(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (bubbles pop) - Hello and welcome to "The Journal", I'm Steve Kendall.

Has Ohio's political landscape changed after the August special election?

If it has, how, and how will that impact the state and national politics in the state?

Joining us to talk about that are two members of the Bowling Green State University Department of Political Science, Dr. David Jackson and Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes.

Welcome to "The Journal".

August 8th, obviously, incredibly promoted election in August, which of course, no one thought we were ever going to have another August ballot issue.

Dr. Kalaf-Hughes, is that a one-time thing?

Is there any thought that maybe that has changed the landscape in Ohio in terms of maybe other issues and maybe the way we vote for U.S. Senate or governor, or anything like that?

Or is this unique to that August election?

- Well, I think the coalition is a little bit unique, but I think to understand how people voted, we have to back up to understand kind of why we ended up with this August election in the first place.

So at the end of last year, right, the legislature decided we were not going to have August elections.

Typically, the turnout is really low, they're tremendously expensive.

Fast-forward to the beginning of 2023, legislators were looking for a way, essentially, to reduce citizens' ability to engage in direct democracy, to reduce the ability of the average Ohio resident to weigh in on issues.

And you get that when the average Ohio voter is out of step with the legislature.

In our case right now, the Ohio legislature is much further to the right than the average Ohioan.

And so if they're looking to retain that control, they need to take it away from the citizens.

This issue was primarily focused on preventing November ballot initiatives around abortion, and then preventing future ballot initiatives around gerrymandering in Ohio.

And so you ended up with kind of an interesting coalition of people who were interested in both the policy areas in question and those who were interested in just preserving their right to have a voice.

- Yeah, and one of the things that flew under the radar, there was the 60/40 situation with regard to approving constitutional amendment, but below that, was even as you said, getting a citizen's initiative on the ballot.

That language was in there too, that seemingly made it more difficult.

Right now, it's 44 counties, a certain number of signatures; you would have to get 5% signatures from every county in the state.

And yet that was promoted, it seemed, by the one side as, "Well, that'll be less expensive.

That takes the big money out of it."

And the other side said, "Well, wait a minute.

We got to go to all 88 counties.

That's not going to be less expensive."

But that sort of flew underneath the radar a little bit.

But for the people who came together in that coalition, that was as important as the fact that we might, obviously we've got a reproductive rights issue on the ballot now, a constitutional amendment coming up in November.

Dr. Jackson, is that your take on it too?

Or how, what's your thought on that?

- Well, sure, everything that happens in politics is meaningful.

So even if it wasn't a surprise that Issue 1 was defeated, the fact of the matter is it was defeated.

And so no political party, and this was strongly divided along partisan and ideological lines, wants to lose an election, even if it wasn't, you know, as big a surprise as losing some elections can be.

So, you know, the facts on the ground do have an impact.

And so losing is always, you know, the thing one doesn't want to do.

It was an interesting coalition that came together in opposition to Issue 1, because it was bipartisan.

I mean, you had former Attorney General Betty Montgomery, very much front-and-center making a policy-based argument against it.

The speeches that she gave were not particularly sort of rah-rah speeches, but they were speeches where she would repeat the phrase, this is "bad public policy".

And not just because of the 60/40 threshold, as you pointed out, but also because of the requirement to go to all 88 counties and then a number of other problems, including doing away with the curing period, so that one couldn't, if one was a little short on the signatures, have a short amount of time to get them.

Every signature that gets turned in is not automatically accepted.

- [Steve] Right, yeah.

- And then also, you know, coming out of this is the question of the concept of protecting the constitution.

And we see with the two issues that are going to be on the ballot in November, one is a constitutional amendment and one is a statutory change.

And there has already been discussion in the press through interviews with leaders in the legislature on the one that's just a statutory change, that if they wanted to, they could overturn the vote in the legislature the very next day.

So it isn't as if the people who have been using constitutional amendments to promote the public policy preferences they have, have been doing that for arbitrary or capricious reasons.

They do it because changing the constitution takes it out of the hands of the legislature, whereas a statutory amendment doesn't.

- Yeah, it's still open to, yeah, it can be changed.

And I know that one of the, when you looked at the people that were, the coalition that was in support of it, I looked at some of the names and I had Theresa Gavarone on to talk about that, and it was an interesting group of people.

'Cause it was the Restaurant Association, it was the Pork Producers.

It was an interesting group.

And obviously one of the arguments was, "Well, if we make it so easy to change the constitution, well we can have, there's going to be all these other issues come up that 51% can rule on."

And obviously some of those groups were uncomfortable with that.

Minimum wage law comes up a lot.

That was one that I think it was, well, you know, you could get a constitutional amendment that said the minimum wage will now be this in Ohio.

But it is interesting though, because people are going to be, I think, probably a little confused about the fact that we have a constitutional amendment and as you said, Dr. Jackson, a statutory change there, which can then be overturned that way.

And I think, you know, Dr. Kalaf-Hughes, you talked about the fact too that democracy is a delicate thing.

And this seemed to some people to remove, to further distance us from "one person, one vote", direct voting on things, that sort of thing.

And that seemed to be a part of why people were upset with this as well.

- I think so, and I think when you look at what all the data suggest around initiatives broadly in states that have this process, it is much harder to get a yes vote, because typically the no is the status quo.

And so if you're fine with the status quo, you're going to vote no without having to do that, kind of figuring out and untangling some of these challenging issues.

And I think getting, I think that's what, you know, you get these campaigns that really have to explain to voters, and I think we lose some of that if we're in this really complicated environment of this initiative process.

- Right, and one of the things, you know, because I know years ago, they would write ballot issues that almost drives you to vote the opposite of what you thought.

They made them really unclear.

They've done a little better now about not allowing that to happen.

Because even this one was a little confusing.

And I remember talking with people and they'd say, "Well, you could look at it and say, 'If you vote no, it stays the same.

If you vote yes, you change this new system.'"

And that's a way oversimplification of what was going on, but that was the reality at that level.

And for a lot of people, it seemed that was, it was confusing.

People would come in and look at the ballot issue, documents laid out on the table in whatever precinct they went in, and spend time looking at them trying to figure out what does this all mean?

And the advertising for it was charged, shall we say, in both directions, in terms of what it was about.

But it just seemed as if it was, as you may have said too, that the legislature may have overreached compared to what they thought the average Ohioan was really for in this case.

So when we come back, we can talk a little bit more with that.

And then obviously, we do have these two issues that are going to come on the ballot.

There'll be another Issue 1 on the ballot, because that's how we do it in Ohio.

We'll come back in just a moment with Dr. David Jackson and Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes here on "The Journal".

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

Our guests are Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes from the Political Science Department at Bowling Green State University, and Dr. David Jackson, also from BGSU.

Ballot language.

And we know that that's, because it goes through a number of manipulations and rewrites and all sorts of things, but the way things are worded that get on the ballot sometimes can confuse people.

And sometimes, I think some people feel it's intentional that they do that.

Now, supposedly Ohio's written things into place that don't allow that to be as blatant, but there's still confusion when it comes to ballot issues, not just in Ohio, but in states all over the country.

You think you're voting one way, and you're actually getting an outcome the opposite of what you thought you were going to vote for.

So, yeah.

- And a lot of that's actually by design.

You see the same thing in terms of ballot language.

And Ohio is not unique in this; this happens everywhere.

And you see the same thing in terms of advertising.

- [Steve] Right, oh, yeah.

- And so you have two kind of separate areas where people are going to get their information from: one, if they're actually reading the ballot language, and the other, all of the campaign materials they have.

And they're all going to sound like they're saying something slightly different, because they are.

- [Steve] Right.

- Most people are not going to take the time to read the ballot language or the- - [Steve] The actual script, or the actual text.

- Yes, the full thing in its entirety, its many pages.

And in fact, Ohio now, there is a group of people actually trying to get that full text on the ballot, because the argument is what has come out for the for one of the abortion amendments is so confusing by design.

They've changed language, they've removed things.

And the people who are the bipartisan committee, though it was a majority, one-way, that is responsible for writing that, it was not a bipartisan decision, are people who have actively campaigned against it and actively supported August's Issue 1.

So you don't have nonpartisan players in crafting this language.

It's crafted in a way to convince people to vote for or against these initiatives.

- Yeah, and you both made a good point that when you look at advertising, obviously there is no requirement that it even be close to being the truth.

That's just how that is.

And if you were looking at Issue 1 in August, you weren't sure of what exactly...

It became almost like a campaign of like, "Here's what will happen in the future unless you vote yes here."

And it was a range of things that were meant to scare people into voting yes, it seemed like, at least from some people's opinions.

And yet that was the game.

The other side basically, you know, the no side said, "Look, this is what it does.

You know, it takes away 'one person, one vote', it does this, it does this, does this."

And the other side is like, "Well, but if, you know, if we let you willy-nilly change the Ohio Constitution just on a whim," which data shows doesn't happen anyway, that that was the tactic, was to say, "Well, it's really not about, you know, reproductive rights.

It's not about abortion, it's about making it way too easy to amend the Ohio Constitution."

Yet we've been doing it for, you know, more than 100 years, and the state's still here, it seems, has survived all of the crazy stuff that apparently some people were saying was going to be on as a constitutional amendment.

How, is there any way to like clarify that for people?

'Cause obviously, as you said, Dr. Kalaf-Hughes, you've got advertising, you've got the actual text, and sometimes even the text is more confusing than the advertising.

So I don't know, when you look at that, Dr. Jackson, is there any way that that will ever be, we can ever find a balance there?

A clarification where people can understand really what they're voting on to the degree that we would like them to be able to?

- Well, a couple different points about that.

I mean, we talk a lot in political science about, you know, how well-informed voters are, you know, what the median voter really knows about what's going on.

And I think some of it is accurate and some of it's misplaced or misguided in the sense that we sometimes underestimate how much voters know about some things.

And we might, by that, I mean not necessarily if you give them a quiz on the facts of a particular issue, they wouldn't do particularly well, but in terms of sort of a general level of common sense, people know when gamesmanship is happening and when tricks are being played.

And some people in fact get tricked and get played, and, you know, that does in fact happen, or the people who do it wouldn't keep doing it.

But I do have a fair amount of faith in the common sense of voters to see through that.

The other thing, as we look at what's been happening in Ohio politics, a colleague of mine named Dominic Wells and I have been doing a lot of work on the political divergence between the states of Michigan and Ohio since 2016, when both states voted for Donald Trump.

Things have gone radically different in each of those places.

And we are almost experiencing what we never see in political science, which is sort of a natural experiment in real time to see if the ideas we have are correct.

(laughs) And it's kind of risky because we have to keep modifying the project as we move along.

- [Steve] Sure.

- But we would have predicted that Issue 1 would go down to defeat, you know, as it did.

Our, you know, we don't have a model per se, but based on the evidence that we have about the ideological, partisan and demographic similarities between the states of Michigan and Ohio, were we to make a prediction, and we're not, because whenever I do it, I get them wrong.

(group laughs) - [Steve] Okay.

- But were we to make a prediction, the tendency would be to say that both issues in November are likely to pass, just based on what we know about those kinds of issues, social issues drawing out newer voters, younger voters, and just based on the survey evidence that we're seeing as well, there's plenty of reason to believe that Michigan and Ohio should not be diverging as much as they are.

And that given that, and given the survey evidence, which is scant so far, but there's some out there on the two issues coming up, that we would, if we were to make a prediction, which we're not (laughs)- - Which we're not, but!

- Might predict that they could possibly pass.

- Could possibly pass.

Well, you know, it's interesting, because the polling that came out before Issue 1, the August ballot initiative, or ballot, was, it showed that it was going to lose.

And yet overwhelmingly, you would see a lot, so much advertising.

I know that the no side outspent the yes side by a fair margin.

And of course, one of the arguments as to why we had to change the constitutional situation was 'cause big money would come in and roll over Ohio.

Which speaks to what you just said, that as if Ohioans wouldn't be smart enough to go, "Oh, wait a minute."

You know, like they, as you said, the common sense factor, like it almost felt like you were undermining the individual, saying, "We can't trust the voters of Ohio to be able to sort this out, so we're going to protect you by not allowing big money."

And which we know of course is a fantasy, that there will always be big money in politics, at least the way it's constructed right now.

But it spoke to what you said, that common sense was sort of like, "Well, we can't trust the average voter to really know what they're talking about," which seemed kind of condescending in a way, but okay.

- Until the polling on that.

So there was I think a Suffolk University poll and then there was an Ohio Northern University poll.

- [Steve] Right.

- And it was interesting how they came out because they were framed very differently.

But I want to say something in favor of political science polling, because both of those polls did a very good job at predicting that election, with the poll that was from outside Ohio, nailing it in terms of where the no vote would be, and the Ohio Northern University poll nailing exactly almost where the yes vote came in.

- Wow.

- They asked very different questions.

One was the actual ballot question; the Ohio Northern poll was more the concept.

So that would explain the reason why there were different results, but they both did a very good job.

- Yeah, and that, so it speaks to the fact that, you know, yeah, they were accurate in the... Yeah, even though the methodology was different, the questions were different, the outcome was still, they achieved the same sort of outcome.

That's interesting, because sometimes you ask different questions, you get different responses, so yeah.

We've got just a moment.

We'll come back and talk a little bit more about this and then obviously too, impact going downstream, because obviously we've got a U.S. Senate race coming up, we've got presidential stuff, although it seems like the election's going to be this November given the way all of the hype and everything that's going on, but it's actually, it's November '24.

So we can talk about that, whether or not what we're seeing, the coalitions that came together on both sides will hang together for that, and will that change how things work in Ohio?

Back in just a moment, here on "The Journal".

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

Our guests are Dr. David Jackson and Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes.

August 8th, Issue 1, lots of storm and fury and noise and activity.

Are we done with the efforts to change the way we get constitutional amendments on the ballot?

Is it settled now, and we're not, no one's going to come back and say, "Now let's try this again," modify it, tweak the edges, come up with a different piece of legislation or different ballot language they think will maybe get a yes vote the next time?

- Yeah, we're not done.

- [Steve] Ah, okay.

- They're going to keep going, both in Ohio and in other states.

And so you've seen other states pick this up kind of as like a model piece of legislation.

Missouri either has it coming on the ballot or they're discussing it.

And their threshold, instead of 60%, they're moving it to 57% to see if they get more traction.

But Ohio is not done.

You're going to keep seeing the same people who supported this supporting similar legislation where they keep trying to kind of, for lack of a better word, pick at voter access and citizen access to this ability to amend the constitution.

And they're just going to keep kind of probably lowering it.

You'll also probably see them try to get something very similar on a November election, where they're going to think turnout would be a little bit better, where they may have a little bit longer to campaign.

They may tweak the language a little bit.

But I don't think that the people who supported Issue 1 are going to go quietly.

And so the people who opposed Issue 1 are going to need to continue- - To stay, in their mind, vigilant about what's going to happen.

- Yep.

- Because you know, early on we talked about the fact that there were Republican elected officials, you know, governors, attorneys general, all of that, who opposed Issue 1, and they were sort of, after the election, I know at least one of the people in support of it, one of the people in Columbus said, "Well, you know, we had people on our own side who weren't supportive of it.

And that's part of the problem."

Well, which was funny, because that would sort of speak to bipartisanship, but obviously, that wasn't comfortable.

Was what we saw there kind of a one-time thing though?

I know we talked about this a little bit earlier, but does this have longer legs for other issues?

I know you've talked about the two issues in November that it appears, and we're not making a prediction you said, that those are trending, we believe, toward passing.

Is that based on what we think this group did the last time in terms of how the vote separated out?

Is it going to be rural versus, you know, municipal or urban kind of things?

Or is that just sort of a one-time thing for us in August?

- Well, I mean, we're less than 60 days away from those elections in November, and we've yet to really see the campaigns fire up the way they're going to as the elections come closer.

And so a lot of money is going to be spent, and so a lot of things can change, of course, about where people land on those issues.

But you know, in some ways, sort of like the casino issue, and the states bordering Ohio did it first, and then the argument was made that we're losing money to these states, so we should do the same thing.

I've been seeing arguments being made on the marijuana legalization that says people are going up to Michigan, and tax dollars are not being collected in Ohio that could be collected, and you have dollars coming out.

And so you start seeing the nature of the campaign, the nature of the arguments being made that'll go beyond just the question of yes or no on marijuana, which is of course an interesting issue, because it cuts across party cleavages and ideological divides in different ways.

- [Steve] And demographic lines too, I would assume.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- And then at the same time, of course with, you know, reproductive rights on the ballot and then coming up in 2024, the question will be: Will Ohio get the kind of attention that Ohio was at one time accustomed to getting in terms of the presidential election?

And it's going to be a mixed bag, because there will be a ton of money coming in to back Sherrod Brown, but at the same time, the Democratic nominee for president, assuming that it's going to be President Biden, might not be spending any time or much money in the state.

- [Steve] In Ohio, yeah.

- But that may not be the best choice, because the presidential election and the Senate election are not completely separate entities.

And so, you can imagine a situation where Senator Brown would say, you don't want the Republican presidential nominee carrying Ohio by 10 points, because that just makes it mean that he has to get more people who are voting for the Republican presidential nominee to vote for him as well.

- [Steve] Right, right.

- And so.

It's such a cliché, but we live in interesting times, right?

- [Steve] Sure, sure.

- And so Ohio politics, despite, you know, a lot... See, I think that tension that we see in statewide stuff versus legislative stuff is in part because of issues like gerrymandering and the fact that the, as my colleague pointed out, the legislature is sort of ahead, or beside of, or in a different place ideologically than the median voter in Ohio is right now.

- Yeah, and when you look at that, and obviously, it's funny because we're talking about a 2024 presidential election, and admittedly, the campaign starts the day after the election's done in 2020 for all intents and purposes.

But Ohio for years, as we've talked about for many years, was a swing state, it was a 50/50 kind of thing.

It's trended opposite that recently, it's moved more red than blue.

And it's an interesting point you make though, that maybe President Biden will say, "Look, I'm not wasting any money or time in Ohio.

I'm not going to win there anyhow."

Which as you said, makes Sherrod Brown's job to get reelected more difficult, because obviously he's going to be targeted.

Control of he Senate is a major issue for both parties and every seat is going to count in an incredible fashion.

What kind of, when we, you know, have either of you thought about the kind of messaging we're going to see for the November issues that are on there?

Because obviously, we saw a lot of stuff for the August thing.

Now we're focused on exactly a particular, two particular issues, not a concept, not a broad, whatever sort of discussion about that.

The issue is, as you said, Dr. Jackson, though it appears to be that right now there is indications that both of them will pass, what would change that?

Is there anything that would change the dynamics there, if that's the case?

- I don't know if there's something that's going to change the dynamics, because I think both of these are, if you just look at the public opinion data, they're broadly popular.

And reproductive rights amendments tend to be broadly popular.

We've seen a lot of success nationwide with that.

We've seen a lot of higher turnout in states that have them on the ballot.

I think what you're going to see as far as a campaign, you're going to probably see people following like the Kansas playbook a little bit, in terms of the people who are opposing reproductive rights going for a "Value them both" argument, which was what they tried in Kansas.

It wasn't successful.

But I think you'll see a little bit of that, and I think you'll see a little bit of trying to link reproductive rights to completely unrelated issues, like parental choice and that kind of stuff, some LGBTQ issues and things that are not necessarily related specifically to what's on the ballot, but might get them more traction.

Because if you just look solely at the issue of access to reproductive healthcare, it is broadly popular.

- Right, right, and hence as you were talking about that, the discussion of, "Well, where can we find the sweet spot?

", say 55, 57, 56, whatever that number is for people who don't believe those are appropriate things to put into the constitution?

When you looked at Ohio with its presidential situation, do we think much will change in 2024 compared to 2020, or not?

I mean, it's obviously, we're way early and a lot of things can happen, because President Biden isn't, at least on the economy, but generally overall, not doing well in the polling.

And I know that polls are snapshots of a given point in time, but he's consistently been fighting an uphill battle with regard to getting positive numbers.

What will that mean?

I mean, Ohio obviously has voted for Donald Trump the last two elections.

The assumption is he will be the Republican nominee.

The assumption is that Biden will be the Democratic nominee.

Is there anything about that race that would look different this time, do you guys think, or not?

- There are things that could change, the natures... We talk about, you know, the word, the electorate, you know, is a complicated word in political science.

And lately, my colleague and I who are writing about this divergence have been using the word electorate to mean the people who actually show up to vote.

- [Steve] Vote, okay.

- Either on election day or in early voting.

And that's what's different between Ohio and Michigan right now.

That the overall populations are not that different in terms of ideology, partisanship, and demographics.

But who actually shows up is different, who's actually registered is different.

And Michigan has done a bunch of things to make registering easy.

It has same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration.

It has, you know, a nonpartisan citizens redistricting process which causes competitive elections, which one thing political science is pretty sure of, competitive elections have higher turnout.

- [Steve] Yep.

- And Ohio has done none of that, and is unlikely to get any of that done before November of 2024.

- [Steve] Before, yeah.

- So all of the things that could be done to change the nature of who actually shows up on election day are going to be done through the same processes that have been used in Ohio in the past.

So if you're doing the same thing you've done before, the safe thing to predict- - The outcome's probably going to be the same.

- The outcome will be the same.

Although I think just, you know, Ohio has been written off as a swing state too soon.

If somebody's willing to do the work that needs to be done, that could change.

But that's easy for me to say, because I don't have the money and the army of volunteers to do it, so.

(laughs) - Yeah, well we're going to, unfortunately we're going to have to leave it right there.

Thank you again for both coming on.

Obviously over the next year and a half, or year or so, we'll be talking more about obviously what's going to happen in November here in Ohio and then what's going to happen next November in Ohio.

'Cause obviously big impact in Ohio still, obviously with the Senate race, a very important seat that is going to be up in that timeframe as well.

So thank you so much for being here.

You can check us out at WBGU.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Good night, and good luck.

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