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

I'm Steve Kendall.

Ohio's main primary featuring statewide races, congressional races, and Senate races is now in the books.

But there were some hotly contested races that went as planned, there were some that were a little bit of a surprise.

So, what does the political train look like, especially after the leaked Supreme Court abortion draft opinion?

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

Dr. Kalaf-Hughes, kind of an overview of what happened on May 3rd, because I say there were some things that went kind of according to Hoyle, a couple of surprises.

- I think one of the things that's kind of really interesting is that it was a smaller primary than normal because our state legislative races were not included, because we don't have those districts yet.

So, what you saw, you saw congressional primaries and you saw a gubernatorial primary, and then you saw a more hotly contested Republican Senate primary, but you did see a Democratic Senate primary as well.

And I think some of the more interesting things that came out of that were the Republican primaries on the congressional side, so locally, our ninth district, as well as the Republican Senate primary.

And there was a lot of discussions surrounding that about the role of Trump's endorsement of J.D.

Vance in that election.

And I think you could make an argument that you saw the Trump endorsement kind of play out in him getting the nomination.

I think also though he was really strategic in that, in that he waited till the very end.

And so, I think they were looking for someone who would be most competitive in November.

I think for the governor's race, DeWine came out ahead, as was expected.

- Yeah, and it's interesting because especially when we talk about the endorsement in the Senate race, because the advertising for that was almost all the ads were negative and especially J.D.

Vance, they had quotes of him in years past not saying the most favorable things about Donald Trump, and yet he still got the endorsement when the other ones were really working to get that.

I'm sure J.D.

Vance was too.

It was interesting though, because then J.D.

Vance moved from sort of middle of the pack to then becoming the number one or two contender and then eventually came out on top.

Dr. Jackson, you look at something like that with endorsements and things, a lot of times I think people say, "Well, endorsements don't really matter."

But as is usually a case, and I remember we talked about this back in 2016, we were on during the presidential election year, it just seems like Donald Trump, does things work out differently when he weighs in sometimes?

- Well, a lot of the research that I do focuses on the question of endorsements, - Particularly celebrity endorsements.

And Donald Trump in a sense is the ultimate celebrity endorsement.

And I think it's absolutely true that in the case of the Senate race, it really mattered that he jumped in late.

And it was interesting as well because it was a strategically interesting decision because he had to pick a candidate and he chose a candidate who had said absolutely negative things about him before.

And so, clearly it shows some strategic decision-making at his point, not to just go with his gut and go with the person that he thought was necessarily the most long-term, sincere Trump supporter, because if there's one thing J.D.

Vance is not (laughs) from all appearances, it is a long-term, sincere Trump backer.

But Trump gave him the endorsement anyway and gave it to him late.

And it had the effect then of it seems putting him over the top.

It seems then that he will have possibly, Vance will have learned his lesson about what's gonna work.

So, being anti-Trump didn't work, being pro-Trump did work.

It got him the endorsement and it got him the nomination, and now he owes him something.

And so, I think that that kind of exchange-based relationship is the way that the Trump organization operates.

We also, of course, had the congressional election.

- [Steve] Right.

- And here we saw an outsider win, but a very, very pro-Trump outsider win here in this district Republican nomination for a district that is currently, of course, held by Marcy Kaptur, a 40-year veteran of the U.S. House.

And her district has switched from being, I think something like plus-Democratic by about 16 points to being plus-Republican by about six points, which would probably place it in the toss-up category.

And so, that should be a really challenging election come November.

- Well, and it's interesting because on the Republican side of that, 'cause obviously nobody was running in the primary against Marcy Kaptur, a local state elected official moved to get into that district, and then in the end was not able to secure the nomination.

Do you think that does moving the people care about that really?

I know it's kind of an off-the-wall question, but to move into a district where you haven't lived and say, "Well, now I love being in this town now."

It's kinda like a rock band, "Hey, we're glad to be in Detroit tonight," when maybe they get the city right and maybe they don't.

But do people care about that in this time and now or not?

Or is that something, eh, it's minor?

- I think what that election turned out in part was questions like that related to authenticity, and also related to insider versus outsider.

The winning candidate was much more of an outsider candidate, much more of a long-term pro-Trump person.

Had even said, I believe at one point, that he didn't consider himself even a Republican.

And so, then Senator Gavarone with her campaign spent a lot of time and a lot of effort on social media promoting the fact that she had endorsements of local elected officials.

- Sure.

- And that might have been the exact opposite of the best strategy to pursue in an electorate that appears, based on the evidence of the election, to be supporting an outsider rather than an insider.

It almost was the same sort of mistake that Hillary Clinton made in 2016, but she couldn't help but make, because she was the consummate insider when there was an electorate looking for an outsider.

- Right.

Well, and I think when you look at that, and again, you mentioned this, Dr. Kalaf-Hughes, that you had, as we've seen, outsiders now.

Well, and I thought, well that's extreme, but Mike Gibbons kept saying, "I have never voted for a tax increase."

Well, he never held elective office, so he never had a chance to, but it sounded good.

And that is like, "I'm so far outside, I've never seen the state house," kind of approach.

But that seems to have, in this environment that we're in, seems to work in a lot of cases.

- I think so.

And I think the winning candidate also, while he was an outsider, he had made national news for some of his positions and some of his non-elected activities relating to supporting Trump and questions about QAnon and that kind of stuff.

So, not only was he an outsider, but he had said essentially all of the right things targeting a demographic that's looking for someone that's very outside politics.

- Right.

And I guess when you look at the difference now on the Democratic side, of course, in that race, there was no primary, but the same thing kind of played out a little bit on the Senate side too, where you had a little bit of surprise there, possibly as who got the nomination.

Although the candidate that won had been working for a long, long time to get her name out there.

And it seems to have paid off the two, the mayor of Dayton and the mayor of Cincinnati going at it.

But they were running sort of as a more positive campaign about themselves versus negative, which seemed to be, which we've talked about for years, seems to be the way a lot of elected officials go now, where candidates go negative, negative, negative.

Only Matt Dolan was saying, "The other people can argue and call each other names.

I'm gonna talk about Ohio."

And he finished third or four.

So, okay.

I don't know what that means, but it tells you, I guess, where we live right now.

- Well, the Democratic race for governor got a little negative at the end.

It was, I guess we could make a distinction in terms of personal attacks versus policy attacks.

And the attacks were definitely, the ones that I saw on television commercials, were based on differences of interpretation about the performance of each candidate's city.

And so, while the tone was negative, the tone wasn't personalistic and negative.

And I think that that's a distinction worth, it's more of a contrast ad, I would say, than a a bitterly personal negative attack ad.

- Okay.

When we come back, we'll talk more about the May 3rd primary and some of the other things that happened there as well.

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

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

Our guests are Nicole Kalaf-Hughes, an Associate Professor in Political Science at Bowling Green State University, and David Jackson, a Professor in Political Science here at BGSU.

We've been talking about the May 3rd primary, which, of course, it was almost surprising that we actually were able to hold a primary on some of these issues and races on May 3rd.

But we now have another primary scheduled, well, we believe for August 2nd, because the one thing we weren't able to vote on this time were the state legislative offices, the state Senate, the state House.

So, kind of explain a little bit how we got to this point, where Ohio's now faced with having two primaries, which, of course, will cost, I think I heard the Secretary of State say possibly $25 million to hold in August, which is, that's sort of real money to a lot of people.

So, yeah, talk a little bit about that.

- So, I think to understand this, we've gotta go back to when Ohio voters overwhelmingly passed support for kinda changing how we draw the lines and making it a little bit more bipartisan.

And so, I believe in 2015 and 2018, Ohio voters passed two constitutional amendments that added additional people to this redistricting commission that would be responsible for drawing the lines.

And the idea was to avoid the historical gerrymandering that Ohio has had in years past, which has been pretty bad, and get something that both parties can agree on, given that Ohio is not overwhelmingly kind of one party or the other.

And it was overwhelmingly popular, but we haven't redraw the line since then because the census happens every 10 years.

So, we did the census in 2020.

Now we have new demographic and population data and we can redraw the lines.

However, there was no real mechanism for enforcement in either of these amendments instead relying on legislators to do what the people wanted.

- [Steve] Do the right thing in other words.

- The people on the redistricting commission, which include elected officials at the state level.

And that didn't happen.

And so, essentially what came out was a heavily Republican-favored map that essentially would've given Republicans way more of a share of the state legislative seats than their percentage of the population.

It was declared unconstitutional by the courts.

It went back to the redistricting commission, it was declared unconstitutional again.

It went back to the redistricting commission, it was declared unconstitutional again.

And then including by a bipartisan judge panel on the Ohio Supreme Court.

And it was not in line with what the voters had wanted.

And essentially this dragged out for so long.

People were not able to campaign.

And we don't actually have districts quite yet as of kind of today that we'll be able to vote on.

And so, the question is, are we going to end up with districts that have been declared unconstitutional and not in line with what Ohio voters wanted in terms of an ungerrymandered bipartisan system?

Or are we going to end up with another 10 years or probably four years of very heavily gerrymandered districts?

- Right.

And when you look at that, obviously the intent of the citizens was to fix that problem.

And it's interesting you mentioned that there was no enforcement.

And of course, the assumption was that that would sort of work its way out.

That things would end up in the right place just by virtue of the people there.

But then again, the panel would, because of the way the elected officials worked out, the panel was, I think, five Republicans and two Democrats, which, and I guess if you look at it one hand, without one Ohio Supreme Court justice saying, "No, I don't like these maps," those were the first maps would've been the maps.

And somebody said we wouldn't be here, but that was sort of the idea was to correct that.

How do we see this playing out now?

Because obviously we're gonna have a primary, I believe on August 2nd, and we might be doing, as you said, with maps that have been all been said, are unconstitutional according to the Ohio Supreme Court.

- I think one thing that we're seeing here at a bigger level is the extent, and this has been something that political scientists have noted for the past few years, the extent to which our system relies on norms.

Norms of coming to testify when called to testify.

The norm of obeying the public's will, even if there isn't a strong enforcement mechanism.

You look back to say 2000, and there was the Bush versus Gore decision.

And after that decision came down, there were a lot of people who would've liked for Al Gore to rally his supporters to say the hell with the Supreme Court.

But he followed the norm that said once the court of last resort makes its decision, he stood up and said that he didn't like the decision, but he said he would abide by the decision.

And that was that.

I think we are in an era now where we've come to recognize that much of our system relies not on strict enforcement mechanisms and punishments, but on people willingly abiding by norms and rules.

And we've seen a lot of people in this current political era for the past five years or so reject the concept of obeying norms.

- Yeah, and I guess even when you see the way things happened on election day, back in 2020, where people were contesting the counting of the votes, who was counting, how they were counting, the machines, all of that, which in years past, there might have been a little of that after an election or during an election, but now that seems to be the norm almost, that we're gonna challenge every count, every mechanism of tabulation, Michigan right now is investigating tampering after the fact by third parties who weren't supposed to be looking at their machines, and yet they were given access by some local officials to do that.

So, it's like say, the norms have gone.

It's like the world turned upside down sort of thing.

- Yeah, we teach about the election of 1800 in our classes as being the revolution of 1800.

This crucially important election, where the Federalists went out and the Jeffersonian Republicans came in.

And of course, we also note that the election of 1800 was the first peaceful transition of power from one party to another in the U.S., and that was an important milestone in our system.

And then for 200 years after that, we had peaceful transitions of power.

And in 2020, we did not.

And it cannot be overestimated how destructive that absence of a transition, because now in order to receive the endorsement of the presidential candidate who lost in 2020, candidates for lower elective office have to say that he did not in fact lose.

And so, you talk about the world being turned upside down, that's the situation that we find ourselves in.

- And where does that head us then as we look at another election in 2024?

Because obviously people have long memories now about this, and both sides are gonna have long memories.

Where does that leave us?

As you said, if we're not going to follow what would have conventionally been the way we've done business politically in the United States, we're flipping things around now, what does that mean for us?

- It leaves us in a mess because this has huge trickle down effects in ways that we may not even think.

So, right, it goes beyond just saying, well, I don't think the winner actually won.

But even when you think about counting the Electoral College votes, the Electoral College votes depend, just the numbers depend on how we allocate the population and what the seats look like.

So, the census was hugely important in that way.

And so, kind of how we allocate everything on up really matters.

And if we all of a sudden start saying Congress is going to question the results of an election, which is not their place, or really any kind of history of that, it's people who are serving in Congress are going to matter.

And so, if our districts are right, you have the counts, you have people who are serving in Congress, and so, if our districts are not equitable and fair, that's going to affect everything coming down the pipeline.

And if we've lost all of the norms, none of this is built in with an enforcement mechanism.

And that's kind of always been discussed is well, we don't really have a key enforcement mechanism, but we rely on, as Dr. Jackson said, we rely on the norms.

Those are kind of gone.

- Yeah.

- And so, we don't really know what's going to happen.

And the presidential campaign cycle is long, and I'm assuming we'll be starting up over the next year.

And we don't know really what that is going to look like.

- Okay.

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

And then obviously there was a bombshell that dropped a day or two after the election, the revealing of a draft of a Supreme Court opinion that shakes a lot of things that 50 years of precedent that people on both sides are looking at now.

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

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

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

Dr. Kalaf-Hughes mentioned a little bit about how the congressional races actually mean a lot voting at the local level eventually works its way up to ultimate decisions at the federal level.

And one of those things is in the event of a discussion about you don't have a definitive winner of the presidency, or as we've seen multiple electoral groups coming from states, that has a lot of impact.

So, talk about the Electoral College, and what that really means as we move forward, given that we're sort of waltzing around a lot of conventions that we just took for granted for years.

- Well, sure.

The United States, being a federal Republic, we have chosen through the Constitution and the acceptance of the Constitution since its inception, not to elect the president directly.

The president is in fact, elected by 538 people, known as the Electoral College.

Most states, of course, have a winner-take-all election system to choose the electors.

A couple choose them by congressional district, and then choose the ones for the Senate statewide.

But the fact of the matter is states matter.

States are very, very significant.

One of our political parties has been very attentive to that fact, and that'd be the Republican party.

And one party has not been as attentive to that fact.

I don't think the Democratic Party has been as successful and committed at recognizing the importance of winning state elections and local elections.

Because who runs for state representative?

People who were county commissioners, people who were on city councils.

Who runs for Congress?

People who were in the state house and the state Senate.

Who runs for Senate?

People who are in Congress.

And so, that concept of a bench is really important as well.

And so, there's the possibility of all sorts of monkey wrenches and chaos being thrown into the electoral count in the 2024 presidential election.

And if that happens, I'm suspecting that not a lot of Americans are familiar with this little quirky aspect of our system, which is if no candidate for president gets a majority of the Electoral College, so that's 270 electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses the president, but they don't vote by all 435 voting members voting.

They vote by state delegation.

So, there'd be a total of 50 votes total for president.

And so, it's really possibly going to matter deeply how many of those delegations are Democratic-controlled and how many are Republican-controlled.

And the closest we came to that was back in 2000.

And I believe back then it was 25, 25.

So, hopefully we don't end up in that situation.

- I don't even wanna know what happens after we go 25, 25.

It probably gets really exciting.

But you make a good point though, because even as we saw, even in the 2020 election, there were states that at least appeared to make the effort to send multiple delegations representing their state for the Electoral College.

And there's no indication that we won't see more of that as 2024 rolls around.

- Well, when it's going to the House, it's never been a clean uncorrupted process.

So, you really don't want it to go to the House.

- Yeah, because I think somewhere in the 1880s, was it the 1878, one of the elections where there was a deal made.

I'm trying to remember which President it was when I was- - Tilden and Hayes in 1876.

(laughs) - Yeah, Rutherford B. Hayes.

Yes okay.

And that was sort of there was some trading going on, so that Rutherford B. Hayes became president, which I believe had something to do with basically deconstructing and reconstruction- - With reconstruction, yeah.

So, it's never a good thing when the president's election- - [Steve] When it gets to that point.

- goes to that.

- You want a clear decision far in advance of getting to that point.

- Yeah, and for the country, it better to have a clear decision instead of one that ends up being legislatively- - It certainly would have been better for Alexander Hamilton had the election of 1800 gone to the House.

(laughs) - Yeah, good point.

Now, one of the things that happened a few days after the May 3rd primary, because not everybody was voting on May 3rd around the country, but we happened to be, was the release of the leak of the Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade.

And talk a little but about what that does to the landscape, because that has always been an undercurrent, and a major undercurrent.

It's probably been one of the most divisive things the country's ever seen.

What does that do now, between now and November?

- So, assuming that the leaked decision that came out on that court case is similar to what comes out when they actually make a final decision, I think it changes things a lot.

Historically, Republicans have used the issue of Roe v. Wade and abortion to get people to the polls.

Trump ran on appointing justices who would find a way to overturn Roe v. Wade or to nominating justices.

And it seems to have worked.

And so, now I wouldn't be surprised if Democrats see a similar push.

We have not historically seen the court make decisions that remove rights from people.

Usually the decisions that have overturned precedent, historically, have sought to expand rights.

This significantly contracts rights of half the population and changes the landscape of politics in a way that we really haven't seen for anyone who is alive.

because even pre-Roe v. Wade, it was a decision left up to the states.

And Republicans have said that their goal and their kind of bar for the presidency in 2024 is a nationwide ban on abortion.

And so, the end result of all of that is killing women, but the politics leading up to that point will be very different than what we've seen in the past.

- Yeah, well, and it comes right back around to the local elections matter, state elections matter, because if it comes back to the states, which if that opinion holds, that appears what's going to happen, it will be your state legislature making that decision on what abortion rights look like in any given state.

So, it is important as we've said, important what goes on in your state.

It's not just what happens in Washington, DC.

- And the governor's races as well, right?

Because it's changed the political calculus in the governor's races as well, even for Republican governors.

And so, it's going to be interesting to see kind of how that shakes out.

- Right.

And as you said, too, it's not something that we've dealt with this directly.

I mean, it's always been the major divisive factor in the country after probably civil rights and that sort of thing.

But it's not something we're used to dealing with in this faction now, where over the weekend, lots of protests on both sides, all of them peaceful, apparently, but it's sort of reliving something that happened 50 years ago, basically.

And a lot of people thought this was the decided opinion.

If you looked at the nominees, the Supreme Court, when they were talking, they didn't say they wouldn't overturn it, but they implied that, "Well, we'd have to think about that a lot."

- Well, they did.

Most of them did say that it was precedent because not only was it 1973 Roe v. Wade, but you also have the Casey decision in the '90s that reaffirmed a woman's right to choice.

And so, you have multiple decisions that have kind of supported this one.

And so, they said it's upon precedent, I think was the line one of them used.

So, it'll be interesting to see what the decisions look like when the court releases their official decisions.

- Right.

Right.

Yeah.

And again, as you mentioned, the appointees to the Supreme Court that are involved in this decision, the result of control of one House, the legislature, or both, or the presidency, or not having control of those.

So, that's the Supreme Court that we have now based on nominations and people being confirmed of the Supreme Court.

- Well, I mean the election of 2016 was decided by what, 70-some thousand votes in three states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Had those votes gone the other way, there would've been three different supreme justices - Probably we assume justices with a different approach.

- Six to three liberal or progressive majority on the Supreme Court.

And we almost certainly would not be having this conversation today.

- Okay.

So, we'll have to leave it there, but obviously there'll be a lot to talk about between now and August and now and November as Ohio moves its way to try and get to a general election in November.

I wanna thank both of you for being here again today.

Appreciate your time and your insight into this.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

And of course, you can watch us each week on WBGU-PBS Thursday nights at eight o'clock.

We will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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