries.

And that's why I wrote the book, to try and expose the problem for what it is.

We like to focus on the personalities of politics, the Donald Trumps or the Barack Obamas, the Marjorie Taylor Greenes.

We don't like as much to focus on the institutions of democracy in our country.

And that's another reason why I think we aren't seeing the problem for what it is.

For every Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz in Washington, who, let's face it, make a lot of noise and say some pretty terrible things.

but they're in the minority.

Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't even sit on a committee.

They're not passing laws.

For every one of those, Jeff and Bride are dealing with dozens with the same views who are in the majority passing laws every single week.

And we hardly talk about it.

Again, that's why I wrote the book.

I don't have time to go through the whole book.

There's a lot to it.

There are copies outside.

And isn't Mack's nice enough to sell them here?

Mack's Books, what is it?

- [Audience Member 1] Mack's Backs.

- Mack's Backs?

They are selling it, so I hope you'll get it if you haven't yet.

So I won't go through all the details of everything I threw in the book, but I want to go through some basics and then what we can do about all this and then go to questions.

So, there's a five alarm fire that I hope my hypothetical walks us through.

And my hope is, and this isn't really in the book, but it's, in the end, maybe the most important observation I think we can make, that that hypothetical opens our eyes to, and it hopefully, my hope is, when we're done here today, all of you are gonna be thinking a little bit differently about where politics is than you than you did walking in, or most of you.

We like to think that we are, in the way we think about politics right now, is that there's a battle taking place between red and blue, between Republican and Democratic parties.

And the more I went through my book and the more I've talked about it since, we are not.

That is an over-simplistic view of what's actually happening in our country.

There actually are two sides, but they're not just the stereotypical red and blue, Republican-Democrat.

And my hope is if there are people here who aren't Democrats, you'll hear me talking to you as well.

This is not just about party.

There are two sides in politics that are slightly different than, I think, the way we think about it today.

And tell me if I'm wrong in this description, most people seem to agree with it.

These two sides are actually not fighting a single battle in politics.

They see the battle so differently, I think there actually are two battles taking place in politics.

And until one side understands the other side's battle, that one side will keep losing.

And here are the two sides.

The one side is I'm guessing most the people in this room, it's been largely Democrats, but some Republicans for a long time.

And this is a side that, as I said, believes very much in democracy and is confident in democracy and believes it's here to stay and it's intact.

This side also, so its default is, "Well, okay, we're gonna engage in a battle of politics given this intact playing field of democracy."

This side also is confident that it can win in that fair battle because most of its viewpoints represent a majority of Americans.

A middle class based economy, as opposed to trickle down.

Support for Roe v. Wade, that's not a minority view.

That's a majority view in almost every state in this country.

Equality, dealing with climate change, I could go on and on.

Common sense gun reform.

These are majority viewpoints, look at any poll.

Banning books is not popular, okay?

It's not, it's about 80-20 the other way.

So this side thinks, "Okay, we're on the side of the mainstream American public.

We believe in democracy, so our battle in politics is to go after election outcomes.

And if we say what we're for and do it well, we win and then we get to accomplish our policy goals, which we know are popular for the most part, not entirely, but almost entirely."

And this side, because it's efficient, and I was part of this, I was a chair of the party, this is not just me pointing fingers, this is me talking about us collectively, decided, understandably, "Well, the most efficient way to win that battle, if I'm about election outcomes, is to go federal because if I win the presidency, the Senate and the US House, I get what I want."

And that's the battlefield that also quickly leads to the strategy of, "Well, if my battle's federal, let me go find some swing states to win, because that's where it matters, and some swing House districts."

That if you win those, you win the electoral college, you win the House, you win the Senate, you win.

That also means that most of the energy and expenditure takes place when in those federal years.

Does that sound like one side of the battle to you pretty accurately?

Go win some elections, democracy's pretty intact, win federally, because that's what you really care about, because that's very efficient, and do it in swing states in federal years.

That's one side's battle.

Now this is the part that may sound controversial to some.

That is not the other side's battle.

That is not the other side's battle.

The other side's battle is very different.

And lately they've actually been more helpful to explain to us what their battle is.

And this is not a party breakdown.

I'm not saying every Republican actually thinks what I'm about to describe.

But there is part of politics today where a group of people with a variety of different views in the world actually understand that democracy is not just automatically intact.

And they also understand, very importantly, that their worldview is not popular.

Getting rid of Roe v. Wade is not a popular view.

No exceptions, deeply unpopular, toxic.

In a world of normal democracy, would cost you your next election.

Rolling back marriage equality, unpopular.

Doing nothing on climate change, gun laws that you guys have to face in the statehouse where there's open carry and no rules and no training.

This is like 10% world, okay?

Most gun owners don't agree with that.

And on and on and on.

Trickle down economics that leaves most people out, not popular, not sustainable in a regular democracy.

White supremacy in a diverse world, which has always been with us, unfortunately, is not a winning issue.

And this side understands this.

They say it, read Jane Mayer's "Dark Money," the Koch brothers understand this, but they also don't wanna give up their views.

So what is their strategy?

They know that in a robust democracy running repeat elections, they would never win.

They would lose, and they don't accept that.

So what's their battle?

It's not to win election outcomes in a robust democracy.

Their battle is against democracy itself.

That's their battle.

And that's what the world needs to figure out.

And in case that sounds crazy or controversial, and I wouldn't have said this, by the way, myself, five years ago.

Who's the most famous billionaire in the country right now, outside of Elon Musk?

And I don't know if Trump is in that category or not, but his name is Peter Thiel.

Do you know what, I got it on my phone, I saw the other day, do you know what he said recently?

10 years ago.

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

There's a current, sorry, Jocelyn, Cynthia, I'm sorry, I don't know why I called you Jocelyn.

There's a current governor candidate in Michigan who said the other day that he cringes when people say they wanna protect democracy because it's gonna lead to communism.

Why is the entire right wing all about Victor Orban?

Because he's figured out a way to lock in minority viewpoints with an appearance of fair elections.

It's called competitive autocracy, and Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump and others are all about it.

They're not even hiding it.

So they have a view.

"How do we get our minority worldview in place long term?"

Knowing that democracy actually would, as Peter Thiel says, is inconsistent with their view.

Their game is to figure that out and their game is to subvert democracy.

It just is.

And how do you do that?

And that's what the book "Laboratories of Autocracy" is about.

How do you do it?

States, statehouses.

That's where you go.

Why do they pick statehouses?

And again, this is what a lot of the book's about.

I won't go through too much.

One, as Bride and Jeff deal with every day, almost every single issue in their agenda, in all of our lives, is dealt with in statehouses in many ways more directly than Congress.

You think about the issue: the environment, economics, climate change, tax policy, regulation.

It all goes through the statehouse.

People don't know it, but it does.

Then take every contested issue in politics: Roe v. Wade and its future, equality, what we teach our kids, the quality of it, the content, all goes through statehouses.

So every issue they care about, they can get done through statehouses.

But number two, and very importantly, they also have figured out, as Bride maybe, Bride is a hero of mine, just so everyone knows, she has been fighting the voting rights battle as much as anyone I've seen since Kathleen Clyde, who's done a great job as well.

Bride knows it.

Statehouses shape our democracy in many ways more directly than Congress.

They write the first draft of the rules about who votes, when they vote, how they vote, how they register, how they get de-registered, right Bride?

Purged.

As we are learning painfully, they draw the districts that shape our entire democracy.

And with that power comes an amazing ability to hold democracy at bay.

They can, through different voting rules, but especially gerrymandering, put into place a system where just like I described, you can put minority views into place again and again and again, and never worry about your next election.

And if your goal is to put into place things that would cost you an election in a normal democracy, you'd go to statehouses to do that because you could protect yourselves, and that's what's happening.

That's their game.

And so once they decide that states are their priority, which they have done, they're not shy about it.

Basically almost the entire agenda I've described, this minority agenda taking us back 50 years on so many issues, the crazy gun stuff, the trickle down stuff, attacking labor, doing nothing about climate change, almost that entire agenda.

Watch Congress.

Does it ever do anything?

No.

Even when they were in charge with Trump and the whole Senate and House, what do they do?

Nothing except tax cuts.

Most of their agenda is going through states because they can put it through states and never lose.

So that's their game.

Their game is statehouses.

Every state, every year there's a state election going on.

And other offices like attorney general or state supreme court, others that impact the power of that statehouse.

And so I ask you, once you understand those are the two battles, one side is fighting for election outcomes in swing states and getting especially excited in those federal years, and that's when all the money gets thrown to every swing Senate seat running against Mitch McConnell or others, if that's one side's battle and the other side is fighting in states every single year, locking them down once they win them through gerrymandering and suppression like they did that to Ohio after '11, and they're doing that every year, if you repeat that battle every couple years, who's gonna win?

Who's gonna win?

Not the federal swing state every couple year people, I'll tell you that.

My son, and a lot of you know, my son is named Jack, my other son's named Charlie.

Jack plays soccer.

He's pretty good, actually.

I don't know where it came from.

He's a good little athlete.

He is a beast.

Whatever the ball comes to his side of the field, he wants to kick it back to their side because he knows that unless you're on offense, you're gonna lose.

If one team is always on offense, they're gonna win.

And one team in the current battle of politics is always on offense in states.

And the other side plays defense occasionally at the federal level.

And that is a guaranteed loss for democracy over time.

That's the current two battles in this country.

And not to get into too many details, but I even watched the other day, this horrible, I can't remember the name of the case now, but the Mississippi case where we see the opinion from Alito.

It has reaffirmed for me just how many federal officials don't see the battle.

Because the truth is every state is just taking shots at abortion left and right, and Roe v. Wade, and that's where their battle is.

And the only thing I hear federal officials say after Mississippi and Ohio and all these other states are doing this nonstop, again, Jean Schmidt, what she said the other day about honestly, I almost hate saying it at lunch, but rape being an opportunity for a woman to deliver a baby in any normal political world, she never runs again.

But in a gerrymandered world, she'll be back just fine.

She's unlucky if she even has an opponent.

But we're giving these people a fortress of unaccountability to do things that would never survive in a real world.

And when it comes to DC, when they see these laws happen, they never talk about statehouses.

They literally say, "If we only elect another senator or two, we'll be fine."

They're still playing defense.

If the other team's offense all the time, most of the Democrats and federal officials literally say, "We just need a better goalie," instead of "Actually, let's go challenge the people in these states who are doing these things.

Let's run in every single district to start holding them accountable.

Let's make sure people know what statehouses are actually doing so they can't pass toxic laws."

So the fight, the battle, even the last couple weeks I'm watching Washington saying, "They still don't see it."

This is all being done through states and statehouses.

And until people figure that out, it's gonna continue.

So what do we do about it?

Is this my water here in this little mug?

Okay, sorry.

I believe, and as much as it's a downer to come to the conclusion that I've come to and it's sobering, I actually find it to be, and I've found this with people who've read the book and listened, it's also uplifting because once you see the battle for what it is, it becomes very clear what you need to do and what mistakes we need to stop making.

And when I say "we" I'm talking about everyone who cares about democracy.

I endorsed a guy the other day for Congress in Cincinnati who was my nemesis when I beat him for the county commission.

Republican, his name is Phil Heimlich.

Literally the son of the inventor of the Heimlich maneuver.

When I beat him, my yard sign said, "Vote Pepper, the Heimlich remover."

(audience laughing) And I beat him, I did remove him.

But in the last couple years, he's a Republican, he's pretty conservative, but he's appalled by Trump, he's appalled by January 6th, and he says, "Listen, I believe in democracy, win or lose."

So guess what?

I endorsed him in a primary.

He didn't win, unfortunately.

So this is bigger than just Democrats.

I don't want this to feel partisan, but once we see the problem for what it is and the two battles and that one side is losing because it doesn't even see the battle, I think it's very eye opening.

And here are some of, I go through 30 steps in my book about what we all can do, but I'm gonna give a couple of the highlights.

Once you understand that it's a battle for democracy, I hope it widens all of our lens to see that it is a long game that we're in.

The battle for democracy is our history as a country.

You don't settle it through the next federal cycle.

And you know, we've all lived this, (indistinct), Millie just saw it at the ODP, if all we do is simply think about the next cycle and everything is about building for that cycle and then collapsing after, and we don't see it's a long game for democracy, we are losing the game.

Talk to the suffragists about the long game for democracy.

Generations fighting, most of whom would never see the 19th amendment.

Only the granddaughters or great-granddaughters of the original suffragists would see it.

They knew it was a long game.

Talk to John Lewis.

He would say to you, and I read John Lewis's book the other day, what kind of game did you think this was?

The next cycle?

Lifetimes sacrifice for democracy.

By the way, short term example and the most recent, who understood that the battle for democracy was a long game?

Stacey Abrams.

And Karl Rove.

Stacey Abrams.

If Stacey Abrams had the short federal cycle mindset?

And I knew her from law school, I was lucky to be in her law school class.

She clearly took courses I did not take.

So I've been watching Stacy for a long time.

If she did not think of democracy as a long game in the battle for Georgia as a battle for democracy, she would've quit '04 or '06.

She had many other things she could do.

She's a romance novelist too.

But she didn't, she knew it was a battle for a long game and she stuck with it.

And even when she did not win in '18, in her closing speech where she was famous for not conceding in a very tainted election, she also said "We made progress."

And my guess is most people watching her speech thought, "Oh, come on, you're just trying to make your supporters feel better."

She knew it was a long game.

And she knew that progress was many more people voted for an African American woman than anyone would think in Georgia, they had registered more people and more people voted.

In the long arc of Georgia's democracy, she saw progress because that's how she was thinking about it.

And two years later, who was right?

She was.

She turned Georgia blue over time because she knew it was a long game.

We all have to have that long game mentality.

And there's a lot that comes from that different than when we have this cycle by cycle mentality.

By the way, one thing people ask me is one way that the long game is helpful is you start to see strategies that work.

And again, Dan and I were talking, there are things I wish I'd done differently at ODP, but there's also things that I played a long game pretty well in one thing, and that was supreme court races.

That was our long game.

We knew it was gerrymandered as hell at the statehouse.

We knew that, and by the way, I say this having no idea what's gonna happen.

I can tell you though, if we hadn't won supreme court races, the first horrible map would be the map.

We wouldn't even have a chance.

And our long game was, I don't know if Biden's gonna prioritize Ohio in the end or not, but we're getting Jennifer Bruner elected.

And any one of you I called late in that year, I was asking for supreme court fund support because we had a long game.

So once you have a long game mentality, you set different strategies.

We didn't win in '16, those supreme court races, but we saw that they were much closer.

Cynthia Rice came a lot closer.

Our drop-off was far lower.

We knew some things that we were doing were working.

So we doubled down and did them again in '18.

And that's when Donnelley and Melody Stewart won, because our drop-off was lower than their drop-off so we kept it going, and you know, Jennifer Bruner had the biggest over-performance in the country when she won by, I think, 10 in a state that Trump won by eight.

So long game helps you see other opportunities.

It helps you measure successes and keep building even if that cycle, in other ways, didn't look so good.

What's another thing the long game shows you?

That the big battle for democracy shows you?

We have to be battling for democracy in 50 states.

So, I've gotten a lot of feedback for my book.

The most sobering, and you'll like it if you haven't read it, it's mostly about Ohio, although I mentioned a lot of other states, but I have gotten emails and phone calls, now I have friends from over the country from Tennessee and Florida to other states saying, "My God, you described our life too."

Millions of people are feeling like Ohioans.

And we live in a state where our statehouse is not a democracy anymore and it's just not right.

And once you see that you're in a battle for democracy, you see how unacceptable it is that we are allowing 30 plus states to live in basically undemocratic land.

And the wrongs that are coming from that are horrible.

And we have to start thinking differently from Joe Biden on down, that it can't just be about swing states, although that's benefitted Ohio for some time, it can't just be about that anymore.

This is a battle for democracy itself and every person, just like everyone has a right to vote, every everyone has a right to live in a state that's run as a democracy.

And right now there are many states, and I hear from folks every day who literally don't feel that way.

And when you look at their statehouse and how impregnable it is to the voters, they're right.

Their state does not reflect them anymore.

There are a lot of other reasons to do that strategically, but it's also just a matter of what's right.

And I won't go through the details, but the Constitution of the United States actually says "the United States shall guarantee to every state in the union, a republican form of government."

By that they meant basically a functioning democracy.

So when we don't have democracy in all these states, we are literally violating the US Constitution's guarantee.

You know what they guaranteed after?

There's a clause, it's article four, section four of the Constitution: "The United States shall guarantee to every state a republican form of government."

By which they meant the people were sovereign.

The next clause says, "And we will also protect those states from foreign invasion," meaning it was so important to them that every state be a democracy, it came before foreign invasion.

And right now it's like, we don't even talk about the fact that many of our states, and I'll tell you, if a statehouse can ignore the will of its people 70%, five different times, are you really a democracy?

If they succeed, are we?

Hard to say yes.

Beyond focusing on all 50 states, though, once you see it's a battle for democracy, you also see what a tragedy it is that we allow dozens of districts in every state to be uncontested.

Uncontested meaning statehouse districts where candidates don't even have an opponent.

If the problem, and I go through all this in the book, if the problem with statehouses is that no one knows what they do, if the local media dying has made it even harder to know what they do so you can't really hold people accountable if you don't even know what they do, the idea that millions of Ohioans, literally, in '20 or millions of Georgians in '20 had districts that didn't even have an opponent pointing out what that incumbent was doing, it's a tragedy for democracy.

It's no accountability.

The only thing worse than Jean Schmidt saying what she said is if she says that, votes for some crazy gun law, and come March, doesn't even have an opponent.

Think about what that does to the sense of lack of accountability.

"We pass toxic laws.

We ignored every media request for comment.

And even after all that, no one even opposed us."

We've gotta support and run in every single district and we've gotta get enough support behind these people they can run enough of a campaign.

And if we don't do that, we're only contributing to the problem.

A couple other final thoughts and then I'll close.

We have to get out of only thinking about "for Trump" or "never Trump."

That's gonna sound odd to some people, but this is bigger than Trump.

The attacks on democracy I describe in my book began before Trump was ever even thinking about running for president.

If he was locked up tomorrow for January 6th, the attacks in statehouses would continue unabated.

If he had admitted that he lost the election fair and square and not "the big lie," they still would've attacked drop boxes because the drop boxes were the way that people who voted against him were voting.

So don't be fooled to think this is about Trump or never Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The attacks on democracy are deeper, longer, they're our whole country's history to be honest.

But they're deeper, they're gonna keep going regardless of if it's Trump or someone else.

And the reason I say it's so important to think that way is too often, we are dividing our world up into Trump or never Trump.

And sometimes that blinds us to the fact that there's some people in politics, and Bride and I know who they are, who may not sound like Donald Trump or feel like Donald Trump, but boy, they're attacking democracy as fiercely as Donald Trump ever does.

And we give them a pass when we define our world as "Are you for or not like Trump?"

I think one reason Republicans actually did better in 2020 where a lot of people voted for Joe Biden and voted for Republicans the rest of the way was because they were approaching their ballot with a never Trump mindset.

Even though many of the people they voted for actually are attacking democracy every single day.

We've gotta broaden it.

And that means if they're Republicans like Phil Heimlich who are supporting democracy, we gotta say great job and work with them.

And it means a lot of the infighting among those who care about democracy needs to calm down a little bit so we can actually save democracy and then have those arguments once we've saved it.

And the final thing that I'll say is I hope that once you see that we're a battle for democracy, I hope you see, and a lot of you already are doing all this so I'm speaking to the choir here, but once you see that that's the stakes, that it's more than just party, that it's more than just the next election, it's a long game and it happens everywhere, my hope is you see there's much more we can all do every day to fight for democracy, way beyond what we imagine.

We all have a footprint of influence in this world beyond the political group we're part of.

I think about if you happen to be a volunteer or a donor or you're on the board of a homeless shelter, that homeless shelter every day is serving people who are being purged every day.

Is that homeless shelter registering those voters when they come in?

And if you're on the board and you ask them and they say no, ask them why not.

Because they should be.

Or the food bank.

Or remember how Sherrod Brown had McDonald's having a voter registration document on every tray?

Does a friend of yours run a small business?

Are you habitual like I am where I eat at the same places all the time so they know me?

Are you asking them to think about how to register people?

Over and over and over again, I go through a lot of this in the book, there are so many things we can all do to lift democracy every single day.

And here's why we have to do that.

If all we do is wait for Stacy Abrams or Michelle Obama to save us, and they're doing great things, I don't think it's the scale we need to fight for democracy.

I don't think it'll work.

The battle against democracy is being waged at a very intense scale all over.

Unless all of us find it within us how to lift our scale for democracy, I don't think it's gonna add up.

We can't wait for the next campaign, we can't keep doing in and out of cycle, we can't wait for Stacy Abrams, although they're doing great things.

If each one of us figures out in our own lives what we can do, then I think we can succeed.

And I'll just close with this because I've been reading a lot about him and no one captured any of this better than John Lewis.

Around the time he passed, there were a lot of quotes.

I just wanna read one that he gave, because in much more eloquent ways and briefer ways than I just did, he summed it up this way.

"Freedom is not a state, it is an act.

It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest.

Freedom is the continuous action we all must take and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society."

He's saying what I just said.

It's a long game.

It never stops.

It's our history.

And there's something we can all do about it.

Thank you all very, very much.

I appreciate your audience.

(audience applauding) - Thank you so much, David Pepper.

We are about to begin our audience Q and A. I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programming here at the City Club.

David Pepper is the author of "Laboratories of Autocracy: a Wake-up Call From Behind the Lines" and former Ohio Democratic Party chairman.

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, and those joining via live stream at cityclub.org or our radio broadcast at 89 7 Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question, please tweet it @thecityclub, and you can also text them to 330-541-5794, that's 330-541-5794, and our staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have our first question, please?

- I appreciate your two fight scenario.

It helps me understand differently than I did before.

But I think that it's easier for us if we can put faces to movements, like a Stacey Abrams, you know, a Zelensky.

Are there other names that you can mention either from Ohio or around the country that could help us be able to put a face with the movement, the kind of strategies that you're thinking about?

- That's a great question, I really appreciate it.

I think Stacy right now is probably the best personification of it.

But what I'll tell you, outside of getting emails about "You described our lives in our states," I've also gotten emails from people saying, "We are doing something like you say we should be doing."

I'll mention some of these organizations for a second.

And, the problem is, by the way, Eric Holder is also doing a lot of this.

Eric Holder's another one.

But a lot of these organizations, unfortunately, are, you know, the Republicans said that, again, I don't wanna sound too partisan.

The other side, everything I described, is core mission.

It's core.

ALEC, the Federalist Society, it's core stuff.

Unfortunately, on our side, the groups I'm gonna mention aren't core, they're sort of side one-offs, and that's the problem.

But here's some of the groups that are doing some really good things.

Now, they're not famous people yet, I'm hoping to help them.

There's a group called the States Project and there's a woman named Melissa Walker who reached out to me right after I wrote my book.

And what do they do?

And you, Bride, Jeff, you'll love this.

Although Ohio's not on the list right now, they take groups of people and they adopt a swing state and say, "Let's go help the seven or eight state reps in swing seats in that state and flip it."

Like Arizona is only two seats from being a Democratic state.

The state with that audit nonsense is only a couple seats from being blue.

So what they'll do is they'll encourage people all over the country not just to give to a senate candidate, but to give to the six people who could flip Arizona.

That's called the States Project.

And that's a very good operation that I think we need to scale up.

Another one that I've started here, and I know Cindy and a few others have been part of this, there was a woman named as Michelle Hornish, again, not famous at all, but doing something really smart.

If you heard everything I've just described, you should be very frustrated that we give a hundred million dollars to beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, and that we have 20 uncontested seats for the statehouse in Ohio right next door.

That is a horrific problem for democracy.

Why is that happening?

Because we're not telling all those small dollar donors that their better investment may actually be to fund every candidate in Ohio, as opposed to giving Amy McGrath, I don't fault Amy McGrath, by the way, she was doing what she should do.

But the rest of us need to figure out how do we start changing that?

Well, this woman Michelle Hornish in Missouri has come up with a way to crowdfund every single candidate running in the state of Missouri for the statehouse, to give them enough money, not a hundred million, not 20,000, enough money so when they run in their district, even if it's gerrymandered, they can actually expose what the statehouse is doing.

That's a project that we're bringing to Ohio, called Blue Ohio, to do the same thing here.

I wanna do that in other states.

You know, a senator who I think is maybe most on point in all this stuff, although he is more focused on the judicial side, is Sheldon Whitehouse.

Sheldon Whitehouse is really good about some of the deeper attacks that are having democracy, and I'm sure he drives the other senators crazy, but he talks about it all the time.

But the problem is, the answer is, they're not enough because this entire state-based view of what's happening and what's going wrong is so in the weeds versus those of us, I think Democrats, especially, we're always looking for that next Barack Obama.

And we need to find that inspiring figure.

Bride and Jeff tell me if I'm wrong.

The Koch brothers could care less if the people you're dealing with could even give a speech.

They don't looking for drama.

They don't even need talent.

They just want people to fill those seats and do what they want.

So a lot of, to me, the answer is gonna be through really good institutions and organizations that we all have to lift up.

And Stacy happens to be both a really well-known political figure who's done that same type of work.

Thank you.

- [Woman] Our next question is a text question.

Besides voting democratic, What can a moderate non-Trump Republican do to help the situation?

- [David] Great question.

In Ohio, this is true every state, so much of the battle on democracy is through the attack on registered voters.

Maybe the most eye-opening data point in my book that I didn't realize until I did the research, and Elena, you're gonna like this, but it's also gonna be painful.

And I mentioned this to Hillary Clinton, she was nice enough to put me on her podcast.

Hillary Clinton won Cuyahoga County with a greater percentage of registered voters than Barack Obama.

Did you know that?

Because the word is, "Oh, she didn't do as well."

She had a higher percentage of registered voters.

Biden had a higher percentage of registered voters than Hillary Clinton in Cuyahoga County.

But her margin of victory was 50,000 votes less than Barack Obama's and Biden was even less than hers.

Why?

Because they'd purged so many of your voters.

The purging of hundreds of thousands of your voters from '11 on crushed the Obama coalition.

And make no mistake, everything from '11 on was to crush the coalition that had gotten Obama the White House but also had knocked them out of the statehouse.

Kathleen Clyde was the best person to explain this to me.

I quote her in my book.

They weren't just mad that Obama won.

That Obama coalition was a threat to their power in the statehouse.

They lost the statehouse in '08 and they weren't gonna let it happen again so they gerrymandered and they did purging.

So to your question, in Ohio, the single best thing I think people can do is register people, especially the people who are being repeatedly targeted because they're part of that Obama coalition that crushed us in places like Cuyahoga County.

If you're stuck, I mean, Hillary did better here and had a worse result.

Think of what an uphill battle that becomes.

And that's because of relentless purging.

So I would say the best thing for someone who is more up in the air on who to vote for is think about your footprint in this world and think about every single way that your footprint could be used to lift democracy.

And that starts with, again, are you on the board of a homeless shelter, a food bank?

Do you run a business?

You know, Kim Thomas isn't here today, Kim did an amazing job organizing hair salons all over the city a couple years.

I'm writing another book, she's in my book.

Everyone has a footprint.

It impacts democracy more than you might imagine.

One example, what's the most powerful way that people are registered generally in America?

The Bureau Motor Vehicles.

Why?

Because people show up there for some other reason.

So what are you doing in life that you're interacting with people for some other reason that you could quickly say, "I'm gonna add voter registration to that interaction."

Your mayor, and I've talked about this and if you know the mayor, let's talk to him about this.

Akron too.

And look, again, I'm not pointing fingers.

I was a city council member.

I did not think about this.

Every rec center, library, health clinic.

I believe, and this would be a little more aggressive, but I would do it if I was on the city council now, every nonprofit that gets money from the City of Cleveland should have in its mission "we lift democracy" and everyone who walks into that nonprofit, let's say it's helping ex-offenders, it's dealing with people who have mental health challenges, every one of them should have at the final part of their sign in, "Are you registered?

If you're not, here's the paperwork."

Why?

Because it's the right thing to do.

But also because these are the people being purged.

LaRose is purging these people every day.

And if you're the City of Cleveland or Cuyahoga County, you should be horrified that there were 300,000 fewer voters from your community eight years after Obama won.

Not just because of the outcome, but because your voice is smaller.

If you're a mayor, you want maximum census count, right?

Well you also want your voice heard in elections.

So if you know the mayor, whether you're a moderate Republican or Democrat, ask the mayor, every public facing, and we should work on this, Brad, I know you're doing this stuff a lot, every public facing service that the City of Cleveland provides should include in its mission and its staff should be trained, "Oh, have you moved?

Have you re-registered?

Are you registered?

Oh, you're not?

Here you go."

And then come the last couple months, "Have you early voted yet?

Oh you haven't?

You want to?

Here's the paperwork."

We have to bring into the bloodstream of everything we do.

This goes back to the scale.

If we wait for Stacy, she'll do something great.

But if you really wanna do it powerfully, put it in the bloodstream of everything we all do every single day and be lifting it all the time.

Hillary Clinton, by the way, one other thing on Hillary Clinton, almost her entire field operation was trying to find those unregistered voters and re-register them, right?

I mean, we saw that and it still was hundreds of thousands short.

In the meantime, she wasn't doing the other things she needed to do.

So if you leave it to campaigns, it's too late and there aren't the resources to do everything else you do to win a campaign.

We have to bring it into every single thing we do all the time, in cycle, out of cycle, December after the election as much as October before the election.

Next question.

- David, in the primary elections that recently held, the Democratic party got the least amount of people who voted for the Democratic candidates.

And I think it's because there was too much turmoil and excitement going on in the Republican party.

And therefore, so the problem is that people are not used to voting for every single election.

They only want to go to some exciting elections and that's what Obama's election was all about.

- [David] Right.

- But when you have the Supreme Court of Ohio say five times that what the Republicans did is wrong and no consequences, when we have the Supreme Court of Ohio say public school funding is wrong, it needs to be corrected, and nothing changes.

- [David] Yeah.

- We continuously accept the reality that our voice is never heard.

- [David] Yeah.

- If you want to have a gun, and the statehouse and the governor wants to have free-for-all guns, then they should be allowed to carry a gun into the Statehouse and the governor's mansion.

Tomorrow, that thing will be shut down automatically.

But if you are for it, then you should be for in your own house.

So those are my thoughts.

- [David] Yeah.

I think we have a massive accountability crisis in our country.

January 6th on down.

But I do think we have a mass, I mean, I'm not on the court, and I don't say this lightly.

And all this, by the way, I think those of that know, me, I'm kind of a calm, levelheaded, normal person.

So I don't even like sounding this alarmist, but I am, and this is gonna sound very alarming.

If the law breakers that Bride and Jeff are stuck with get away with violating the constitution of this state five times, 70% of the people's will just ignored, if they get away with that, if we are all stuck living in a map of districts that this supreme court found to be unconstitutional for the next two years, I don't think we have a rule of law in Ohio, do you?

It's just gone.

It's just gone.

(audience applauding) And I do believe that, I hope the Ohio Supreme Court sees that that's the result.

It would be gone.

By the way, the other thing, the federal decision on this, it's more rogue than Bush v. Gore.

It's a horrible decision.

I'm horrified partly because one of the people who wrote that opinion clerked for Nathaniel Jones like I did, which is a horrible, you know, Nathaniel Jones, one of the great civil rights heroes of this country and our state and that one of his law clerks, and the other law clerk, by the way, was a Ginsburg clerk.

And they wrote an opinion that basically said "We don't care what the Ohio Supreme Court says.

We're gonna impose a map that's unconstitutional."

I mean, again, that's the end of the rule of law.

And I hope that the Ohio Supreme Court says we cannot let that happen.

And they have a couple weeks left.

Because if they do, even two years, I'm not living in an unconstitutional world for two years.

Are you?

I mean, that's what we'll be in is a two-year constitutional crisis.

So, I've talked to Jeff about this.

We need to bring accountability back into politics.

One, run in every district and give 'em hell in every district.

If they voted for this map, even if you're gonna lose 70-30, every single day of your entire campaign, tell everyone about it.

Because when you don't run, they get away with it and no one even knows.

So there needs to be political accountability, but there does need to be legal accountability.

And right now there is a law in the state of Ohio, dereliction of duty is a crime in Ohio.

And you commit it if you refuse to do a duty you were supposed to do.

Well, that's the redistricting commission.

There, if you read what the law says, they're in violation of it right now.

Someone should go after them for that.

This isn't just a political disagreement.

They're breaking the law in front of all of us.

And I worry that, I go through this in the book, the lack of accountability that they are experiencing is catnip to keep going and going and going.

And they've done it in Ohio since 2011.

How many times did they try and fail to get rid of Golden Week?

They did it twice, on the third time they succeeded, but they kept going because there was never accountability that they broke the law the first two times.

Again, the term in my book "Laboratories of Autocracy," this is not a cute title, okay?

It's what they're doing.

They are operating, they're always learning from what they're doing and the lack of accountability means they can try a second time, a third time, a fourth time.

If someone in another state does it well, then they do it here.

They literally are operating in that very way.

And so the lack of accountability is, to me, a crisis that it allows them to keep going and going and going.

And again, we don't hold them accountable back on the election day because we don't even challenge them.

And we also, I think, are too passive.

And again, if any of this sounds over the top, I'm talking mainly as a lawyer.

You read the statute that describes dereliction of duty, just read it, or misconduct in office, read it.

It's what Matt Huffman has been doing for a year.

It's literally he's not fulfilling a duty that he is supposed to be fulfilling.

I don't know what to say about someone who's violated the constitution five times and thought about how he was gonna do that for the last year.

That is literally, clearly misconduct in office.

So we have to start, whether it's Merrick Garland or in Ohio, using levers of accountability that we have, or the problem gets worse.

On turnout, there are different reasons for that.

Obviously their primary had a lot more attention.

I do think parties, and I came to this through a painful couple years, I think parties should stay out of primaries because I think the energy around the different candidates does create more of a turnout.

You know, I stayed out of Cordray.

I've known Cordray for years.

I said, "Rich, if they seek an endorsement, I will resign if they endorse you."

I'm so against it because I think it crushes that process.

And once you endorse, it takes the oxygen out of that.

And the opposite of endorsing is to say, "Let's have debates all over the state."

You know we, with Cordray and Kucinich and Joe Schiavoni, we had debates all over Ohio.

We had forums all over Ohio.

We made it something.

We had TV covering it.

We had debates, right Dan?

You like debates.

The Cordray primary turnout was a lot higher.

And I think that the effort to close down that debate, although short term it may work, you spend less money and all that, I do think that actually people are less aware of what's going on than if you actually have people, you know, again, are you for democracy or not?

If you're for democracy, well, you actually want to have that primary also feel small D democratic.

Now, they left the primary open in the governor's race, which was smart.

But I think overall, the more a party says even beyond staying neutral, "We're gonna make some noise about this primary.

We're gonna go to every media market and go to town."

You know, we had a primary, our first primary debate was back when Nan was running into Betty Sutton, we were in Martin's Ferry.

I dunno if any of you went down for that.

We had three straight days of media coverage in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, because we chose to have a debate there.

The media was all, "Why'd you pick Martin's Ferry?

Why did you do that?"

So I think that part of it is you have to make some more noise about these things than sometimes parties want to do.

Thank you all very much.

I'm getting my hook.

Appreciate it.

(audience applauding) - Thank you David Pepper for joining us here today at the City Club.

Today's forum is part of our "Authors in Conversation" series in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the John P. Murphy Foundation.

We would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the American Constitution Society.

Thank you all for being here with us today.

Next week, we will continue our "Authors in Conversation" series with Jeffrey Nussbaum, former senior speech writer for President Joe Biden and author of the newly released book "Undelivered: the Never Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History."

Tickets are still available for this forum and you can purchase tickets and learn more at cityclub.org.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you, David Pepper.

And thank you members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, and this forum is now adjourned.

(audience applauding) (bell ringing) (urgent electronic music) - [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

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