A Revolution in Ohio
We’ve lost democracy in Ohio. Where next?
By Luke Carroll ‘26
In Columbus, Ohio, a revolution is being waged proudly in the Statehouse. It is at once being executed with a wanton destruction of democratic norms and institutions, incoherent political nihilism, and blithe crudeness—but also sophisticated, surgical attacks on Ohio’s bureaucracy and the custodians of its elections. This is the democracy denial regime. The corrosive ideology has penetrated so deeply into the corpus of Ohioan government that it has become hard to fathom how the remaining democratic limbs could salvage the rest.
Ohio has been a swing state for most of the last fifty years and therefore a major draw for presidential campaigning and PAC money directed toward House and Senate candidates. President Trump recaptured Ohio in 2016 and 2020 after Obama won the state the previous two elections, though with razor-thin margins. A close division between Democrats and Republicans in the voting electorate might, prima facie, lead one to conclude that the same is true of Ohio’s Statehouse––that the parties are in approximate balance. Harboring that impression would be a mistake.
Republicans dominate the Senate 25 to 8 and the House 64 to 35, enough for a veto-proof majority in both chambers. This is not to say Republicans in the legislature need a veto-proof majority; Governor Mike DeWine enthusiastically shares their politics. And these are not “mainstream” Republicans, either (although the “mainstream” Republican is an endangered creature, is it not?).
Take one prominent Republican lawmaker—a (former) emergency room doctor—who claimed that “colored people” are more likely to catch COVID-19 because they do not “wash their hands as well.” He is now the chair of the Senate Health Committee. Or take state Representative Jean Schmidt, who, when defending an anti-abortion bill that would require even a 13-year-old rape victim to carry a baby to term, called such a hypothetical pregnancy “an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is.” That was May 2022. Two months later, a 10-year-old victim of rape in Cleveland was denied an abortion and forced to leave the state for a potentially life-saving intervention—because of the bill Rep. Schmidt defended. U.S. Representative Jim Jordan (OH-04) called the story of the victim “another lie” before removing the Tweet.
Their extreme remarks are buttressed by radical policy proposals that have little basis in public opinion and fight on the imaginary fronts of the culture war. In June, the House and Senate passed a bill, signed into law weeks later by Governor DeWine, that reduced the training for teachers to open-carry firearms in school from 750 hours to become an “officer of the peace” to just two hours of hands-on instruction plus some scenario-based lessons. Another bill bans transgender female athletes from competing with other girls in high school sports in a stroke of truly shameless cruelty.
Meanwhile, corruption runs rampant and yet, remarkably, below the national radar. A current case involves First Energy, which is alleged by the FBI to have bribed Republican lawmakers with $61 million for a state bailout worth nearly a billion dollars. Most of the money is said to have been paid to House Speaker Larry Householder, while a number of lobbyists (one who committed suicide in the scandal’s aftermath) and Republican officials have been implicated and charged as well. Householder only upholds tradition in this respect, though—just four years ago, House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger resigned after the FBI raided his home due to a bribery and extortion scandal.
All of this is only a partial list of Ohio Republican exploits in the past few years. But here is the catch—they’re winning.
The turn to conservative extremism, corruption, nihilism, and functional simony in the legislature is breathtaking, partly because of its ferocious speed. Only 12 years ago, Democrats controlled both the House and the governor’s mansion. But it is clear that this state is no longer open for free and fair democratic competition.
Ohio represented the playbook for successful partisan gerrymandering following the 2010 Census. Like most states, the state and federal electoral maps in Ohio are set by members of the legislature, not an independent commission. When Republicans re-drew the map in 2011 (one year on from winning the House), it guaranteed their steady control of the statehouse. One census on, and emboldened by a conspiratorial anti-establishment attitude, Republicans have packed Democrats into just three, densely blue Congressional districts (of sixteen) and modified the state district map to maintain their political ascendance.
To present a sense of how extreme this latest map is, the Ohio Supreme Court (led by an elected Republican majority, one of whom is Governor DeWine's son) has rejected it twice, first rejecting an even more extreme version that Republicans put forth and the League of Women Voters of Ohio challenged. But the newest variety of conservative leadership has an appetite for provocation and authoritarianism, and the Ohio Supreme Court does not have an army to enforce its rulings. So why comply? The answer, to Ohio Republicans, is no reason at all, and so the 2022 state and federal elections were brazenly carried out on the second, illegal Republican map to Republican benefit.
The case of Ohio in the current decade is especially frightening (or, to a certain wing of a certain party, promising) because it makes bare the fragility of our democratic institutions. What, really, will stop Ohio’s Republicans? Will Republicans in other states behave similarly, given the political fortune that awaits them if they succeed?
It is tempting to end the story with an optimistic sermon. Something along the lines of, “citizen ballot initiatives can be proposed to replace the maps, and that can put an end to this coup d’etat.” But that was tried before (in Ohio in 2012), and it failed. And even if it were to succeed, who’s to say that this rogue crew of antidemocratic insurgents would listen? These are devoted pioneers in breaking the conventions of history, law, and democratic practice as a means to an ideological end. Their capacity to constantly reinvent and reapply their destructive methods is perhaps the only unsurprising thing about them.
In a different era, the federal government could intervene to end the subversion of democracy and take temporary, nonpartisan control of the election process in the state. It could do this by subjecting a state to federal approval for election changes, so long as that state’s elections were deemed to be operated unconstitutionally beforehand. After all, that is the federal government’s constitutional mandate—to set and maintain the guardrails of the democratic process in the states. That ephemeral moment in our history was 1965 to 2013, before the U.S. Supreme Court gutted enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby v. Holder decision.
Although the Court has not (yet) ruled the process of federal “takeovers” of unfair state elections as unconstitutional, it did strike down the formula used to determine which states were conducting their elections illegally. To regain the federal prerogative, Congress and the President would need to approve a new, likely more permissive formula.
So that’s it—that’s our recourse. The possibility of restoring the Voting Rights Act, if Democrats control the House, if Democrats command a 60-member Senate majority or abolish the filibuster, if the presidency remains under Democratic control, and if, when challenged, the law stands up to the most zealously conservative Supreme Court in nearly a century.
Republicans know this and won’t allow it to happen without staging a vicious resistance that, if our present politics are any indicator, will win (or has already won). The insurgency may gain even more federal ground, too—by summer 2023, the Supreme Court will release its holding in Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina case litigating the Independent State Legislature theory. If the court were to side with the tar heel legislature, it would effectively eliminate all judicial review of state elections laws.
Jill Lepore, Harvard professor and columnist for The New Yorker, writes of the “paradox of democracy” that “the best way to defend it is to attack it.” Lepore qualifies a defense of democracy through criticism, protest, and reform. But imagine a more literal interpretation—is the only adequate defense against an insurgent democratic takeover to respond (sort of) in kind? This was Lincoln’s defense of democracy during the Civil War, through the arrest of dissenters and suspension of habeas corpus. It took the shape of Wilson’s restrictions on speech and “sedition” during the First World War. How much will have to be at stake, in our time, before we take the leap toward corrective action?