COLUMBUS – Republican Donald Trump set the pace Tuesday for just about every statewide race in Ohio when he carried the state by 11 points.
Vote totals for Issue 1, the anti-gerrymandering proposal, had a similar spread, an eight-point defeat of 46% to 54%, suggesting that straight-ticket partisan voting may have been a factor in the issue’s defeat even though Ohioans previously have said they opposed gerrymandering.
Election experts say other factors also likely contributed to defeat of Issue 1, an amendment to the Ohio Constitution proposed by initiative petition and submitted by Citizens Not Politicians, a bipartisan coalition.
Among them, the complexity of the ballot issue, a campaign that couldn’t break through the confusion and an inherent distrust voters have for big-change ballot issues paved the way for Issue 1 to fail in Tuesday’s election, experts say.
And calls to reject the issue from prominent lobby groups, such as the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, as well as from Trump himself, may have had an impact.
Had it passed, Issue 1 would have scrapped Ohio’s politics-dominated redistricting process in favor of a bipartisan citizen redistricting commission that would have barred participation from politicians.
There’s no question about how voters feel about gerrymandering – the drawing of legislative districts to give a political party an advantage for holding power. Recent polling has shown as much.
“Ohio voters are opposed to gerrymandering across the board. Period,” J. Cherie Strachan, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, said in an interview.
But that by itself wasn’t enough to guarantee passage.
Supporters of the issue had condemned the ballot language as confusing, labeling it as an attempt by Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose to undercut the chances of passage.
That could have caused some to vote no, thinking they were opposing gerrymandering, or prompted others to decide it was just too confusing to support, Strachan said.
That kind of confusion would feed into an axiom about all ballot issues, said Justin Buchler, an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University.
“As a general rule, the default vote in a ballot proposition is ‘no,’” Buchler said. “Voters get frustrated and confused and they defaulted to no.”
Constitutional amendments approved overwhelmingly in 2015 and 2018 were supposed to end gerrymandering and promote fairer redistricting in Ohio. Yet when the Ohio Redistricting Commission put the new system to the test after the 2020 census, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled seven times that maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
Ultimately, the Republican-dominated commission ran out the clock and unconstitutional maps were used in the 2022 elections.
“Issue 1 was an attempt to fix the last fix,” Buchler said. He suspects some voters remember that.
“There are going to be voters who have some memory of previous reforms,” Buchler said. Their attitude toward whether Issue 1 would end gerrymandering may well have been “That’s what you said last time, and it was a disaster. Why should I trust you this time?”
That distrust likely turned some votes against Issue 1, Buchler said.
Partisanship also could have shown up for voters who printed out voting guides.
“If people were using a sample ballot, if they downloaded a Republican ballot, that might have contributed, too,” Strachan said. “They would look at the sample ballot and just have gone straight down the line.”
For those voters, opposition from advocates and social media posts from Trump urging defeat of the issue might have contributed.
Political consultant Brenton Temple, who managed Gov. Mike DeWine’s re-election campaign, suggested the proponents of Issue 1 had a messaging problem.
“I think a lot of times, Democrats get caught in the weeds trying to explain things that the average voter doesn’t understand, and the average voter doesn’t understand gerrymandering,” Temple said.
“There’s probably a better message that could have been used, especially with the amount of money that they had,” Temple said. “They went into the intricacies of how the districts are drawn and kind of what redistricting is, and what all of that means. It’s not a good elevator pitch, which is what a TV ad needs to be. A cleaner message is probably (that) elected officials shouldn’t be picking their voters.”
With Issue 1’s defeat, the question now is what happens next.
Former Ohio Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who helped lead the Issue 1 campaign, said Tuesday the fight isn’t over.
“We have built something lasting, and we will continue to hold those in power accountable,” O’Connor said. “Our opponents may have won this round, but we are not defeated.”
Buchler said it seems clear that voters want some kind of fix, but what that is remains unclear. The problem with redistricting, he said, is that everything is based on trade offs. There’s no solving all the problems.
Strachen suggested that proponents might want to consider the timing of an issue, shooting for an election that won’t have as big a draw as a presidential contest. That might avoid no votes from low-interest voters who don’t always cast ballots in off-elections and might vote straight tickets.
Another possibility, she said, is that DeWine could take up the issue, trying to convince the General Assembly to take action.
In July, DeWine expressed opposition to Issue 1’s approach, instead suggesting a plan used in Iowa would be a better solution.
“Whether Mike DeWine can deliver on that remains to be seen,” she said.
Statehouse reporter Jeremy Pelzer contributed to this report.