The Ohio Midterm Election

Tim Fulton 00:11Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. We are a weekly, Columbus-centric podcast focusing on the civics, lifestyle, entertainment, and people of our city. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. This week, at the risk of sounding like a broken record that you have heard before: voting is important. On the occasion of next week's midterm election, David DeWitt, the editor-in-chief of the Ohio Capital Journal, sat down with me to discuss how the political landscape has changed in the last two years, the Ohio Supreme Court races and the issues that will be decided as a result of them, the Ohio governor's race, and, of course, the US Senate race, and why it is so important to vote. You can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Also, the Confluence Cast is on Patreon. Find out how to support this podcast on our website, theconfluencecast.com, or at patreon.com/confluencecast. Enjoy the interview. Sitting down here virtually with David DeWitt, the editor-in-chief of the Ohio Capital Journal. David, how are you, sir?

David DeWitt 01:28I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Fulton 01:32Absolutely. Longtime listeners of the Confluence Cast will remember we talked about the state of Ohio politics in an in-person interview that happened to be — I just looked at my email — February 2020, with a slightly different tone at that time. Can you give, actually, to start, just a high level of where our politics are, and how have they changed, and how have they not changed, in that time?

David DeWitt 01:56Well, we've seen a lot. Starting in March 2020, we had COVID really gearing up here in the United States, and we started having our lockdowns. And we saw all of that play out. That summer was the George Floyd protests. And so we saw a variety of things happen. We saw attacks from the legislature on the governor's authority over emergencies. We saw attacks from the legislature on lockdowns, on vaccinations, on all of that stuff. We've also, in the last year and a couple of months, seen a whole redistricting process play out after the last US census, the redrawing of Ohio's maps for our statehouse and state senate, as well as our congressional delegation. All of that culminated in a battle with the Ohio Supreme Court. A bipartisan majority on the Ohio Supreme Court shot down every map that was proposed and passed by Republicans along party lines. So all of the maps ended up being declared unconstitutional, a total of, I think, seven times by the court, in seven different rounds. Eventually, a federal court forced the voters to use one of those partisan gerrymandered unconstitutional maps, and then the congressional case dragged on so long that we were forced to use those as well. So now we're looking at a November 8 election where Ohio voters will go to the polls and cast ballots in districts that have been declared unconstitutional by a bipartisan Supreme Court numerous times. And we're going to have a whole other redistricting process coming up next year, because these are only one-time shots, because this still hasn't been resolved. So between COVID, redistricting, battles over the health department and public health, and the economy that's taken wild undulations, there's been a lot happening since we last talked. It's a pretty exciting place these days, I guess. I don't know that it's explicitly different from other places, but certainly the redistricting has been a unique thing to watch play out. And along those lines, just to sort of skip ahead — we're talking today about the statewide issues that voters are going to be voting on. Those are specifically elections or re-elections of folks. That redistricting process is going to be addressed by a newly seated Ohio Supreme Court. Can you talk about, first of all, what's inherently going to change based on losing one of the justices and how they stood on things? And then where we stand with the three races that are coming for that? Yeah, absolutely. So right now you have a four-three Republican majority Ohio Supreme Court, where party affiliation was never listed on the ballot previously. What's happening now is Republican Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor is forced to retire due to age under the Ohio Revised Code. And so she has to step away. Maureen O'Connor has been the swing vote on the court, especially in these redistricting cases, but a number of other cases too. She has, in the redistricting cases, decided with the majority, with the Democrats on the court, to strike down these maps. Now she's going to be out because of this forced retirement. Running to replace her are two current justices, Jennifer Brunner, Democrat, and Republican Sharon Kennedy. And for the first time ever, their party affiliation will be listed on the ballot this year. That was a change that the legislature made for this election cycle and going forward. And so they're going to battle for the election as chief justice. If one of them loses, they'll just resume the spot that they already had on the court. And then you have two other Republican justices who are running for re-election. This is Pat DeWine and Patrick Fischer. And they're facing challenges from Democrats Terri Jamison and Marilyn Zayas, who are appellate court judges. And so, depending on what happens — if the Republicans, who are currently, according to a poll that came out today from Baldwin Wallace, the Ohio Pulse poll, all of the Republicans in these three races are leading by between seven and eight points. So seven points for Kennedy, eight points for Pat Fischer, and seven points for DeWine. And so what you could end up with is another four-three Republican-to-Democratic court, but this time without the swing vote, without Maureen O'Connor acting as a swing vote. And so it'll just be a hard-line four-three Republican Supreme Court if these polls are indicative of what happens on election day. And there are a lot of issues at stake with this, though. That's why the Supreme Court races are so huge. Not only is redistricting going to be coming to a head, but Ohio's current abortion ban, that's being challenged at Hamilton County Court, is most likely to make its way to the Ohio Supreme Court. And Ohio Republicans have been talking about making plans to do a full abortion ban, either in lame duck or early in 2023. That surely will be challenged and will make its way to the Ohio Supreme Court. And then just a whole slew of other laws, you know, really running the gamut through everything but the issues that really matter to Ohioans, according to the polling — gun violence prevention and gun laws, LGBTQ laws, all those laws that lawmakers are passing. And there's public health stuff too, as far as the governor and executive battle between the legislature on who really controls public health policy, that could also come before the court. So these three races have enormous consequence.

Tim Fulton 08:20And given that we're electing a governor, and then we're also electing a net-new senator, these races tend to not be as much in the spotlight, right?

David DeWitt 08:31Right. Yeah, the oxygen has really been taken out of the room by the Ryan-Vance battle to replace Rob Portman in the US Senate. And that's because it's the tightest race. Not only is it a very significant race as to the makeup of the US Senate, but that race has been polling in a dead heat, really within the margin of error, in almost every poll that's been run, with a margin of error that runs around 3.5 to four percentage points. So it's either Vance up by two or three, or Ryan up by two or three, in every poll. So that one's really tight. And most of the other races are not. I mentioned the Ohio Supreme Court races — there's, you know, seven, eight points, that's a solid lead outside of the margin of error. Mike DeWine has been consistently polling for reelection at, you know, 13, 14, 15 points. In this Baldwin Wallace poll, he was polling 17 points ahead. And it looks like he really has a big lead. He has this 33-point lead among independents over former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, his Democratic challenger. But Ryan also has a lead among independents by seven points. So you're gonna see some split-ticket voting, Ryan-DeWine voters.

Tim Fulton 09:57Right. Well, that doesn't feel that weird here, given that when Sherrod Brown was reelected, he was the only statewide — the only statewide Democrat on the ballot that won that night. It was, you know, not really a very fun party to be at.

David DeWitt 10:14Right. And there were actually two — they were not listed on the ballot as Democrats, but two of the Ohio Supreme Court races that year went to Democrats, Melody Stewart and Michael Donnelly. But they didn't have party affiliation. So that made it really about slate cards and who was informing their voters who to vote for. This year is party affiliation, so that changes the whole game of the Supreme Court races.

Tim Fulton 10:45Interesting. Can you dig a little bit into what's the sort of narrative around — I want to save Ryan-Vance for the end — but talk through what's the narrative around the governor's race? I'm thinking specifically about the fact that there hasn't been a debate, and the issues that each of the candidates are sort of bringing to the fore as issues that they're running on.

David DeWitt 11:10Yeah. So Mike DeWine is running mostly on his record, and he's pointing to his various initiatives as governor. A lot of the stuff that he's done administratively, what he would call his record of, you know, steady hand at the wheel, that type of stuff, playing into his incumbency advantage, which is where you get to distribute a lot of money to a lot of communities. Most of it's coming from ARPA, but, you know, he's doing these initiatives. And really, his goal right now, politically, because he has these 13, 14-point leads, is to just kind of keep his head down and not mess up. And that's why he doesn't really want to debate, because debates are all about getting clips and something going viral, you know, something newsworthy, and DeWine doesn't really want to make a lot of splashes right now. He wants to coast through the next two weeks. Whaley has shifted her messaging several times throughout the campaign, trying to see where she can make a dent. So she's gone after the public corruption stuff, the FirstEnergy bailout political bribery scandal, which has implicated the governor directly, but it's implicated a lot of people he's surrounded himself with, and people he's appointed, such as Sam Randazzo to one of Ohio's main utility regulators. So she's gone after that corruption stuff. And then after the Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case this summer, she's really been hammering him on the abortion rights issue, and the legislation that he's signed that has caused these really terrible, heartbreaking situations that we've reported on at the Ohio Capital Journal — women who wanted their pregnancies, going under these terrible conditions where they're forced to endure instead of getting medical treatment that they need. And then obviously child rape victims who have had to flee the state to get medical care. And so she's hammering him on that stuff. And she's also been hammering him a lot on his refusal to debate. 85% of Ohioans, or thereabouts, want debates, they support debates. So she's been calling him out a lot for not being willing to face the public and be accountable for the laws that he's signed and the things that he's done. Whether it's making an impact — his poll numbers have stayed pretty consistent. So I expect that he'll just continue to kind of go to friendly ice cream socials and, you know, shake hands, kiss babies, and, you know, ride it out.

Tim Fulton 14:04Well, and again, it's the power of the incumbency, right? Whereas, given that Rob Portman announced that he wasn't going to run again, I think, mid last year, and now we have two folks who are running for this empty seat on the United States Senate. What has been — and as you said, they're sort of polling within the margin of error, it also feels like there's a new story every day — can you give a lay of the land of where we are? First of all, for folks that just have no idea, background on the two candidates?

David DeWitt 14:36Yeah. Okay. So, Tim, Tim Ryan's a longtime Mahoning Valley congressman, US congressman. I don't want to mischaracterize his number of years, but it's been since the early 2000s that he's been in office there. He ran for president in the early part of the 2020 cycle. He's challenged Nancy Pelosi for speakership. He's kind of made some of those bigger splashes on the national stage. And other than that, he's just been, you know, the Mahoning Valley's congressman in Ohio, one of the bigger names in Ohio Democratic politics. He's been being encouraged to run statewide for a while. JD Vance, on the other hand, he made his name writing the book called Hillbilly Elegy, that people might be familiar with. A movie was made out of it more recently. And he went to Yale and wrote that book, he ended up moving out to Silicon Valley, becoming a venture capitalist for a while, falling in with Peter Thiel, apparently, and that crowd, came back to Ohio, decided to run for Senate, had Thiel's backing financially. Thiel is a billionaire tech executive. And he ended up, after getting a Donald Trump endorsement late in the primary, he ended up pulling the primary off in the spring. It was a big Republican field. The primary faced former treasurer Josh Mandel, among others, businessman Mike Gibbons, and others, but Vance ended up pulling it off narrowly in the end. And yeah, so that's kind of the background of both of them. As far as the pitches that they're making, it's been interesting. So Tim Ryan has really been leaning into — it's almost a page out of Sherrod Brown's book, with his own kind of twist on it. He's really trying to appeal to the, you know, the blue-collar Ohio everyman type of sensibility. He's making ads where he's saying, you know, culture wars, I'm not your guy. If you want to talk about American workers, this is what I think we need. He's taken on trade policy. He talks about China a lot, and trade policy, and looking out for Ohio workers. He talks a lot about how there's been electric vehicle investment in the Mahoning Valley, and that he's working on getting that done. And he's really trying to send a message of regeneration of these forgotten-about Midwestern areas. And that message — there was a good article that we ran today from ProPublica kind of talking about this stuff. National Democrats have been kind of doing this type of stuff with the Inflation Reduction Act, with some of the investments of the infrastructure bill and things like this. They are putting investments back into these regions and trying to build something. But the whole point of the ProPublica article was, is it too late? Is it too late for people like Tim Ryan to be able to win statewide in places like Ohio on the back of such investments? So, I think that, considering the fact that Tim Ryan has basically been going it alone — he does not have national support from national Democrats. On the other side, JD Vance has gotten nearly $38 million worth of ads paid for by Mitch McConnell. Tim Ryan has not had anything like that, although there is some late-game trickling in, like a $3 million ad buy here, $4 million ad buy there, by national Democratic groups, but not official ones. Anyway. The Vance campaign, meanwhile, has been focused a lot on immigration, he has been focused a lot on his views of why a lot of areas of Ohio have been kind of left behind. And he's had that support come in. And so at this point, the most notable thing about the fundraising is the outside spending.

Tim Fulton 19:12And where that influence is coming from. And basically, if this were a game of spending, JD Vance should be polling much better than he is.

David DeWitt 19:24Yeah, Tim's punching above his weight as far as that goes, because he's facing a lot of spending right now. So he's polling around even, and sometimes, you know, he has the advantage, sometimes Vance does. It is a real contest. And a lot of national Democrats have written Ohio off. They saw Trump win here twice by points. And frankly, you know, some of the things that I've read recently — I think Tim Ryan even said this — is they don't think that the demographics of Ohio are a Democratic advantage. They look at the population with college degrees, and they look at this suburban versus rural, and they look at those demographics, and it just sounds like they've written Ohio off. But a lot of people have been very impressed by Tim's message, the campaign that he's running. And you see it when you're talking to people, like just everyday people. Some of my moderate Republican family members are very impressed by Tim Ryan's ads. And so you can see where these split voters would come from.

Tim Fulton 20:50As a reporter taking sort of a 10,000-foot view, do you feel like you're just following a horse race? Or — obviously you're passionate about politics, right — but what's standing out to you right now as the important thing to look at?

David DeWitt 21:08The first thing — I mean, the whole idea that I have about being a reporter and a journalist is that we are here to provide citizens with the information they need to make informed, smart decisions come election time. And as a citizen of Ohio, these elections are actually far more important than the presidential, insofar as the state policy and law impacts your lives a lot more. And this year has a lot more on the ballot. It has races for not just governor statewide, but auditor, attorney general, secretary of state, which runs our elections, and treasurer, as well as the three Ohio Supreme Court races. So these elections — you know, 2018, 2022, 2026 next — these are elections that really control the direction that Ohio specifically is going in. And so I want, as a reporter, to provide the best information that people can have to make informed, responsible decisions for those elections. But the point that I would want to hammer home to listeners is, people have to know how critical these elections are, and they gotta go vote. It's great to vote yourself, but you really gotta tell your friends and family to vote too, because it's much more important and impactful than a lot of the other elections.

Tim Fulton 22:37Yeah, absolutely. David, I want to give you the opportunity — I don't know if we did it two and a half years ago, but I end most interviews by asking two questions. One, what do you think Columbus is doing well? And then the reverse of that, what do you think Columbus is not doing so well?

David DeWitt 22:56Columbus is an amazing food town. That's where I'm gonna go, it's one of my favorite things about Columbus. I travel a decent amount, and I am really impressed with Columbus's variety and quality of good dining, everything from, you know, little bakeries like Dan the Baker, whatever, to really good fancy restaurants, to just the mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall restaurants. There's a lot of good food in Columbus. It's a good foodie city.

Tim Fulton 23:31Excellent. And then what are we not doing so well?

David DeWitt 23:36Oh, we need rail. We need rail. If the city of Columbus is going to take up almost the entirety of Franklin County, you need to get people into and out of the city center easily. You look at a very similar city like Charlotte, North Carolina, and they have this cheap, easy passenger rail that takes you right into town and right out. If Columbus had — and there's an appetite for it, people want it and people will use it — if Columbus had good rail into and out of the city and around a little corridors in the city where you need it, it would be a game changer.

Tim Fulton 24:14There you go. David, thank you for your time.

David DeWitt 24:17Thank you, Tim. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Tim Fulton 24:31Thank you for listening to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. Again, you can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Please rate, subscribe, and share this episode of the Confluence Cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite political reporter. If you're interested in sponsoring the Confluence Cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info@theconfluencecast.com. Our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson, our producer is Philip Cogley, I'm your host, Tim Fulton. Have a great week.