Jane Mayer on Ohio’s Lurch to the Right

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

Last month, the story of a 10-year-old rape victim captured national headlines. The young girl was forced to travel out of state because of Ohio’s draconian abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, which would have been nearly unthinkable until very recently. Jane Mayer took a deep dive into statehouse politics to learn how a longtime swing state—Ohio voted twice for President Barack Obama—ended up legislating like a radically conservative one. Its laws, she says, are increasingly out of step with the state’s voters, and this is owing to a sweeping Republican effort at gerrymandering. While familiar, gerrymandering “has become much more of a dark art,” Mayer tells David Remnick, “thanks to computers and digital mapping. They have figured out ways now to do it that are so extreme, you can create districts [in which the incumbent] cannot be knocked out by someone from another party.” Mayer also speaks with David Pepper, an Ohio politician and the author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” who explains how a district is firmly controlled by one party, the representative is driven by the primary process inexorably toward extremism, until you have “a complete meltdown of democracy.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.3	The state of Ohio is moving steadily to the right.
0:17.1	Its draconian abortion ban has no exceptions for rape or incest, which would have been nearly
0:22.3	unthinkable until very recently. Last month, Ohio's ban forced a 10-year-old victim of rape
0:28.5	to travel out of the state to end that pregnancy. So how did Ohio, formerly a swing state that
0:34.7	voted for President Obama twice, shifts so decisively to the right.
0:39.7	That's the subject of a report in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, a longtime staff writer.
0:46.0	Jane, you've been a political reporter for a while based in Washington.
0:50.0	What drew you to this deep dive into Ohio politics?
0:54.5	Well, Ohio's been seen forever as the bellwether state in America.
0:58.9	So what happens there is very important determining presidential elections
1:02.8	and also in kind of giving us a temperature on what's happening in the country.
1:08.0	Now, a lot of change seems to be happening there.
1:10.3	We thought of it always
1:11.1	as a swing state for the longest time, and now it's solidly in Republican control. To what
1:17.6	extent are voters changing their opinions ideologically? And to what extent is this due to other
1:23.7	factors like redistricting? Well, this was what was so interesting to me was that the state has a reputation for having
1:31.0	relatively moderate, slightly conservative voters. It's not an extreme state. It was a state that
1:37.0	went for Obama twice and then went for Trump twice. What's interesting is it's legislating,
1:42.2	out of its state legislature, in a way that a study found was more conservative than South Carolina.
1:49.5	So the government seems to be out of kilter with the population.
	...

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