The Republican wave swept through Ohio this week.

Who will be tapped to take over the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Vice President elect J.D.

Vance?

And for the first time in four decades, Cleveland public power rates are going up.

Ideas is next.

Hello and welcome to Ideas.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks for joining us.

Ohio has not been a bellwether for years.

It's Republican red.

And Tuesday, it got even redder.

The national Republican wave that swept through Ohio this week will mean two Republican U.S. senators from Ohio.

And the bid to end gerrymandering that favors Republicans in the state was trounced.

Who will Governor Mike DeWine tapped to replace U.S.

Senator J.D.

Vance as he ascend to the vice presidency?

There's no shortage of contenders.

A for profit venture capital firm has reached a deal to acquire summa health and customers of Cleveland Public Power will see their rates go up in 2025 and 2026 for the first time in 40 years.

Joining me to talk about the week's top news from ideastream Public Media deputy editors of News Stephanie Check.

Wolinski and Andrew Meyer in Columbus.

Statehouse News bureau chief Karen Kasler.

Let's get ready to roundtable.

The GOP turned in a dominant Election Day performance in Ohio, helping to return Donald Trump to the White House, where his vice president will be Ohio Senator J.D.

Vance and propelling businessman Bernie Merino into the U.S. Senate.

Karen, Huge win for Republicans.

I expect the rejoicing in Columbus.

Well, I mean, there is certainly some rejoicing, of course, among Republicans who supported Donald Trump, which was pretty much all of them.

And the like you said, the six one now on the Ohio Supreme Court.

And there's still some question about, I think, one congressional race where you've got Marcy Kaptur, who was the longest serving woman in the Ohio House, is very, very close, but so far winning over Derek Marron, who people who have followed the show for a long time, remember as being part of that whole speaker battle in the Ohio House not that long ago.

But I think the issue one defeat is interesting because it preserves the status quo.

And so the question then becomes, will any changes be made to redistricting?

Because there was a lot of frustration after the process went forward in 2021 and 2022, and we saw those seven rulings declaring maps unconstitutionally gerrymandered and even Governor Mike DeWine had said he wanted to pursue some changes to the redistricting process.

Whether that goes forward now is a question that I guess we're going to be watching to see if it if it does.

All right.

Well, let's dig into ISSUE one a little bit more now than the Supreme Court, as we said, is now 6 to 1 Republican at the time.

Those rulings were made that you talked about, there was a different level of commitment to party line or to philosophical or ideological line in that you had the chief Justice, Maureen O'Connor, who was a Republican, siding with the Democrats to say that these maps were out of line.

In fact, she was a driving force of issue one.

Now that doesn't exist.

Now you have what seem to be people who are pretty well in agreement.

It would seem unlikely that you'd get a map declared unconstitutional.

Now.

Well, you never want to predict what Supreme Court justices are going to do, but they did run under partizan labels and their elections were very close to the result that Donald Trump got at the top of the ticket.

So there's certainly the question about if these maps are drawn and appear to be really dumb, appear to be overly favoring Republicans, if there would be those kinds of rulings again.

Fortunately, we don't have to worry about that for a little while.

The primary and primary concern here with regard to the Ohio Supreme Court has been the cases that are going to come before it regarding last fall's issue one, the reproductive rights, an abortion Access Amendment, and how that and the current state laws on abortion square with each other.

Certainly, let's stick with this issue one and talk about why it failed.

House Minority Leader Allison Rousseau said it was all because of the language that Frank Leros wrote that she says was misleading.

Frank LaRose says that language pointed out specifically some things that were in the legislation that were very problematic.

So what about the purpose of that failing?

Have we heard from and I know we've interviewed a number of folks.

Is it because simply the language or is it because people were confused or is there just not an appetite for making a change?

Or maybe it was the Republican messaging on this because Republicans were very clear from Mike DeWine on down that issue one was a bad idea.

And so that seemed to track with the results here.

I mean, Trump won by 11.4 points and issue one lost by about seven and a half.

So, yes, there were some people who did not follow that Republican messaging.

But for the most part, that's that's a lot of what happened here.

Now, you could argue whether the language was politicized and certainly the folks who brought issue one forward said it was an it wasn't fair.

And there is something to the fact that the Ohio ballot board has been sued three times in the last year and a half over the language that they wrote for the ballot summary that those issues would have on before voters.

But, you know, this is what happened.

This is the result.

And I think a lot of it really was the messaging from Republicans on this.

I thought it was interesting.

I heard a last word that Jenny Hamill read yesterday on the sound of ideas from a voter who said, I'm for redistricting, I'm for gerrymandering reform and getting rid of gerrymandering.

But I voted no because the language was so convoluted.

And then she went on to say, listen, if you're going to have an amendment, you should at least be able to write it in a way that I can understand it.

And really what she was talking about was the summary language, which as Alison Russo says, wasn't written by the people who wrote the amendment.

It was written by Frank LaRose.

So interesting is the language did play a role.

I do know that it was look look at a full page or so on the on the ballot.

Yeah.

People are taking their time with that.

Yeah.

And certainly there are a lot of questions about that ballot language.

And there we heard from voters as well who were saying, I was confused.

I thought I was voting for issue one and for the change, but I ended up reading it and thinking that I should vote no.

That was arguably something that Republicans on the ballot board wanted to see.

They were opposed to issue one.

So that's that's a real concern here.

There's also the question about whether voters wanted an independent commission to decide redistricting.

Voters have shot that down twice before.

So this is the third time an independent commission has come forward and voters have said, no, that's not what we want to do.

I mean, I think there's universal acknowledgment that the current system did not work very well.

And the question then becomes, where do you go from there?

What do you do about that, if anything?

And Governor Mike DeWine, who agrees that there needs to be some change, had promised that if this goes down, he would support some other kind of measure.

He came out and talked about that this week that he would favor if the legislature were to put forward something not right now.

And it needs to be a cooling off period.

But at some point, some reform for the way district maps are drawn.

Yeah, And I mean, when you ask Ohioans if they favor gerrymandering, of course, most say they don't favor gerrymandering.

The question was, do they issue one, ban gerrymandering, as the yes folks said it would or would it ban gerrymandering as the know folks said it would?

You know, you had both sides trying to make that argument.

And I think that really led to some confusion here.

And so now I think there's a little bit of ballot fatigue, though, when it comes to the question of redistricting and trying to put that forward before voters.

Again, that's there's there's a lot of money and a lot of resources that are involved in putting ballot issues forward.

So I don't expect that necessarily.

But the legislature may act.

I don't know that it'll happen.

The lame duck.

I don't think it will.

Okay.

Let's talk about turnout.

So it was weird because there were lines that were reportedly so long.

There were people I heard from who said, I've never wait in line in my neighborhood.

And now I waited in line all this time to vote.

You had stories at the statehouse news bureau in Columbus, and so did we up here in Cleveland that the weekend before, in fact, Stephanie, you were out taking pictures that there were lines wrapped around the block.

So the thinking going into this was we would have robust turnout if not record turnout, and yet it lagged 2020.

What do we what are we seeing for that?

Is that is it possible?

I mean, there are some that are crying foul that says that can't possibly be true.

We see the numbers.

I really think we have to address that upfront, that there is a lot of comments on social media about that, something suspicious here.

These are the same things that we heard after the 2020 election.

And over and over, there were lawsuits, investigations, audits that showed that there was no widespread voter fraud in the system.

People weren't voting who shouldn't be voting.

Ballots weren't missing.

All these kinds of things.

We have to bring that forward that as far as we know, everything in the voting system has been secure.

And that's an important thing to consider.

But honestly, people did not turn out in the same numbers.

They turned out in 2020, we had just under 70% voter turnout.

And while you had some counties that had really low voter turnout, like Hog County, 64% in Lucas County near Toledo, 61%, you had other counties or suburban counties where they had higher voter turnout.

So but it's those those big counties where the turnout was low, that makes a huge difference.

Two of those big counties, Stephanie, were Franklin and Cuyahoga counties, and it was abysmal specifically in Cleveland.

So we did some work on that.

Why were voters not turning out?

Yeah, I mean, in a close election, you always you know, it's going to be a turnout grind.

And that's, you know, how campaigns win elections.

So on Election Day, we had Abby Marshall out.

We had a lot of people talking to voters, but we had Abby specifically looking for nonvoters.

And she talked to a couple of people.

A lot of folks said, you know, there they were.

They believe their vote didn't matter.

It wasn't really worth their time.

Some people were saying, you know, I have to work, I have transportation issues.

But a lot of people also said, you know, like I haven't voted in five in the past five years.

And but this particular, you know, they named an issue you really turned me on and I want to go out and vote for it.

So it was a mix.

But, you know, I think there was a lot of apathy At the end of the day.

There were some people who really thought that their vote didn't count, and that's why they were not headed out.

And I wonder if part of that is because Ohio, as we've said, Karen, is no longer a bellwether.

Right.

And so what we hear and what we report is that Ohio is going to go Trump We said something like 8%.

It went much higher than that.

So there are some that might look at it and say, well, what's it matter?

I'm in Ohio.

Oh, sure.

And that's part of the problem of being in a state that is dominated by one party or the other is you have the people who are in the party that's not in power feeling like they don't have a voice, that they why bother to stand in line.

And we did hear about long lines, especially early voting.

I mean, I went to the Franklin County Board of Elections.

I've gone there the last day of early voting every time for years now.

And I saw a line that I had never seen before.

It was incredible.

And early voting did get big numbers.

45% of those who voted in this election voted early, which is huge.

But then the Election Day turnout didn't follow up with that.

And I think maybe there were a lot of people who normally would have voted on election Day, who just voted early.

And then that explains why the voting on Election Day numbers weren't so great.

Denise Oh, go ahead.

Oh, I saw one more interesting thing that I thought was really telling.

Every Democratic county, the care carried by Senator Sherrod Brown, saw a decrease in turnout since 2020.

So that national narrative where you're talking about Ohio not being a bellwether, it affects those down ballot races where, you know, party, the party who may not be in power has, you know, feels like they have more of a chance.

Well, right now, you don't have the national campaign playing out here.

And so if you don't have your candidate for president in the state ten times, then that doesn't they don't bring up on stage the guy.

They also want to be the senator.

And so that certainly affects his ability, although he was not running really as a Democrat, you didn't see him at the DNC or affiliated with with the candidates?

I think he was trying to run a Sherrod Brown campaign, not a Democrat versus Republican campaign.

Right.

We got Denise sends us an email.

She says voter turnout in Cuyahoga County and overall overall was abysmal.

I'm glad you're discussing it because the Democratic Party in this county and state need to reconcile the decreased turnout, reevaluate their game plan for outreach and reassess messaging.

The leaders in Cuyahoga County, the Democratic Party, and the Ohio Democratic Party need to resign.

And he says and I know there's a lot of frustration amongst people, Andrew, and the Democratic Party throughout the state in these counties as well, particularly when you're a Democratic dominated county in a Republican dominated state.

The whole idea is turnout.

And when you have turnout, that's that abysmal, something is wrong.

And if you look back, I would say going back to even 2016 at this point, you've seen a real trend in terms of a lack of turnout in those major urban democratic core areas, and that has historically been the offset for the more Republican rural ex-urban areas.

It's just not the balance there anymore.

And you know what the person who emailed in says has some weight.

Where is the party at the county level On the Democrat side, where is the state Democratic Party coming in to help bolster the message?

You can lay a lot of blame on, Well, you know, Ohio is not a swing state anymore.

The Democrats nationally ran a lackluster campaign.

But where's the ground game?

That's the big one.

And let me add one other thing here, too.

I think there's been a lot of focus on registering voters and getting those new voters into the system and registered voters were up by more than 86,000 in this election.

But then ballots cast were down by more than 115,000.

So the effort to try to bring voters into the system there, the follow through of getting voters to the other step of actually casting ballots is an important step here.

I mean, we we said it all the time on the show that it's about turnout.

Everybody says that it really was.

I mean, that's that's what we saw.

We saw, you know, Trump got 2 million fewer votes this time around than he did in 2020.

Harris got 14 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020.

Turnout was really, really critical.

There were some bright spots for Democrats in Ohio.

Andrew, mainly Amelia Sykes of the 13th Congressional District.

Very tight race.

She prevailed.

And for now, Marcy Kaptur, as Karen had mentioned in the ninth, where she appears to have eked out a victory over Derek Marin, The former House member appears to have eked out, of course, the margin of votes there is less than half a percent, which means that automatically under state law, it's going to go to a recount.

But it looks like Marcy Kaptur, at least at this point, is going to hold on to it.

But what does it say when one of the few bright spots for Democrats is they held the line in terms of the number of delegates, the number of congressional representatives that they have in the delegation, five of 15.

Now, some of that can be attributed to the 2018 charter amendment, not coincidentally, was also called ISSUE one at the time.

We have a lot of issue ones in this state, but that was the one that designated that urban areas would no longer be split up among multiple congressional districts.

And that in some way has helped Democrats in terms of representation, those urban areas.

But in some ways, it's also reinforced gerrymandering in the state.

If you look down through the results for this year, you'll see that outside of those two districts, Captor's and Sykes, that whether it was Republican or Democrat, the margins were 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 4 to 1 for the winner.

Really no contest whatsoever.

And how do these House races here in Ohio shape the overall picture for control of the U.S. House?

I think it looks like it's going Republican, though it isn't called yet Senate for sure.

It's at least 53 Republican senators.

But what about the shape of the House?

On the House side, it is significant, specifically with the Sykes race, which Cook Political Report rated all along as one of the most competitive races in the entire country.

The margin between Democrats and Republicans in the current House is so close that only takes a handful of seats flipping and there are just enough of them in play currently still undecided that that's why we still don't know at this point if the next House is going to be a Republican majority again or a Democratic majority.

Karen, Governor Mike DeWine will appoint a replacement for J.D.

Vance.

They'll serve two years and then have to run, including in a primary in 2026 and then again for the seat for the full term in 2028.

So there's a lot of there's a lot of campaigning ahead.

He needs to pick somebody who wants to do all that.

That's one of the things he said that are part of his criteria.

Yeah, he needs to find somebody who can win that seat essentially and not only run in 2026, which is the special election, but then in 2028 for the full six year term.

And that takes a lot of money and it takes a specific kind of candidates.

And so I think the the names that I keep hearing popping up are Jane Timken, the former Ohio Republican Party chair who has ties to former President Trump.

He basically installed her as the party chair after he took office.

And then Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur from the Cincinnati area, he has run for president before he is close to Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, from what I understand, but also J.D.

Vance.

And he has a lot of money.

So I think that he really looks like somebody who could end up being the choice had apparently J.D.

Vance met with the governor yesterday.

And I'm sure that that was a topic of conversation.

I know Frank LaRose had run for that seat.

You mentioned Jane Timken, Matt Dolan, more moderate, but also ran for that seat and actually did better than than other candidates.

So there are a number of people that the governor could think about.

Right.

But Matt Dolan in particular, he's tried twice to win the Republican nomination and has failed, even though he was endorsed by DeWine.

This year.

So that seems like an unlikely choice.

And also Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted and Attorney General Dave Yost.

I think they're completely out of the mix because they've both said they want to run for governor.

And even Yost told my statehouse news bureau colleague Sara Donaldson on Tuesday night that if he were appointed, he wouldn't accept.

You know it.

Neither will I. I'm going to say that right now, and I will not, sir, and I will not accept the nomination.

The Health Assurance Transformation Corporation CATCo has signed a deal to buy Akron based Summa Health.

The for profit venture capital firm has agreed to pay $485 million to acquire assume regulatory approval is still required.

Andrew, What do we know about the terms of this deal and how to implant impact Schumer's sizable debt?

Well, part of the deal is the debt is going to go away.

I don't quite understand how they make $850 million just vanish in a puff of smoke, But they're going to do that to address concerns in the community.

And there have been a lot of concerns raised about a for profit coming in to acquire a nonprofit hospital.

They're going to create a charitable arm of it, basically to continue to serve the needs of the greater community, especially parts of the community that are traditionally underserved, unable to take advantage of health services.

So there's part of that.

There's a lot of big numbers thrown around here.

In addition to the debt going away, hundreds of million dollars put into that foundation, hundreds more into basic needs, transformative investments.

The head of Suma is applauding this.

The mayor says this is great what Katko is doing, and also making a commitment not to cut staff and cut programing for those who need it.

But the track record out there for for profits coming in and taking over system is not great.

Yeah, there's research from Harvard Business School that talked about private equity firms and what happens when they take over these things.

And again, there's there's different points of view on this.

But what did that study find?

It found that basically it's not advantageous.

The communities that are served by these nonprofit organizations, when for profits come in, services get cut.

And it primarily affects people who are most in need, those who can least afford them.

That's the bottom line.

Rising costs for patients, staff reductions, cutting services for low income populations and people of color.

Those are what the surveys have found.

We'll see what happens.

And some of it we're hearing, as you mentioned, is the mayor and and others who are excited about it because there is going to be some investment there.

There will be some investment.

Of course, I think a lot of us are looking to what's going on in another part of northeast Ohio with steward health systems having gone bankrupt, declared bankruptcy and left two hospitals in the Mahoning Valley sort of dangling.

And fortunately, we're seeing some resolution this week on that.

And two Canton police officers face reckless homicide charges in connection with the death of a man in their custody.

Andrew, let's talk first the circumstances that led to Tyson's death during that arrest.

Well, according to Canton police, Frank Tyson was fleeing the scene of an accident and officers caught up with him in an AMVETS, which is basically a bar, you would say, And they were struggling with him, according to police.

And in terms of trying to restrain him, one of the officers put Anita's back during that time.

Frank Tyson, according to reports, was saying he couldn't breathe.

Finally, body cam as he came to arrest body cam footage from one of the officers shows Tyson on the ground not moving for several minutes before officers then finally administer CPR.

So when they are originally when they were brought into court, we see that a number of officers are there to support them, 5050, some of them in an overflow room.

This has led to concerns by the lawyer for for the Tyson family that basically says that's intimidation.

Well, yeah.

And Bobby DeCarlo, who is the attorney for the family, who has represented other families, who's who have lost loved ones to police, was saying, look, the two officers who are involved with this weren't even in court.

And yet you had 50 officers packing the courtroom.

Ultimately, it led to the judge issuing a decorum order.

I don't know if many people have ever been in a courtroom, but generally judges run a very tight ship in a courtroom.

There's no bad behavior allowed.

It's frowned upon.

And the judge will throw the book at you very quickly.

So to go one step further and issue a decorum, preemptive a preemptive right decorum order, you better keep in your seat where the judge said if nobody is if there's somebody out there in the courtroom, it's not good with us, you can leave now.

And nobody left.

Cleveland public power will increase its rates in 2025 and 2026.

It's the first rate hike in 40 years.

Stephanie, why is CPP seeking these increased in rates?

Well, they say they're facing facing financial pressures and that they have been for a long time.

Specifically, they they say that their yearly debt payment has increased about $2 million or excuse me, it will starting next year.

And so they're looking at covering those costs.

They also want to make improvements to infrastructure and that sort of thing.

And customers are businesses and residences, some in Cleveland.

What will it mean for them in terms of their bill?

Well, there's a nominal increase of $4.85 on your monthly bill in 2025 and another $3.45 in 2026.

All told, after that, that'll come to about $100 a year.

Once you do all the math in 2026, about one dollars $58.50 annually in 2025.

Akron will hold a grand reopening celebration for Locke three Park on November 29th, the day after Thanksgiving.

What are we going to see now as a result of that?

Well, you're going to see a much nicer space.

It was really threadbare before it, but in addition to a nice lawn, you also have multiple performance spaces.

You're going to have a couple of ice skating rinks during the wintertime.

Also, it really knits well into the Ohio and Erie Towpath Trail, which runs right through it.

So the intent is not just to make it nice for summertime.

When the weather is nice, you want to be out there, but year round, use and I want to note the death of somebody many of you have never met and you may not even have heard his name yet.

Millions of you will know his voice.

Welcome.

You've got mail files done.

Goodbye.

That's the voice of Elwood Edwards, a professional announcer and former graphics and camera operator at WKYC TV three.

He also, as you just heard, became the voice of AOL.

And for those of a certain age, mine really the voice introducing us to the Internet and the home computer.

Edwards got the gig because his wife, who worked for a company that became AOL, suggested Elwood for the Voice voiceover work for its software.

The rest is history.

Edwards died Tuesday at the age of 74 in his home town in North Carolina.

And those words even became a movie.

Yes, right.

You've got mail.

You've got mail.

But that was it, man.

That was the and, you know, the sound that had to happen before you heard that?

Sure.

Sure.

When you dialed in.

It's it's it's amazing.

Everything comes back to 2014 for.

Yeah, it all comes back.

All roads lead to Cleveland.

Monday on the Sound of Ideas on 89 seven KSU, we'll hear veteran voices in honor of veterans Day.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you so much for watching.

And stay safe here.