Midterm Elections With Long-Term Consequences

By Bruce Checefsky

The 2022 midterm elections are coming, with congress, the state senate, county executive, appellate judges, and ballot measures up for grabs. The general election in November will decide the balance of power in the Ohio Supreme Court and determine the influence of Trump in Ohio politics. The entire nation will be watching the results.

Ohio voters will elect a new representative to the U.S. Senate on November 8, with conservative Republican and author J. D. Vance running against Democratic U.S. Representative Tim Ryan. Ryan and Vance are competing for the six-year senate seat after Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced he would not seek re-election this year. If Ryan wins, Ohio would have two Democratic U.S. Senators for the first time since John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum served together in the early 1990s. A Republican loss in the Senate race could signal a change in voting attitudes for the state.

Vance, 38, the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy and a venture capitalist with ties to Silicon Valley, is viewed as an outsider by some analysts. Ryan, 49, is a 10-term House member from the Youngstown area.

Democrat Chris Ronayne and Republican Lee Weingart are candidates for Cuyahoga County Executive, a position that has a term of four years. Weingart, 56, was appointed Cuyahoga County commissioner in 1995 at age 28. After losing his election bid to stay in office in 1996, he started a lobbyist consulting company, LNE Group. Ronayne, 53, served as Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell’s planning director and chief of staff in the early 2000s before becoming the executive director of University Circle Inc. in 2005. He stepped down in 2021 to campaign for county executive.

In the Eighth District Court of Appeals, only seven of the twenty-three open seats for judicial office are challenged. The winner will serve a term of six years. Cornelius J. O’Sullivan (R) will face off against Michael John Ryan (D). The other races are Tim Hess (R) and Richard A. Bell (D), Gina Marie Crawford (R) and Maureen Clancy (D), Joan Synenberg (R) and Brian Mooney (D), Denise Joan Salerno (R) and Deborah M. Turner (D), Kevin J. Kelley (D) and Wanda C. Jones (R), and Kenneth R. Callahan (R) and Jennifer O’Donnell (D).

Ross DiBello, a Cleveland attorney who worked at the law office of Cassandra Collier-Williams and is now a judge of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas General Division, said finding information about judges can be difficult. “We need an independent and publicly funded tracking and publicity mechanism for incumbent judges and lawyers who become candidates to understand their judicial records,” said DiBello in an email to The Cleveland Observer. “Judges can grant and terminate probation and hold corporations accountable for bad behavior. They can confirm or vacate a Death Penalty. They deal with neighborhood fence and dog bite disputes.”

Kevin J. Kelley, former president of Cleveland City Council and mayoral candidate, is running for judge of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, General Division. Kelley said fundraising limits are unfair. Most government offices have a much higher cap than the $650 for individual donors in the judicial races. Ohio Supreme Court candidates can accept up to $3,800 in contributions from individuals in the primary and general elections. Organizations are limited to $7,000, while political parties can contribute up to $189,500 in primaries and $347,600 in general elections.

Kelley wants to win the election since he thinks his experience with the city provides valuable litigation skills and the knowledge needed to be a successful judge. “As city council president, my job was to build consensus with people and listen to them. I was able to build coalitions and never failed to get the votes I needed,” he said. “The challenge was working with sixteen colleagues, independently elected, that I did not supervise. I could not discipline or fire them. I had to build a consensus and work with them.”

With few comparisons between campaigning for mayor and a judicial seat, Kelley acknowledged that he was free to debate issues facing the City of Cleveland as a mayoral candidate. But as a candidate for judge, he can discuss his qualifications only. Legal cases pending that may make it to the court are off the table for public discussion. Campaigns must be void of political commentary.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Wanda C. Jones, appointed by Gov. DeWine to fill the vacancy on the bench after the death of Democratic judge Joseph D. Russo, is campaigning against Kelley. Jones, a Republican, earned her Bachelor’s degree at Ursuline College and a law degree at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. Before serving as a judge, she was an assistant attorney general in the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. She previously worked as a principal at Axner & Jones LLP. Jones said judicial races rarely get the attention they deserve. Running for office is expensive and time-consuming.

“If you are a good judge, people vote for you; if you are not, they will not vote for you. People should have a right to decide between two candidates,” she said, referring to the number of unopposed races. “I learned early in my career that it was not about the issues or a debate between the candidates. It was political, and I believe politics has no place in the courtroom.” Judges of the court of common pleas are elected to six-year terms.

In The Betrayal, a new book about Mitch McConnell and the U.S. Senate, Ira Shapiro chronicles the challenges faced by the Senate during the Trump administration. The midterm elections could challenge McConnell’s power—or, should Republicans win control of the Senate—force President Biden to become more moderate. With voter apathy in Cleveland a dismal reality, Shapiro believes that at a certain point, people do not vote because they think it does not matter. Fatigue from the pandemic can also play a role in civic engagement. Shapiro in a recent phone interview said that if Americans do not like the direction that things are going, they better register and vote.

The deadline to register to vote is October 11. Ohio voters with up-to-date registration information can vote in person starting October 12, including the two Saturdays, the Sunday, and the Monday before Election Day. Learn about absentee and early in-person voting from the Ohio Secretary of State https://www.ohiosos.gov

Polls open on November 8 at 6:30 a.m. and close at 7:30 p.m.

None Of The Above: The Media’s Effect On Voter Participation

By Gennifer Harding-Gosnell

Eighty million Americans sat out the presidential election in 2020. Of those who did vote, 85 million of them were registered to one of the two major political parties. If non-voters were their own political party, they would be nearly equal to the numbers of Republicans and Democrats combined.

Though the reasons for not voting vary widely by the individual, when 80% of non-voter respondents to an NPR survey say they believe “the mainstream media are more interested in making money than telling the truth,” it begs the question does the media play a part in influencing people to NOT vote.

The media has certainly been found guilty of not covering enough of what the people want to know, and too much of everything else. Pew Research Center studies from the 2016 election show “about four-in-ten say there is too much coverage of candidates’ comments on the campaign trail (44%), their personal lives (43%), which candidate is leading in the polls (37%) and the candidates’ moral character (30%). There is only one topic that most Americans say has received too little coverage – candidates’ stances on issues (55% feel this is under-covered).”

Many media organizations will intentionally give the most air time to the loudest and the most extreme voices and viewpoints. News stories about these people and issues tend to generate the most clicks, views, and comments, thus generating a perceived larger audience that is touted to bring advertising and subscription revenue to the company.

Director of the Center For Policy Studies at CWRU, Joseph White, explains, “There has been a long development in which it became harder and harder for the “mainstream” media to act as ‘centrists’, treating the two sides as equally plausible. This clearly has contributed to polarization, [then] polarization to distrust and so on, in a vicious cycle.”

The idea that the media is biased and polarizing is not new. By the early 70s, research had already established “that news and public affairs programs of the television networks were, in a broad sense, consistently propagandistic and sometimes malign. They evoked images of American politics ‘which are inordinately sinister and despairing, causing the viewer to turn against the social and political institutions involved, or against himself [for] feeling unable to deal with a political system like this.’ More recent studies have reached similar conclusions: ‘negative’ news stories and ‘negative’ campaign ads create cynicism, drive people away from political participation, and often confuse them to such a degree that they refuse to vote or even read about politics and government.”

Improvements to election coverage have been suggested, though rarely implemented, over many years. An article from a journalism industry conference in 1995 states, “The tough parts will be getting politicians to stick to substance and getting news organizations to resist the temptation to focus on the hollow symbols of slick media events. More needs to be reported about the substance of issues in campaigns. Although the strategy of politics can be fascinating, it is the candidates, not the consultants, who are being elected. Reporters too often become captivated by a campaign’s message of the day or picture of the day. Reporters need to think more deeply about what politicians are offering up and whether it means anything to anyone. If it doesn’t, they need to be willing to report that.”

The unregulated, open nature of the internet and social media has since only exacerbated these concerns. This Knight Foundation study concluded, “Social media and word of mouth via friends and family—two sources of news for many non-voters—are consistently tied to lower likelihood of voting in the future, more skeptical views about the efficacy of voting and lower community engagement overall.”

This corroborates information learned by Cleveland VOTES a local group promoting civic engagement that helped survey non-voting residents and found that “Over a third of Clevelanders get their information from social media and tv, but trust friends/family more for information about community issues.”

Not just what gets covered, but how it gets covered, can be problematic. Many organizations, especially legacy-media outlets, use what’s known as “horse-race” election coverage: it is candidate-focused, tied to who is winning and losing, relies heavily on opinion polls, and favors coverage of those already winning out of the gate, the underdog, or controversial figures. This can shift voters’ focus to non-substantive items and is in direct conflict with issues-based coverage that is exactly what non-voters are asking for.

Horse-race coverage can also negatively affect turnout among those who do vote. Research shows early media forecasts of a landslide Clinton victory over Trump in 2016 may have influenced left-leaning but less engaged voters to stay home assuming their votes weren’t needed that day.

“That’s me,” says Jeanelle, 38, from the Broadway/Fleet area. “I didn’t really take Donald Trump all that seriously as a candidate. All the media talk leading up to the election was about how Hillary Clinton was gonna win in a landslide, and the day of the election, they were all like, she’s totally leading, so I was like, okay, I don’t really need to go, she wasn’t my choice anyway. So I went to bed pretty early, and when I woke up the next morning, it was like, holy s**t, he actually won? I kinda felt bad for not going, but then I was mad, like was this really the best y’all could do? If a retreaded Clinton, a career politician, and a flaky real estate agent are the best we have for Presidential candidates, we’re screwed anyway.”

“We often do not understand the story behind the story,” says Cleveland VOTES co-Founder Erika Anthony. “We can’t focus solely on things like voter turnout. There’s a lot of things that can surround or impact what that turnout rate is. The media needs to place more value on storytelling…We [Cleveland VOTES] are trying to elevate news outlets like The Observer or new civic tools like the Cleveland Documenters to get those stories not being captured through traditional media sources.”

This piece is part of a series of stories titled “None Of The Above” created as part of the Democracy SOS Fellowship program. Other stories in the series can be viewed in print or online at theclevelandobserver.com.

Gerrymandering is Voter Suppression

By Bruce Checefsky

Gerrymandering is defined as manipulating the boundaries of an electoral district so as to create an advantage for a party, group, or class.

Earlier this year, the Ohio Supreme Court, which is the highest judicial court in the state with final authority over interpretations of Ohio law and has a current makeup of four Republicans and three Democrats, invalidated legislative district maps and sent the Ohio Redistricting Commission back for revision. It rejected the fourth plan of the state redistricting commission as unconstitutional gerrymandering that unfairly favored Republicans.

The redistricting commission resubmitted its third plan, which had been thrown out by the court, rather than creating a new one. Republicans filed to get a federal court involved in the process, and a panel of three federal judges threatened to step in and force the state of Ohio to implement a new redistricting plan.

U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amul R. Thapar and U.S. Western District of Kentucky Judge Benjamin J. Beaton, both appointed by former President Donald Trump, voted to use the third set of maps giving Republicans the green light to move forward in a 2-1 decision. The decision disregarded what the Ohio Supreme Court said was unconstitutional. Secretary of State Frank LaRose ordered a special election on August 2 to implement Map 3. It will serve as an election for state representatives, senators, and the state central committee, and is the first election affected by the redistricting following the 2020 census.

In July 2015, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the legislature had carried out a blatantly unconstitutional gerrymander and ordered redrawing of eight congressional districts and all 40 state senate districts, according to Reclaim The American Dream, a non-partisan, non-profit, informational website. When the legislature had trouble coming up with revised maps, lower courts stepped in to supervise the redrawing of election districts to make elections more competitive and give voters more choice. The new, court-ordered maps went into play for the first time in 2016 and produced notable upsets in both parties, with political newcomers ousting long-serving incumbents.

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) provides several solutions to gerrymandering, including tools to identify gerrymandered maps with free online tools to upload proposed redistricting maps to determine whether they are fair or gerrymandered. DavesRedistricting.org , CampaignLegalCenter.org and PlanScore.org empower advocates, journalists, policymakers and the public to assess and score maps, to establish Independent Redistricting Commissions (IRC) to create fair maps and to limit the power of self-interested politicians in the mapmaking process. They also advocate for the passage of federal legislation to ban gerrymandering. Congress should pass the Freedom to Vote Act which would open new judicial avenues to challenge maps that unfairly advantage one party.
(https://campaignlegal.org)

States could give the responsibility for drawing voting districts over to independent commissions.

State legislatures have the authority to draw political districts. They could hand that responsibility to another party or organization. A few state legislatures have allowed an independent commission to draw political boundaries. The results have been more sensible maps.
(https://www.brookings.edu)

Ohio may need to look for other ways to redistrict to avoid a recurrence of the latest situation.