(upbeat music) (graphic pops) - Good evening and welcome to "Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall.

A familiar face is joining the 2026 US Senate Race in Ohio, and the Ohio Governor is working with the federal government to deploy troops in DC, and also a current US Senator Bernie Moreno, appears at the City Club of Cleveland to mixed reviews and mixed comments.

We're joined for this edition of "Journal" by the host of "The State of Ohio," Karen Kasler, and Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes from Bowling Green State University's Department of Political Science.

Welcome both of you to "Journal."

Karen, as I mentioned just now in the intro, Sherrod Brown has cited he's gonna run against Jon Husted, who was appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by JD Vance.

So Karen, talk about the interview folks had with Sherrod Brown and what his plan is as he basically makes his comeback to the US Senate.

- My Statehouse News Bureau colleague, Jo Ingles, talked to him.

She sat down with him for about a 15-minute interview and I think his entrance in the race is not a surprise.

He is by far the best known Democratic figure in Ohio politics.

Sadly, that's not saying a lot because there's only one elected statewide Democrat in Ohio right now since Sherrod Brown and two other Supreme Court Justices were defeated in 2024.

So Brown, I think the question was whether he was gonna run for governor or US Senate.

There was some people who wanted to see him run for governor, including some labor leaders, but he eventually decided to run for Senate, I think the pressure from Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer was part of that because there were some pictures put out on social media of Schumer and Brown out on the town here in Columbus in June and July.

So I think that kind of gave us a hint of what was gonna be happening here.

- [Steve] And what were the alternatives?

Who else would had expressed interest in the race who had talked about it?

Because obviously Sherrod Brown is, as you mentioned, is the biggest name in Democratic politics in Ohio right now.

Who else would've or still could decide that they wanted, might challenge him in the primary?

- Well, there's a guy from Northeast Ohio, a wealthy man named Fred Odie, who has said that he will challenge him at a primary, but we haven't seen any paperwork filed from him.

And of course there's Tim Ryan, the former congressman who ran against JD Vance in 2022 and lost that race.

Ryan has said, in the wake of Sherrod Brown's announcement, that his phone has been blowing up with people wondering if he's going to run for governor.

Of course, there's already a Democrat in the race for governor, and that's Dr. Amy Acton, the former Director of the Ohio Department of Health.

But Tim Ryan has said he's interested and then decided not to run for things before.

So we're still wondering if we're gonna actually hear something from him or not, but it really looks like Sherrod Brown is gonna be the nominee, certainly, and it's the one, he's going to be the one that the National Democratic Party and donors are gonna be pouring money into.

In fact, he claims that he raised $3.6 million just in the first day that he was out officially as a candidate.

So he has a lot of potential money behind him, but that may or may not win the race.

I mean, Ohio has gone for President Trump three times now, and including the last time when he ran in 2024, he lost by less than four points, but Trump won Ohio by a little over 11 points.

So he did better than a lot of Democrats in 2024, but still lost.

- Yeah, and Nicole, when we look at the race, obviously, Sherrod Brown has name recognition, but he's gonna fight an uphill battle in Ohio, which is a 54:46 or 55:45 Republican state, depending on how you view the presidential races.

So even though he's been a senator, he was defeated the last time.

It's gonna be difficult for him in the state of Ohio.

- It is, and I think it's gonna be really interesting.

Historically, he's done well, and the one thing that we kind of have to keep in mind though, obviously, the past doesn't dictate the future, is that whenever you have someone who has been kind of appointed to a Senate seat in Ohio in recent history and then run for that seat two years later when the election comes up, or less than two years depending on when the appointment happens, they actually haven't won.

The person challenging them has won.

Now, politics are very different now, things may have changed, but we do see that, in recent history, the challenger has done better.

So I think that is something just to kind of keep in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of how he does, or how Sherrod Brown does in this race is going to be affected by what the kind of the national political conversation is.

And while Ohio has gone for Trump, there has been, it was a much narrower victory for the Senate race last time than we saw in the presidential race.

And so, I think we know that there are people who do support President Trump or did in the 2024 election, but also voted for Sherrod Brown.

And so, we're gonna have to see kind of how that shakes out a little bit this time.

And a lot of it, I mean, it's not that far away, but it's still far enough away where stuff is gonna happen and there's going to be some changes.

- Yeah, and Karen, I noticed in the interview that you folks did with Sherrod Brown, he focused a lot, which has been his message in the last campaign about he's for the workers and he positions and says, "No one else is for the workers like I am."

And he's talking union, non-union, no matter what you do, if you're a worker, that's his message.

Is he trying, that was not as successful the last time when he ran against Moreno.

Is there a reason to think it will be more successful this time than it was a couple of years ago?

- I'm not sure about that.

I mean, he did start this Dignity of Work Institute back in March to kind of continue on with that message.

And that kind of gave us a clue too, because he was talking about workers on a national level, but he was really very seriously thinking about running for the US Senate rather than running for governor.

But I think really a lot of this is gonna depend on what Nicole said about the climate in general and what the climate is like in midterms next year.

I mean, midterm elections typically don't go well for the party in power, but all bets are off in the time of Trump here.

So that's something to think about.

But also, I think one of the reasons that Sherrod Brown eventually did make the full on decision to run for Senate is the idea that he was going to get some funding from the national level.

And he really didn't get a whole lot of funding.

He was pretty vocal about how he didn't get what he had hoped for from national Democrats when he ran against Bernie Moreno and lost.

So I think the idea that maybe he's going to be getting some support from national Democrats may have pushed him over the edge into the Senate race rather than to the governor's race or staying home, which never really seemed that much like an option, but of course it could have been.

- [Steve] Yeah, yeah, okay.

Well, when we come back because you mentioned the fact that Sherrod Brown was a little concerned about not getting support, and that's a theme that's kind of run for Senate Democrat candidates in Ohio because Tim Ryan wasn't thrilled with the level of support he got nationally.

So we can talk a little about that when we come back.

Back in just a moment with Karen Kasler and Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes here on "The Journal."

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

Our guests are Dr. Kalaf-Hughes from Bowling Green State University and Karen Kasler from "The State of Ohio," which you can see every Sunday at noon here in WBGU-PBS.

Karen, that last segment we talked about the fact you mentioned that Sherrod Brown wasn't all that thrilled the last time about the support he got financially and otherwise from the National Democratic Party.

Tim Ryan, when he ran, was very upset about the fact that he felt he had a winnable election in Ohio.

But the National Party had moved on and said, "No, no, we're not gonna win in Ohio.

Thanks, Tim.

See you later."

So this seems to be a theme as the Democratic party, the National Party said, "We don't think we can win in Ohio no matter who runs as a Senate candidate," because if they're not gonna put money behind Sherrod Brown, who would they put it behind anytime in the future if another, you know, four years from now?

- Well, that's the question.

I mean, resources are finite and the party that's not in power, I mean, Republicans are in power in the US House, in the US Senate, and in the White House.

And so, there's a lot of money that has been raised alongside that.

And so, Democrats have had to make choices on what states they were going to spend money on, places that they felt were possibilities.

And I think once Trump endorsed Vance and the way that things appeared to be turning in 2022, that explains some of that.

I mean, Ryan did better than other Democrats, but he still was not really close to JD Vance in terms of the final outcome there.

And Sherrod Brown kind of had a similar situation where it really looked like Trump was gonna do well in Ohio and other Republicans were also gonna do well in Ohio.

So that explains that.

But when you start talking about the mid-term elections here and where things might end up, especially since we've seen some pushback on the economy, on the Epstein files, on some of these other things that Democrats have been really pushing hard, you know, who knows what's gonna happen?

It's a long time.

You have to remind people that this is next year's election, not this November.

- [Steve] Not '25.

Yeah, not this November, a year from November.

- Exactly.

So it's a long time.

A lot of things can happen, but that doesn't necessarily mean things will happen.

- [Steve] Yeah, yeah.

And Nicole, it's interesting because yeah, we're talking as if this election's going to happen right now, because everybody's on top of this, are we getting to the point now where elections that are, in this case, more than a year away, our focus is gonna be almost like a presidential election starts the day after one of them is done in November, we start talking about the next one because we're talking about something that's more than a year away, and yet all the focus is on Sherrod Brown and Jon Husted in '26.

And just like some of the other things that are not gonna happen, the governor's race now, not for another year, and yet we're acting like it's gonna happen this November rather than November '26.

Is that the way politics is gonna go from now on that you've won election, you start thinking about, okay, what's gonna happen in the next election, literally the day afterwards?

- Oh, I mean, in short, yes.

And it's kind of exhausting.

I think everyone's getting a little bit exhausted by it.

But part of the reason for that just has to do with the structure of our election.

So we're talking about the Senate race, and this is kind of an off cycle Senate race because of the appointment, because the fact that Vance vacated that seat to become Vice President.

So it's a little bit rare there, but members of the House, right, they're up for election every two years all the time.

And so they're kind of known for this constant campaigning.

In the Senate, we don't usually see that, they serve six-year terms normally.

So this is a little bit off cycle, but I think it's just more kind of a broad comment on what our politics looks like now.

We know that the party out of power usually does better in the midterms, so Democrats are probably gonna see this as an opportunity, or at least their best opportunity, because usually regardless of who is in power, to get there, they've made a lot of promises that are just really hard to keep.

And so, we tend, as voters, to be like, "Well, we voted them in this presidential election year, they haven't done every single thing they said they were going to.

So two years later, we put the other party back into Congress."

And so that tends to be how it's gone.

And so we're gonna see a little bit of that.

But I think a lot of this is just kind of the state of politics, this constant upheaval, this constant campaigning.

And I think it does get to the point where voters get a little bit exhausted by it and also a little bit confused.

So we're gonna be having these same conversations for the next year in a couple months as the campaign gets closer, and with the two people who are running in this Senate race, they are not, and, you know, maybe more people will come in, like Karen said, but they're not unknown quantities.

We have a pretty long history on both candidates or both major candidates so far.

So it's not like a lot of unknown things are going to come out, or there's gonna be a lot of a learning curve.

It's just going to be kind of drag out campaigning, I think for the next year plus until we get to the election.

- [Steve] Yeah, and Karen- - [Karen] I'd say the one wild part here, the one wild part here is redistricting because Ohio, Texas, California, some other states are doing redistricting kind of in the middle of the cycle here.

And obviously, there's a lot of pressure from the White House and from Republicans at the national level to find more Republican seats, that's put pressure on Democrats to find more Democratic seats.

And so, we have not yet seen what Ohio's redistricted map will look like, the redrawn map, right now it's 10 Republicans, five Democrats.

I don't necessarily think that was the intended way that the map was drawn when it was drawn, I think it was drawn to be a little bit more favorable to Republicans, but that's not what happened.

But now, there's some pressure on Republicans in Ohio to draw that map to make it 12 Republicans and three Democrats, or even 13 Republicans and two Democrats.

So even though the midterms, like Nicole just said it, tend to be more in favor of the parties not in power, with these kind of things going on, more seats for Republicans in Texas, more seats for Democrats in California, it's kind of like all bets are off here.

- [Steve] Yeah, well, and it's interesting because we've been talking about redistricting, well, when Ohio was doing it officially the last time and didn't quite get it completely right, that's why we're back here again.

But it seems almost as if now you can redistrict whenever you want to, it seems like, and that's something new.

And the other thing, and Nicole, there seems to be no shame in saying, "Yes, we're going to gerrymander this time when we redistrict almost as if, you know, before, we pretended we weren't doing it, now we're just going to tell you we are going to gerrymander when we redistrict, and isn't this going to be fun?"

Before, it was almost, you didn't want to make a big deal about saying, "Yes, we're going to draw these unfairly."

Now we're saying, "Yes, we're gonna draw them to benefit us, and we're gonna have fun doing it."

So it's different than it used to be, like a lot of things in politics now.

- It is, it is really different.

There's a couple things that are really different, the mid-cycle redistricting.

So Ohio is always gonna have to do it because we didn't get the super majority needed as specified by our last constitutional amendments about redistricting.

Our districts were only gonna last for four years.

So I'm kind of taking us out of it a little bit for right now.

But this call from the executive branch, to states saying, "You need to redraw your lines mid-cycle and you need to pick up more Republican seats" is pretty unusual.

States have gerrymandered forever, right?

The term gerrymandering comes from a revolutionary war statesman and Governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry from the 1700s because he, right, this idea that he drew districts that looked like a salamander.

And so, right, we've had, this has been going on since day one, but the actual overt call to do it specifically for a partisan gain to keep one specific party in power and not kind of pretending that that's just like a ooh, surprise, an unintended consequence, that's pretty unusual.

And then also having these mid-cycle redistricting where it's not actually required.

And so the Constitution requires drawing these lines every 10 years after the US census is conducted, so we can see where people are, and then we can draw districts accordingly.

Nothing has changed in that regard.

All that has changed is the call for more Republican districts and then states kind of responding to that.

And so, there's a ton of implications from how we draw these lines, but that's kind of a really big change that we just haven't seen before.

- [Steve] Yeah, when we come back, we can talk a little bit more about this because, obviously, we're going to hear more about it in the news, Ohio's in the process of starting its, which of course was somewhat constitutionally required, so we're an outlier in that we're just not doing it because we can, we're required to because of what we didn't do the last time.

So back in just a moment with Karen Kasler and Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes here on "The Journal."

You're with us on "The Journal."

Our guests are Karen Kasler, host of "The State of Ohio," and Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes from Bowling Green State University.

Karen, we were talking about redistricting, which we talk about pretty much all the time because it's Ohio's favorite topic other than algae in Lake Erie.

- [Karen] Funding, don't forget that.

- Now, Governor DeWine, when this, of course, last time we cycled through this, it didn't come out the way, it didn't meet all the constitutional requirements, so we're back again.

Between then and now, he discussed different ideas and plans that he thought might be a better fit for Ohio.

Has any of that gotten any traction with anybody in the state regarding those who are gonna be dealing with redistricting or not?

- Well, he had said before last fall's vote on a redistricting panel that if indeed voters did reject that, that he would work with state lawmakers to come up with kind of an alternative process similar to what's done in Iowa, where there's a nonpartisan legislative services agency that does the lines there.

And we haven't heard anything about that.

My colleague, Sarah Donaldson, asked him in June what was going on with that.

And he said that he still believes that would be a better choice than what Ohio's been doing now.

But he mentioned that lawmakers have not hinted at any ways and reforms changes to the process.

So it looks like they're going to go ahead potentially and do it the way that they did it last time around.

But of course, the question is then how many Republican districts, how many Democratic districts?

And it's important to note that this is only congressional redistricting that we'll be doing this time, not redistricting for the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate, just for the 15 congressional districts.

- Yeah, that's all we can handle right now anyhow, it's just the congressional.

Nicole, when we talk about, and you mentioned this is historically what we've kind of done, but now we're much more out front with just saying, "Yes, gerrymandering is what we do, and we do it well, no matter what state we're talking about."

Before, we used to, I know we joked about this, we talked about it before that it kind of made Ohio look like we weren't maybe on top of our game with regard to the way we looked at redistricting, but in a way, we're kind of the norm now versus the outlier that we thought we were a year or so ago.

- Yeah, there's a couple states that don't gerrymander as much, right?

They have these non-partisan commissions or they have citizen-driven commissions that are not essentially legislators picking their own districts.

But now, because we're starting to see more and more of this mid-cycle redistricting and a little bit of a tit for tat approach in doing so, everyone is joining us and actually getting farther, you know, into the gerrymandered territory than we are.

And once the executive branch asked for five more Republican districts in Texas, right, California responded and said, "Well, if you're gonna do that, we're gonna try to pass a one-time exemption so we can create five more Democratic districts."

And then Missouri's in there, they're like, "Well, we think we could find one more Republican seat here."

And then, so you have other states essentially saying, "We're gonna redraw the lines to maximize certain party vote share, primarily Republican party vote share to prevent Democrats from having a voice."

And that has become a very public strategy instead of what is talked about behind closed doors, we're gonna draw these lines, and we're gonna get an advantage to, we're just gonna tell you what we're going to do.

And it's going to prevent certain voters from having a voice in their congressional elections.

The other thing that we don't often think of with this is that you do have a lot of Republicans towing the party line because that's what's gonna keep them in office.

But not everyone is super pumped because when you start redrawing the lines, you're also redrawing their lines.

And so what's nice about like a 10-year, you know, a decade-long cycle is you do develop relationships with your constituents.

And while you run for reelection, you're still able to provide that important case work for them, whether it's help with Social Security, or VA benefits, tickets to the Capitol, right?

Those kind of nonpartisan things that members of Congress do that get them back into office, that people like regardless of what party you tend to represent.

And so, as we redraw the lines, whether we're looking to benefit one party or the other, people who are currently in office are gonna see their districts change, they're gonna lose their constituents, but they also may end up completely out of office or competing with a co-partisan for that district.

It may mean that they have to move or they're not living in their district anymore, so we start seeing these changes that happen so often that you lose those constituent connections that are important for reelection.

And political scientists always say that members of Congress are single-minded seekers of reelection, which is true, and it becomes really hard if all of a sudden on the whims of the President, your district has changed, you no longer live in your district, and now you're in a primary election with a co-partisan after you've had to move across your district lines.

And so, this stuff makes politics really complicated, both for the elected official and for the voter who are like, "What district am I in?

Who do I contact about my veteran's benefits?"

It's not the same person it was.

And that's only looking at the people who are kind of in the party.

For the people whose votes are being minimized, they're getting a whole other raw end of the deal.

But we tend to talk about them, but this affects everyone, and so it's not something that you should be super pumped about if you're like diehard Republican, you know, relative to diehard Democrat, this kind of constant shifting is gonna affect everyone.

- [Steve] Yeah, and Karen, Bernie Moreno, the current US Senator, was at the City Club of Cleveland.

And the question of redistricting kind of came up because he has sort of talked about, as you mentioned earlier, he would like to see Ohio have 13 Republican congressional seats and two Democrats versus the 10:5 it is now.

So he's been very upfront about, as a US Senator, saying, "Yes, let's redraw the districts to benefit the Republican party.

And that's just how I think it should be."

So talk about his response, because he had kind of a contentious discussion with folks at the City Club of Cleveland.

Not everybody was a big supporter, I guess you could say, when it was all over.

- Well, I think a lot of the City Club back and forth came about because of some other things.

There were some people who, in Northeast Ohio who were very frustrated with Senator Moreno that he hasn't held any town halls, he hasn't been available to them to talk about issues that they care about.

And so, that's where some of the pushback came about.

I mean, Henry Gomez, who's an "NBC News" reporter from the Youngstown area, was the one questioning him.

And the City Club always has an audience segment where the audience gets to ask the guest questions as well.

And so there were some really good questions about intel, about some other things that have been going on.

But yeah, there was some frustration on the part of people who really view Bernie Moreno as being incredibly partisan, because he did say that indeed he thought that 12 Republicans and three Democrats in Ohio's congressional delegation would be what Ohio should go for in redistricting.

So there's a little bit of frustration, not only at President Trump, but also at Bernie Moreno in particular.

- [Steve] Yeah, and I know towar the end, 'cause, you know, I watched your presentation on "The State of Ohio," and part of that was too, at the end, the gentleman who was the president, whatever, I forget his exact title, but he said, you know, we've gotta be a little more, we tried to preface this and say, "Let's all get along here for this.

Let's have a good discussion."

It didn't go as well.

And he kind of chastised the audience in a very diplomatic way.

But then afterwards, the Republican party said, "We're gonna encourage our folks not to do anything with the City Club of Cleveland because we don't like the environment," which has been sort of par for the course for a lot of elected officials say, "I'm not gonna go out in public unless I can control the narrative," which is not new.

But now that's become very blatant to say just, "Hey, if I think I'm gonna get tough questions, I'm not going there, see you later."

- [Karen] And I didn't mean to correct you there, it's board president, the Board President of the City Club, Mark Ross, had said, "Hey, we want respectful, thoughtful questions."

He said it before the event, anticipating issues.

There had been a whole bunch of protestors outside the City Club who had clearly been waiting for the opportunity to put their signs up for Senator Moreno if he had seen them.

But then also at the end, he specifically said that he had really hoped that there would be a little bit more of that.

And like you said, the Republican Party Chair, Alex Triantafilou said that he, as the Party Chair, will urge candidates to avoid future events at the City Club of Cleveland.

"It is not what it purports to be," he writes on X, "And until they foster civil adult conversation, Republicans should decline participation to avoid the spectacle."

Now, I'm really disappointed in this because I mean, the frustration on a lot, part of a lot of these people comes from the lack of access.

But, you know, it is frustrating for a guest to show up and feel like they're getting yelled at from members of the audience when there are rules that have been established.

So it's a tough situation, but what I really don't wanna see is less access to candidates.

We're already losing access to candidates through debates.

Fewer candidates are doing debates now, and to not have even these forums here is really problematic for democracy because you wanna see these people standing in front of a crowd, taking questions, thinking on their feet, and not just doing ads and talking points and that sort of thing.

- Yeah, and talking about access, we're gonna have to leave it there.

Our access is being closed down by time.

Karen Kasler, thank you so much, Nicole Kalaf-Hughes, thank you so much.

We'll have you back again, because obviously we're gonna be talking about this for the next until November of '26 at the very least.

We've got some time yet, so we will be back in a few weeks to talk more about this and see what's happened.

You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 PM on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Goodnight and good luck.

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