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

I'm Steve Kendall.

The midterm elections are in the books for the most part.

There is still a little thing going on in Georgia.

But overall, the midterm elections are done.

So what are the takeaways?

Has anything really changed?

And if so, what has changed?

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

Dr. Jackson, if there's one takeaway, what would be the one thing you would take away from the midterms?

Then I'll ask Dr. Hughes as well about that.

What would be the one thing you would say, if you wanna walk away with something, here's one thing to think about?

- Well, as we discussed last time, the party that wins the presidency usually does very poorly in their first midterm.

And definitely, the Biden Democrats appear to have lost the House of Representatives by a very narrow margin.

But to have held onto the Senate and to have done very well in most states, Ohio excepted otherwise, and so I think the big takeaway from the election is that the typical decline that the party in the presidency experiences in their first midterm didn't happen.

The so-called red wave that was coming turned out to be more of a red trickle or a red puddle.

And you know, while losing the House of Representatives is obviously not considered a good thing by the party in power, to hold onto the Senate and return us to a position of divided government, which has been increasingly common in our politics lately, is actually in some ways a win for the Democrats.

It also creates a situation for the Republicans with an incredibly narrow majority in the House of Representatives.

They'll discover what soon-to-be former Speaker Nancy Pelosi discovered, which is it's really, really hard to manage and wrangle votes when your majority is very small.

Now, she was a master at that and produced the passage of a tremendous amount of legislation.

It's still, and we'll probably discuss this later, unclear who the Speaker of the House is gonna be on the Republican side, and if they'll have the political skill to get through legislation like soon-to-be former Speaker Pelosi did.

- Yeah.

And Dr. Kalaf-Hughes?

- Well I think Dr. Jackson just stole a lot of my talking points.

But I think what's gonna be really interesting long term is to see kinda how the strategy is from this election cycle play out in 2024 or 2026.

If the same approaches that the candidates that didn't win, which is often like the election denialism message and that kind of stuff, if that carries over into future campaigns.

Or if they kinda pause, step back, and reassess what they're doing.

If it didn't work this time, will it work in 2024?

Will it work in 2026?

Probably not.

So I think it'll be really interesting to see how campaigns and how the Republican Party nationwide reassesses both their position and their strategy.

- Yeah 'cause what you hear people talk about is that people want to find, that voters would like to have people somewhat more in the middle, you know, more mainstream-ish.

And yet, both parties seem to be controlled, seems on the surface by the extreme left for the Democrats, the extreme right for the Republicans.

And the House discussion is really pertinent because Kevin McCarthy's having a tough time.

He's got at least five Republican House members going, "We're not gonna vote for you."

Well, he needs every Republican vote it seems.

And somebody raised the issue that, well, would it be possible that he would have to get Democratic votes to become the speaker?

Now, I don't know if that would happen or not.

Or they could end up, theoretically, with a Democrat as the Speaker of the House, which seems almost totally unlikely.

It would really be flipping politics on its head.

But it speaks to what you said, that the margin is so narrow in the House that can he maneuver even becoming elected speaker, let alone move legislation through?

- Well, I mean, the drama of who's going to be speaker is obviously the immediate issue and it's an important one.

And it reveals, though, a deeper problem for the Republican Party, which is the visions within their soon-to-be majority in the House of Representatives.

Also, though, that the topics that we discussed in terms that Dr. Kalaf-Hughes just mentioned, in terms of election denialism versus what we could say sort of, you know, kitchen-table issues, bread-and-butter issues.

I mean, the Republicans wanted to run on, you know, inflation, the economy, crime, the problems that people are facing.

Or at least, you know, the people who know how to win elections wanted to run on those issues.

But election denialism and personal vendettas against the Biden administration and the Biden Family are what have come to the surface immediately after the election.

And with the leader of the Republican Party, for want of a better term, down in Mar-a-Lago putting out tweets, or not tweets anymore since he's not on that platform, whatever the social media platform that he's on, calling for the elimination of the Constitution and the reinstatement of him as president sucks all the air and energy out of the room of any reasonable Republican who wants to solve problems that people actually care about.

- Yeah, well, and I think it was interesting that of course within a few days after the election, he announced his candidacy for 2024, which people are saying, well, it's way too early.

But then again, he's never followed the conventional rules on any of this, so what a surprise.

- Well, and I think with that, I mean, we have to remember that he announced his candidacy for 2020 the day of the inauguration in January of 2017, which is also not typical.

But also I think from a strategic standpoint, his organization and he as an individual are facing a number of investigations.

And those become far more difficult once he is a declared presidential candidate.

And so I think the investigations were probably progressing enough where he realized if he doesn't declare candidacy, then he's going to be in legitimate trouble.

And now, it puts the Department of Justice and the administration in a little bit of a different position because they're investigating now a former rival and a potential future challenger.

So it's gonna be, it makes it a little more interesting.

- And it all makes it look political then versus judicial or criminal justice approach to it.

When you look at that, who else, like obviously Ron DeSantis has become Trump's, you know, attacker and he's the one he wants to attack now because he sees him as his main challenger.

Is this way too early even for Ron DeSantis to be talking about being a presidential candidate?

I mean, he hasn't really declared, but everybody's saying, "He's the one, he's the one, he's the one."

Because we know you can be hot for a few months and then suddenly the next, the new kid on the block shows up.

So is he, because he's the front runner technically versus Trump, is that good for him or bad for him at this point?

- I think it's good for him, but I don't think he's gonna declare soon.

- Okay.

- I think he's gonna talk around it, talk around it, while still making himself seem very committed to Florida, right?

You know, only cares about Florida, that's his state.

But then I think he's gonna talk around it as he makes his decision.

But I think it's a good idea to do nothing right now 'cause there's no need to declare.

Declaring brings with it all sorts of like campaign finance regulations, and all sorts of limits as to what you can and cannot do.

And there's no need for him to declare right now.

That was a big point of contention in his election as to whether he would be committed to Florida for the long haul.

And so I think right now, committing to Florida but talking in broad strokes like around the presidency, I think is probably the best strategy for him.

- Yeah, there's a step in the presidential process that people experience and know about, but they don't really name or talk about but political scientists do, and it's a process called surfacing.

And that's the process that happens before somebody's an official candidate, sort of defined as a series of decisions and actions made by potential candidates to bring themselves to the attention of the national media, the local media, and whatever states have the first primaries and caucuses, the primary voters of their party.

So we can expect over the next, you know, several months and year a number of candidates to engage in the process of surfacing.

You know, causing themselves to be identified by the various groups that I just mentioned as a potential candidate.

And so DeSantis will carry out those actions, and as my colleague pointed out, stop short of announcing due to the legal things that start happening when you are an official candidate.

- Okay.

When we come back, we can talk about some other people on the Republican side because there is a former vice president who seems to be surfacing, as you said, over the past few weeks.

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

Thanks for staying with us on "The Journal."

We're doing a little after-the-midterm-election analysis with Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and Dr. David Jackson from Bowling Green State University.

We were talking about potential candidates a little bit for 2024 and we're way too early.

But then again, as you said, Dr. Jackson, surfacing, getting your name out there, but not actually saying, "Yes, I'm a candidate."

Who else on the Republican side besides DeSantis, who we talked about has been doing that a little bit but then kinda going low key, and part of me says, well, as long as Donald Trump keeps getting out his shovel and digging in deeper, why go out there and do?

You don't have to do anything.

But who else would be out there?

I know Mike Pence has been appearing on a lot of shows, and now he's got a book out admittedly.

But does he legitimately believe that he has a chance to become the Republican nominee?

I mean, he's gonna drag a lot of people that think he's a traitor to Trumpism.

So what's his status with that right now?

- He may believe he has a chance.

I think he's got a pretty steep uphill road for a couple reasons.

I think partly because the Trump wing of the party, they don't care for him.

And I think the images of January 6th illustrate that quite well.

They see him as a traitor.

They don't care for him.

And so I think for that wing of the party, it makes it really challenging.

For the more moderate wing of the party, it makes it really challenging because he is a very conservative Republican.

[Steve] Right.

- And when he was governor of Indiana, he had a lot of policies that did not set the state up well in terms of public health and that kind of stuff.

And so I think for more moderate Republicans who are not Trump Republicans, he may be too far to the right.

[Steve] Oh... And I think that may limit him with the more, now I don't know how big the moderate section of the base is anymore, but that may actually limit him a little bit there.

And so I think he's not someone who's going to appeal to the masses in terms of, he's not Trump-y necessarily, he's gonna do everything he can to, you know- [Steve] He'd be away, yeah.

[Dr. Hughes] Move away from that.

[Steve] Pretend that never happened.

- Yup, and he might be just far too conservative for the more moderate Republicans who are, say concerned with fiscal issues but they don't really care about social issues.

And historically, his platform has been entirely social issues.

- Right, now is there anybody else beyond, once you get past Mike Pence, because obviously everybody appears to wanna line up to challenge Joe Biden, whoever the Democrat is.

First-term president, that's when you see that kinda thing happen.

Anybody else on the Republican side that sticks out, Dr. Jackson, at this point?

- Well, I mean, the natural place to look is that the candidates who have run previously.

And so, you know, I imagine that Marco Rubio still has presidential aspirations.

Ted Cruz, you know, any of the folks who challenged, you know, in 2016.

But it points out the problem in some ways, or not problem, but it points out the aspect of the Republican primary, which is Donald Trump's support is showing no signs of dissipating among the very, very hardcore of supporters who he has.

Now, the group of people who would support him as Trump famously once said, "Even if he shot somebody, I believe it was on Fifth Avenue."

- [Steve] Yeah on Fifth Avenue, yeah.

- And so he got the Republican nomination because the opposition to him in 2016 was split among a number of other candidates.

You know, the never-Trump group was never able to coalesce around one candidate.

And so if we end up in a situation where it's Trump and seven others, the exact same situation could happen again in 2024 where with, you know, 35, 40% of the vote, especially in winner-take-all primaries, that could get you the delegates.

- Yeah, and as I remember when we looked at 2016, because 2020 was more defined, the Republicans had what, 10, 11, 12, 16 people vying for that nomination?

And in a debate, it was almost tough to keep track of who was saying what about whom or about themselves.

[Dr. Hughes] Well, they separated out the debates too, [Steve] Yeah and split them into- [Dr. Hughes] I believe into like an A and B debate.

- Yeah, but if you had that same thing again, now, what about the Democratic side of it?

Because obviously, Biden's a sitting president, but there's always an undercurrent there about, well, should he run again?

Which you rarely hear about a sitting president.

Usually, it's like, well, he's gonna run the second, he or she would run the second time.

But who's out there lurking behind the scenes who might wanna surface?

Because taking on a sitting president's a pretty, you know, tough achievement even if he's not the most popular president as Joe Biden currently is not the most popular president ratings-wise.

- Well, it never works out well for a political party when a sitting president who is interested in running for reelection faces a primary challenger.

So you had Pat Buchanan run against George H.W.

Bush in '92.

That wasn't to their benefit.

1980, you had Kennedy up against Jimmy Carter.

1968, you had multiple challengers that eventually prompted President Johnson to pull out of the race.

So just from a fundamental standpoint, Democrats need to be really cautious and conservative right now about talking about publicly the idea that they might run against the sitting president because of how that almost, well, never works out well for the party.

So you haven't heard publicly of anybody saying, "Oh, I'm just itching to get in this race "and hoping that Biden stays out."

You know, there probably are people in the background having those conversations.

It'd be foolish not to given that President Biden, you know, is up there in years and has said that the decision always was the default position to run for reelection.

But that, that's actually gonna be a family decision that's made, I guess, you know, starting the process in the beginning, you know, of 2023.

Which, you know, leaves him an out not to run.

And if he doesn't run, which there's been, again, no public indication that he won't, I would imagine you would see a field of, you know, 15 or 20 people end up surfacing.

Gretchen Whitmer or Governor Whitmer from Michigan could be in there.

Pete Buttigieg obviously has shown that he has an interest in being president.

Kamala Harris clearly as a, you know, sitting vice president, by some measures would have an inside track.

- Yeah.

Now, when you look at that, and I guess you mentioned Kamala Harris, that's a tricky position to be in.

Well, vice presidents and presidents can have a strange relationship anyway.

But that would be, I mean if you're President Biden, you're wondering, "Is my vice president working behind the scenes to promote her own candidacy in 2024 or is she still working with me?"

That's gotta be kind of an interesting feel to have within the administration.

- Well, I think because you don't have Democrats who are willing to declare unless Biden 100% says, "I am not going to run for reelection," I think it puts both President Biden and Vice President Harris in kind of a safe spot.

Because even if she is thinking that, I highly doubt she would ever challenge a sitting president as a primary challenger.

Particularly when she's in the position of vice president.

So I think in that way, they're probably, everything is probably fine.

But I think once if you do have President Biden say, "I am not going to run," that's when I think you would see all of these people including Harris emerge.

And I think at that point, it's probably not an issue because he has chosen to remove himself.

- Well, when we come back, I know one of the things that was interesting about this election, at least regionally, was the difference between Ohio and Michigan and how things worked out there.

And maybe we can talk a little about some of the dynamics that drove that.

Because I think we used to look at Ohio, Michigan being very similar and acted the same way, voted the same way a lot.

But we're seeing that's not been the case for the last two presidential elections and maybe back a little farther.

So we can maybe talk about that a little bit.

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

With us on "The Journal," our guests are Dr. David Jackson and Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes from Bowling Green State University, Department of Political Science.

Before we get to Ohio and Michigan, let's talk a little bit about Ohio because, Dr. Kalaf-Hughes, there's some things going on within the state based on what happened in the election that also, especially when it comes to the state school board, there's been some reaction in the legislature about, well, maybe we need to look at what the state school board's responsible for.

So talk a little bit about that.

- So there have been some really interesting things going on with the state school board.

The state school board is a mix of elected and appointed individuals.

And historically, well, at least since 1953 when the state school board was created as more of a nonpartisan advisory body, taking it away from the governor's office, has been responsible for curriculum, appointing a state superintendent, and making kind of those decisions about what goes on in Ohio K-through-12 education.

And in this most recent electoral cycle, a number of the candidates that were elected were backed by different Democratic organizations.

And so not necessarily running as Democrats, but some of them previously held elected office as a Democrat and were backed by the largest teachers' unions in the state.

And so they were elected.

A lot of them have ties to education either as former teachers or longtime like coaches and that kind of thing.

And once they were elected, you now have members of the Ohio State Legislature saying, "We're actually gonna take power away from the school board."

- [Steve] Hmm, okay.

- And so in a really interesting twist where someone might typically think of Republicans as the party of small government, they are acting very much the opposite of that here.

And what they're trying to do, given the outcome of this election and the fact that they no longer care for the composition of the state school board, is creating a new bureaucracy under the Office of the Governor that would decide curriculum matters for Ohio schools.

And so the state school board would still exist.

They would still be responsible for appointing a state superintendent, and that would be their job.

And then all the decisions about the curriculum would fall under the elected governor's office.

And so it would politicize Ohio State curriculum and Ohio State education in a way that we haven't really seen since before 1953.

And it would also increase the size of the governor's bureaucracy, which is not something that you typically associate with the Republican position.

And the legislators are kinda taking up kind of a page out of Wisconsin's playbook because Wisconsin famously did this when Wisconsin voters elected a Democratic governor.

The Republican state legislature in the period between the election and when the new governor would take office a couple months later, stripped the governor of a majority of gubernatorial powers to weaken the executive and strengthen the legislature because they didn't agree with the voters' choice.

- With the voters' choice, interesting.

Now, when we talk about, and what's interesting is too with Ohio and you've got that situation, which as you said, normally, Republican, small government, but we seem to be, there seems like a centralization going on a little bit, which has been going on for a while, it's things that have flown below the radar, but this is one that is more relatable probably to people.

But Ohio and Michigan, Dr. Jackson, used to be at least in, I guess maybe the average person's mind, pretty much the same kind of places.

And they voted similarly it seemed.

But that doesn't seem to be the case.

If you look at especially this midterm election and the presidential election the last time, and the time before that actually too, not necessarily the case anymore.

We're not as much like Michigan as we we used to be.

And they're not as much like us as they used to be.

So what's going on there?

- Well, my political science colleague, Dr. Dominic Wells, and I have been looking into this question.

And you go back to (clears throat) 2016 and Donald Trump carried Michigan by a very, very narrow margin as the so-called, you know, blue wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania fell.

And at the same time, Ohio went for Donald Trump by about eight percentage points.

But then since then, things have radically diverged between Michigan and Ohio.

In 2018, the Democrats swept the statewide seats in Michigan, passed a number of liberal or progressive ballot initiatives including at that time marijuana legalization and same-day voter registration.

And then my colleague, Dr. Wells, has shown that since then, the number of registered voters in Michigan is higher than the number of registered voters in the state of of Ohio, even though Ohio has nearly 2 million more people than the state of Michigan does.

So this leads us to think that there must be some structural factors that are contributing to the differences.

Because demographically, as you point out, Michigan and Ohio are essentially similar on all of the important measurements.

But what matters, it turns out, of course, is not necessarily just the composition of the state's population, but the composition of the electorate, the composition of actual voters.

So if you look at not just registered voters, but those who actually come out.

So if you look at 2022, Ohio's actual voters were a little bit more likely to be male, a little bit more likely to be white, much less likely to be members of union households, and much more likely to identify as Republicans.

And so the state's electorates are completely different.

And one of the factors that certainly could have contributed to that are statewide ballot initiatives.

The state of Michigan has had a number of progressive policies passed this way including in 2022, protection of abortion rights and contraception rights, which certainly increased turnout among people who would identify as liberal or progressive.

And making it possible for people to vote and register to vote and vote on the same day, on election day, we saw, you know, massive numbers of people in East Lansing where Michigan State University is and Ann Arbor where U of M is coming out to vote.

Whereas in Ohio, you have to be registered to vote 30 days before the election.

So if there was any sort of late, you know, mobilization in Ohio, it doesn't matter because if you're not registered, you're not gonna be allowed to vote.

So the divergence between, you know, those two states, you know, has been incredible.

We also chalk this up to, frankly, shall we say, a higher apparent level of competence on the part of the state Democratic Party in Michigan as compared to Ohio.

It's not, I think, controversial to say that the Democratic Party in the state of Ohio does not have a reputation- - [Steve] Of being really as organized.

- as being great at what they are are supposed to do, which is, you know, elect the candidates, you know, statewide.

- Yeah, well, you mentioned something too.

And, Dr. Kalaf-Hughes, you have a few moments here.

One of the issues on the ballot, which made it different too, was the fact that, as you said, Michigan was dealing with an abortion resolution to put it into the state constitution.

Because with the Supreme Court ruling, they reverted back to like a 1931 law, which was some people would say was extremely draconian.

So that may have had some role in terms of turnout and mobilizing voters too.

Ohio didn't have anything quite that impactful, at least in most people's mind.

- No and what the data have shown is that pretty much every state that had abortion or something similar on the ballot saw a much higher rate of turnout.

And the Democratic candidates did much better because the people who were turning out essentially cared about abortion as an issue and wanted to protect the right that women have and people with uterus have to reproductive healthcare.

And having that on the ballot motivates people in a way that kind of Ohio didn't.

Ohio didn't really have anything like that on the ballot.

The initiatives that we did have on the ballot were complex and not something that was really talked about in the media.

So people probably weren't turning out just for that.

And I think it could even get worse in Ohio because now, the legislature is moving to make direct democracy and citizen-driven initiatives almost impossible to pass, requiring a super majority and so- [Steve] 60% needed versus 51%.

- Exactly.

And so while this is kind of one of those solution to a problem that doesn't exist, because most of them that do pass, do pass with a super majority, making ballot initiatives even harder is also meant to kind of tamp down a little bit of the people's voice in Ohio.

Where states like Michigan and other states, you have states moving more towards direct democracy and the voice of the citizens.

- While it has been pointed out, ironically, this change in order to pass would not require a super majority.

And it would take place in a low-turnout primary election.

[Steve] Ah, interesting.

[Dr. Hughes] By design.

Yeah, by design.

No, just by coincidence.

Okay, well, we'll have to leave it there.

But obviously, we'll keep watching all these developments, have you guys back on to talk about what is going on not just regionally statewide but also nationally as well.

You can check us out at wbgu.org, and you can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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