By Chris Satullo
I was born in Ohio. I was raised in Ohio. Ohio will always have a piece of my heart. Which is why the political turn my home state has taken in the last two decades – from deep purple to apparently solid red – has made my soul ache while baffling my brain.
How did the state that once raised up sensible Dems like John Glenn, Jack Gilligan, Louis Stokes and my childhood congressman, Charlie Vanik, end up as stone-cold MAGA territory? I still don’t know the full answer.
But now I glimpse fresh hope of improvement.
This week, the state’s Republicans, operating with the sense of impunity that is a hallmark of the MAGA bubble, tried to slip one past Ohio voters. With an eye on a state abortion-rights referendum coming up in November, the GOP moguls tried to change the rules for that vote at the last minute, in the dead of summer. They sought to sneak through a change in a 112-year-old state rule, the one that says a simple majority – 50 percent plus 1 – can vote to change the state’s constitution.
The geniuses in the GOP strategy bunker pushed for a stealthy August referendum, one seeking to raise the bar to 60 percent – even though they themselves had recently pushed through a ban on such low-turnout summer elections. For this one, they created a one-time exemption.
Hypocrisy, much?
Dick has already analyzed here the blowout that occurred Tuesday – a 57 to 43 percent voter tsunami against the proposed change, with a robust turnout of 37 percent, nearly four times the norm for these August elections in the Buckeye State.
And Dick properly put it in the context of the recent wave of state-level triumphs for Dems in any election where abortion rights were either directly – or perceived to be – on the ballot. Several of those votes occurred in states that went for Trump in either 2016 or 2020 – Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as Ohio. Moreover, a Washington Post analysis found that the abortion rights side in six recent state referenda outpolled Joe Biden’s 2020 performance in 500 out of 510 counties, often by wide margins. In counties where Trump won in 2020, 81 showed majorities supporting abortion rights.
Still liking that Dobbs decision, Conservatism Inc.?
Dick covered all that, though, in his post. I just want to add one point that is less obvious, but still crucial:
Writing for The Bulwark, an Ohio-based journalist named Daniel McGraw detected this theme while doing dozens of voter interviews outside polls in Northeast Ohio. A thirtyish art teacher told him: “As I thought about this vote more and more, what they were trying to do and the way they were trying to do it, it was just kind of creepy.”
She continued, “The feeling I am getting is that they thought most people were too dumb to figure out anything and that they could just walk all over all of us as if that is just how this world of politics works.”
Another voter told McGraw that this stealth election was “the most below-the-belt’ political maneuver he’d ever seen.
So, yeah, for many, upholding abortion rights was the dominant reason to vote. But even for them, and for another chunk who might not have shown up to vote just about abortion, this sense of political foul play and disrespect for voters was a huge motivating factor.
You think the rules don’t apply to you? You think we’re too dumb to see what you’re up to? Well, think again. And screw you!
This GOP miscalculation – and similar ones MAGA world is churning out these days – is rooted in a hyped-up sense of existential crisis.
The “Flight 93 election” nonsense of 2016 lives on – and ramifies. It is larded onto everything that the legal apologist for Jan. 6, John Eastman, said in his own defense in a recent lengthy video interview. To Eastman and many others on the right, the “radical left” – meaning normal, left-of-center Americans like Biden, like me, probably like you if you’re reading this – are out to “destroy America” and “eradicate us.” In this usage, “us” apparently means any white person who votes R, hums along to Jason Aldean and doesn’t like to think about slavery.
This bogus sense of threat is deployed to justify any legal mumbo-jumbo, lie, dirty trick, unconstitutional maneuver or outright exhortation to political violence that someone like Eastman can concoct.
Things are supposedly so dire in America – hidden somewhere beneath all the rising employment and working class incomes, the sunny days for Wall Street, the repaired roads and new bridges, the investments in home-grown tech and clean energy – that you can waive the Constitution at will. That is, if (and only if) you’re a white conservative. In that case, legitimate election results you dislike can simply be ignored, and civil war fomented.
Inside the MAGA bubble, this is a gospel now taken more seriously than anything in the actual Gospels that Jesus inspired.
But outside it, even in places like Montana, Kansas and my beloved Ohio, moderates and independents, not just progressives, are beginning to craft a response to this lawless nonsense:
Huh? What? Unh-uh, we don’t think so.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia