 Good evening. Hi, everyone. My name is Kelly Brotton and on behalf of Scott Seaman, Dean of the Libraries, I'd like to welcome you all to Authors at Alden this evening. Thank you. So I would like to get started with the program and introduce our special guests starting with our special faculty interviewer, Dr. Thomas Settis. Dr. Settis is the professor of journalism. Sorry. It teaches here at Ohio University and received his Bachelor of Art in journalism from the Ohio State University, his Master of Science in 2002 from Ohio University and a certificate in Contemporary History and a PhD from Ohio University. I wanted to mention that at Ohio State University he was the editor of his school newspaper. In 2014 he was elected to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame by the members of the press club of Cleveland. He continues to write as a journalist for the plain dealer, the Dayton Daily News and the Columbus Dispatch. And our special author this evening, the author of, I have the book here, The Bellwether, if you haven't read it, it's a great read. Why Ohio Picks the President, Kyle Condick, also a graduate of Ohio University from the School of Journalism and a former editor of The Post. He's now director of communications at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. He's previously served as the director of policy and research for former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray and he's worked in newspapers in Northeast Ohio. He's been on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC and has given speeches at the U.S. Department of State and for the National Governors Association among other groups. He's originally from the Cleveland area and now lives in Washington, D.C. and says his experiences here at Ohio University helped prepare him for his career as a reporter and political analyst. So welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction. I appreciate everybody being here this evening. Thank you for your interest in what is proving to be one of the most unusual political years in recent United States history. Speak as someone who can actually remember Adelaide Stevenson and Harry S. Truman in a parade in Youngstown in the 1950s. Being a receiving class to mind, Ohio used founders aimed to school Ohioans in citizenship. The university seal bears the words religio doctrina civillitas religion learning civility and it's hard to imagine a place in this campus that better exemplifies learning and in my experience civility than does Alden. Religious pluralism is also a fact of life in Athens and in our country. Now it's true the university seal has three additional words on it which are pre omnibus virtus that is virtue before all things. But given this year's presidential campaigns we'll have to seek virtue and other facets of American life I suspect this evening as well as the next few months. So I am very glad to see Kyle here again. I was telling him earlier he'd be a good candidate for doctoral work here at this university because he finished his book in about a year's time even less than that maybe and most Ph.D. people like yours truly take a lot longer to get done. So I'd like to get started right off and say if I understand correctly this thesis of your book is there are characteristics about Ohio that make Ohio a unique kind of litmus paper or die marker for the presidential election. What do you say about that? What is it what is it what's the record of Ohio in terms of being correct or accurate? First of all you knew there'd be a building named after him but of course the library was a special honor. So a few points about Ohio. Ohio has this very remarkable record of voting with the presidential winner. It's voted with the presidential winner in 28 of the last 30 elections. It went back to 1896. That's the best record of any state over that time period and also Ohio is typically voted only about two points off the national average on average in those 30 elections which is also by far the best record of any of any state in that time period. So there are a few reasons why I think Ohio is this bellwether state and before I go to them I want to explain what a bellwether actually when a bellwether actually is and that's on the cover of my book here and so you probably know the term bellwether as a leading indicator or a trend but what a bellwether actually is is a sheep with a bell around its neck. That's why I have a sheep on the cover of my book and if you are mining the flock and you hear the bell you know where the flock is and the bellwether is typically castrated to make it more docile and so I just this imagery of this poor castrated sheep leading around the flock and you're talking about that with presidential elections it's kind of amusing I think. So a few reasons for why I think Ohio is this bellwether state. The first reason is that while Ohio was the 17th state to enter the the union in 1803 it actually some people refer to it as quote the first American state and that is because it was a good kind of melting pot for the rest of the country as it was back in 1808 in the early 1800s so where I'm from and where where Tom is from up in northeast Ohio Tom's from Youngstown I'm from the greater Cleveland area that was part of the Connecticut Western Reserve which was land that was part of Connecticut before it became part of Ohio a lot of people who settled in Connecticut or I'm sorry in in the western reserve are we're from Connecticut or from New England and so there's this kind of New England kind of Yankee character to the northeast. Southwest Ohio was the Virginia military district which was land reserved for revolutionary war veterans from Virginia and so in the southwestern part of the state you have a lot of people from the southwest and others filled in throughout the rest of the state the middle part of the state had a lot of people from the mid-Atlantic and Pennsylvania and so you can kind of look at American politics as this almost this battle between north and south the party identification of the various parts of the country have changed over time the north used to be very republican after the civil war the party of Abraham Lincoln the south was very democratic and then the party party labels kind of switched but the basic kind of battle between north and south remained and Ohio was a kind of a battleground between north and south it had some north in it it had some south in it and none of those particular regions dominated which I think has sort of tethered the state to the national voting for so long so that's sort of that's a big part I think of the of the the Ohio story and why it's this bellwether state. There are some factors though that make maybe influence this year's polling and decision-making that Ohio is different in some respects is it not in terms of its characteristics socioeconomically in terms of both ethnicity and maybe educational levels. Yeah so if if there's you know Ohio I think just generally throughout its history been a been a good melting pot for the nation and been demographically reflective of the nation but at the moment it is a little bit different for the nation in that it is considerably wider than the nation the national electorate it's going to be somewhere in the you know 70 percent to 72 percent white Ohio is more like about 80 percent white while Ohio has an african-american population it's basically roughly the same as the national average about 12 or 13 percent and that shows up in the electorate too. Ohio has below average percentages of far below average percentages of hispanic americans and asian americans and given racial disparities in how people vote whites voted about 60 percent to 40 percent for mit romney in 2012 non-white voters so african-americans asian americans spanish americans they voted about 80 to 20 for obama in 2012 so since ohio is less is is less diverse than the nation that may make it a little bit more republican and also in this particular election you have a situation where there's a this growing education gap in amongst the white vote and so the basically college educated whites i mean white white voters again generally republican college educated whites are a little bit more resistant to mit rom or to donald trump than they are to other republican previous republican nominees and non-college educated whites seem to be more open to trump than uh than previous republican nominees and ohio's white population is basically less educated overall than the nation is and so that's a benefit i think for for trump in this election and there's several other states that are remotely in the same league of predictability as ohio was about the presidency not as good as ohio but somewhere pretty decently so it used to be that illinois and missouri both had really remarkable very good records of being bellwether states but they kind of and of course you know i talk about a mix of north versus south illinois and missouri are that way too yeah in fact that you know missouri was a you know big battle battleground in the civil war and all that but uh what has happened is that illinois is sort of trended democratic over time because of the dominance of the city of chicago and it's immensely democratic immense democratic strength in that giant city which is much bigger than any of the cities we have here in ohio and more democratic than any of the cities we have in ohio and missouri uh basically missouri uh white voters they're increasingly vote like voters and white voters in the south very much more republican and conservative than white voters in the rest of the country including ohio and missouri doesn't have the you know it has kansas city and st louis but those places are not as democratic necessarily as some other big cities uh and they're just they kind of get swamped by the rest of the state um other states that have a a good record of voting with the presidential winner are our nevada and new mexico two states out west however uh those states have so few electoral votes ohio is 18 nevada only has six new mexico has five uh that they are not they're typically not decisive in presidential elections because uh they're so small but uh nevada of all the states may have a maybe kind of the best uh reflection of the national racial makeup of any of the states but uh but again those are states that also often vote for the winner but they're not as big as ohio and therefore not as important speaking of ohio being kind of a do you use an unoriginal term a mosaic or a real variety of humanity and also industry and economic attainments uh you recently had the opportunity to compare in contrast to starkly different counties one of which is i think has one of the highest educational levels of any county in the state another which is really a struggling kind of post industrial counties struggling with whatever we're all struggling with economically you talk about the contrast between those two what they are and what the contrast are between those two counties so yeah i did a uh two-part series that i participated in with pbs news hour um and we were in uh delaware county which is suburban columbus the county directly north of of franklin county in columbus uh and then we were in trumbel county which is where the city of warren is and it's a basically greater youngstown um and part of the mahoning valley and the counties are in some ways kind of mere opposites in that uh uh trumbel voted about 60 for obama in 2012 delaware voted about 60 for romney in 2012 delaware has a very long history of voting republican in fact uh it's the uh it has a longest streak of voting republican of any county in the state going all the way back to 1916 whereas trumbel is is usually significantly more democratic than the state um delaware is the wealthiest county in ohio it is the most educated county in ohio by a lot more than half of the uh adults over 25 in that county have a college degree it's by far the highest there's no county even over 40 percent um and it's the fastest growing county in ohio had something like 50 000 residents in 1980 and now it has almost 200 000 um trumbel on the other hand is kind of middle of the road education wise uh income or basically below the state the state average um economically been struggling for a long time and it's declining in population to the point where trumbel and delaware are both going to cast about roughly 100 000 votes a piece in this election um in the primary uh delaware was donald trump's worst county in the whole state and uh john casick wanted overwhelmingly in fact john casick actually lives in delaware county he doesn't live in the governor's mansion he lives in southern delaware county i forget exactly the the town but um and in trumbel county that was trump's second best county in the whole state so what we may see what i think we should look at is that here we have a traditionally democratic um as you say post industrial county that's kind of struggling where trump may be able to do better than republicans typically do and here we have delaware county traditionally republican but a place where maybe hillary clinton does a little bit better than democrats typically do because of the uh dislike that some of the kind of high-end republicans have uh for trump and so if you maybe if you look at those two counties as as as we recently did um if you sort of just knew the results of those two counties and nothing else about ohio that may give you a pretty good a pretty good uh census to which way the election is going what sort of changes we saw in seeing those places you touched on something i think we're all interested in i'm generally about this whole question again and it partly your research at the university of virginia's center for politics and also you're on the ground experience of ohio you mentioned trumbel county there has been at least a a theory among a lot of observers that the trump message may appeal more than one might expect to blue collar ohio is who otherwise might be straight democratic ticket voters what do you think of that assertion and what's the evidence show so um what's interesting about trump is that he's different from regular republicans in a lot of ways and and one way that is true is that trump is kind of an anti free trade populist he's anti anti internationalist anti globalist and that kind of message has been a big message in northeast ohio and the mahogany valley in particular really for a very long time i mean some parts of mahogany county or mahogany the mahogany valley um basically have been struggling economically since the late 1970s when you know steel some steel production went away and some other kind of heavy industry uh went away and then in the nineties you had the north american free trade agreement um which was uh very divisive of course bill clinton signed that donald trump actually brought up nafta in the debate last night as a mistake from the from the clinton years and what's interesting is that it's almost like democrats are kind of getting a taste of their own medicine up in the mahogany valley right now because democrats are used to running on um anti free trade sentiment in that part of the state and trump is arguably even better messenger for the anti free trade message uh than many democrats are and some of you may remember or know of jim traficant jim traficant was a congressman from the youngstown area for a very long time in some ways he was he was kind of a precursor to trump in that he was anti immigration um anti free trade uh let's just say he was a little rough around the edges maybe yeah kind of like the republican nominee uh and some people are very comfortable with that and i think a lot of people in that region were comfortable with that and um traficant eventually ended up going to jail uh or some corruption stuff and um died a couple years ago after he had uh got out of jail but i think that there might be some traficant in trump and maybe that provides a clue as to maybe what's happening up there but you know there's there's so much it it's kind of difficult to know what's going to happen i mean there are some observers who think that um trump is going to win some counties up there like trumbull county and mohonin county that obama got over 60 of the vote in um that to me seems like a very dramatic change in an electorate that where there actually seems to be a pretty high level of party unity as measured by polls uh i i have my i have a hard time kind of imagining that dramatic of a change but trump's going to do better up there than republicans typically do i think speaking of places that can't change and not just uh up in the northeast uh i think in 1960 i know in 1960 when john kennedy campaigned in central ohio i'm not your Mrs in theater whites books or otherwise john kennedy said about columbus he said i never got more applause or fewer votes anywhere in america than in columbus ohio and yet now columbus and franklin county have changed quite a bit have they not what are the patterns there about the changing presidential patterns in central ohio so it's really interesting that that you know the path to victory for democrats in the state used to be basically running up the store in northeast ohio and then uh getting a substantial number of votes here in southeast ohio and of course athens is still very strongly democratic a lot of other places in the southeast not so much but the democrats have maybe lost some in appellation ohio but they've added this new big prize and that's franklin county um franklin county i don't know if it if it is the most populous county in the state now over kayahoga very close and within the next probably 10 years or something it's going to be casting the most votes in the state um for 100 years kayahoga counties cast the most votes in the state and basically every urban county in the whole country has been trending democratic over the last 20 or 30 years um very few of them even there are still a few uh i mean obama won 46 of the 50 most populous counties across the country franklin is one of them uh and some of the holdouts include orange county california which in some in some sense is sort of the birthplace of the conservative movement um and but even orange county might vote for clinton this time instead of voting republican because it's been trending that way and basically what you have is that big urban counties are younger more diverse generally a little bit more educated um and all of those factors kind of suggest voting for democrats a lot of big urban counties franklin county of course is one of them have big universities big universities of course are very democratic and you sort of put all those factors together and it explains not not only why franklin county has moved democratic but even hamilton county where sincennady is which was one of the core republican urban counties in the whole country uh even it voted for obama twice and it hadn't voted democratic since linda johnson and johnson won almost every county in the state because he won in such a landslide what does your research on ohio which is really impressive by the way the book is really excellent i'm not wanting to say that if i didn't believe it about co-tail effects meaning that um the theory is that the presidential nominee of a given party does really well he or she will then his or her co-tails will then bring in lower down ticket people to get in the public office as well what does your sense of ohio's politics say about the co-tail theory um i think that it is very important uh typically and it's so interesting in this in this presidential election year we also have a senate race in ohio republican rob portman is running portman uh ran for first ran in 2010 which was a great year to be a republican um republicans swept the house that year also won several new senate seats and portman won in a in a walk and it looked like portman was gonna have a very tough race this year in part because the idea was that trump might drag him down um but portman has done a great job of basically creating a crossover vote um for him which actually is odd because uh you don't basically presidential and senate results are increasingly correlated in american across the whole country um and there's just been a general kind of trend away from ticket splitting and yet portman is sort of the exception to the rule because i think he's run a really good campaign and i also think that the democratic nominee former governor ted strickland um you know he unfortunately for him was in office during the economic crisis of 2008 uh he lost to john casick the current governor in a very tough race in 2010 and basically what the portman people did is they just dusted off the old opposition research file that the casick people had created on portman and uh and they just are sorry i'm on strickland uh and uh just started to use all that stuff against strickland and i think it's been very effective um and uh you know it this this feels like something of a missed opportunity for the democrats because potentially a stronger nominee um might have been able to you know match clinton's vote and if clinton won the state then clinton could drag that person over the finish line but that may not be the case this time on that front uh as you know and i witnessed myself if you were to ask republicans around last Thanksgiving last christmas last new year's maybe even last october a year ago october uh what my portman's prospects were uh they were concerned about because his near recognition was not as great as you'd think for united states senator statewide and that they was going to be a close one thing they thought and i'm not saying they were willing to think that they would not underestimate these are people that were not public figures they were people nuts and bolts of the party and just i think the last day or so senator for politics has said what about the Ohio senate race we moved it to safe republican which is so we don't think that we basically don't give strickland any chance to win so um and we have we actually have the state as as leaning to trump right now we did a big revision of our ratings about 10 days ago and for the reasons that i outlined those demographic reasons and also historical reasons um so i mentioned that ohio's voted for the winner 28 to 30 elections um and you've probably heard the factoid that ohio uh has a republican uh has never been elected president without winning ohio which is true so if you go back to the start of the current two-party era which starts in 1856 you have 40 presidential elections in that time ohio votes for the winner and 35 of them and the five times that ohio doesn't vote for the winner it supports a losing republican over a winning democrat and while i said that ohio typically votes pretty close to the national average to the extent that it deviates from the national average it's typically in a republican direction so you add the history to the demographics that i described earlier and i think that i don't necessarily know who's going to win the state but i think trump will do better in ohio than he does nationally for those two reasons and again that would not be all that strange for a republican uh i think in the time period that i that i really focus on in the book the last 30 elections going back to 1896 when ohio and william mckinley won the white house for the first time ohio was more republican than the nation in 24 of those 30 elections uh than six times it was it was more democratic so generally a little bit more uh a little bit more republican you know the numbers far better than i could ever hope to but uh it was always sad that one of the ways in which jimmy carter won very narrowly actually in 1976 was support in southeast ohio and i think those numbers that's probably a fair assumption what do the patterns in southeast ohio suggest about given the presidents carrying ohio in uh 08 and 12 and now a really hot erase going this year what are the prospects in southeast ohio for the two parties and presidentially right now so jimmy carter and bill clinton did really well in southeast ohio and um there is a little bit of a kind of a southern character to that part of the state particularly in terms of in terms of religion it's probably in terms of uh it's probably the most white evangelical christian part of the state either that or southwest ohio and both carter carter is a white evangelical christian himself and bill clinton um probably not as religious as carter is but he certainly could speak that language when he when he ran for president in 92 and 96 and so carter and clinton won a lot of the counties in southeast ohio which helped them in carter only won the state by i think a quarter of a percentage point in 1976 and southeast ohio was crucial then clinton won the state by i think about two points in 92 and then 96 wasn't particularly competitive but clinton won a lot of the counties in this region too but all of the Appalachian region is sort of trended against the democrats in recent years and while it's tempting to say um i think for democrats that oh well it's because brock obama is black and they're being racist or something like that the truth is that the trend starts before obama it's it's a um basically a lot of appalachia started to trend against the democrats in 2000 i think part of it was that um algore was a democratic nominee um and i think algore's signature issue probably is environmentalism if you had to name one issue uh and you know coal is very important if not necessarily for jobs anymore in ohio we were just talking about this earlier coal is really not a big employer at all in ohio anymore it's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three thousand jobs um but uh culturally coal is important in a lot of that part of the state and in appalachia as a whole and i think that the democrats were seen as being sort of anti coal which is which uh you know might say more things about um or broader things about being sort of hostile to a regional culture and so for instance west virginia which is the only state that is wholly in classified by the federal government is appalachia um west virginia as recently as 1988 voted for michael dukakis uh in a year that michael dukakis got crushed nationally and by 2000 it was voting for george w bush after supporting clinton quite comfortably in in 92 and 96 and you know southeast ohio is kind of like west virginia um that whole region just started to to trend away from democrats to the point where um the only uh southeast ohio county that obama won was right here in athens of course um and athens is an outlier from from the rest of southeast ohio um for because of the university basically in the in the college town it's an outlier of the rest of the world i sometimes think i was called the people's republic of athens yeah that's outside to outside audiences but one of the things that i think we can all agree on as a matter who's elected president november he or she is going to have to deal with congress and as we know the congressional tactic seems to be right now to be you do nothing as little as possible with the party of the president as the other party uh what does it speaking for the moment nationwide what does the center um for politics um at the university of virginia see the national picture on control of the u.s. house and control of the u.s. senate so it looks pretty likely that republicans will maintain control of the u.s. house uh right now the republicans have 247 seats that is the biggest republican house majority since 1928 right before the great depression when uh you know right after that the republican party i think after 1930 the republicans control the house for all of four years four years out of 60 or something like that's quite there's 64 i think so uh we're at a we're at a fairly high watermark for republican control in the house democrats just for sort of um there's been some redistricting ordered by the courts in certain states that have created slightly better districts for democrats in places like virginia and florida so that'll lead to a few seat gains for democrats in the house but really we're probably looking only a democratic gain of maybe 10 to 15 seats in the 30 to win that to win the house so republicans look pretty solid there and then i would think that probably whoever wins the presidency will probably also narrowly carry the senate uh because a lot of the key senate races are in swing states uh of course we don't think ohio is this particularly competitive anymore but ohio will be a swing state in the presidential election uh but probably more important are uh the two states bordering us to the west and the east uh indiana which will vote for trump but where former senator evan by is running uh as democrat um by decided to retire in 2010 made a lot of money for himself as a uh government affairs person to put it lightly uh and then he is um trying to run for senate again as democrat in uh potentially challenging circumstances and then in pennsylvania to our east uh where senator pat to me is trying to run for a second term as republican uh and there's a number of other key races across the country but most of them are in the key presidential states and uh given what we know about the lack of split ticket voting and again ohio is an exception right now but in a lot of states there's a lot of there's not much difference between how trump is doing and how like say pat to me is doing in pennsylvania so i would think that um the presidential and senate results will mirror each other mirror them each other in in certain states uh and that the presidential winner probably will have a very very narrow majority in the senate imagine it's election night which i don't want to think about right not too much anyway and you are not as you will be watching all 50 states or at least all of the states are really competitive and you are only watching ohio and like all of us will be at least initially before we look at the national picture you indicated through your book and i think his book by the way i think establishes that we'll be in contestable ohio really is an indicator state a bellwether state within ohio are there certain counties that if we're in election night we should look at and say well these aren't bad indicators of what where things are going with the state which would you suggest they'd be so i i do think that you know that the trends in places like trumbel and delaware that i mentioned earlier are interesting even though historically those states are not what you'd consider to be bellwether counties within the state because trombel is very democratic delaware is very republican the traditional bellwether counties in the state include a stark which is where canton is and in fact there's this kind of funny story about how stark was played in the minds of of national reporters and that is that in the night in 1996 election there was a reporter from the new york times named michael wineryp who moved his family to canton and wrote a bunch of stories about the about about life in canton for the new york times they were reprinted in the local newspaper the canton repository and actually the people in canton were pretty impressed by wineryp because he you know he wasn't just coming in and sort of you know flying in from the big city and making fun of the small town folk and what happened was is there a bunch of people in later elections who basically kind of tried to copy wineryp in fact the the editor of the repository called it the wineryp effect and you had all these you had all these national reporters sort of parachuting into stark county in 2004 covering canton and the funny thing was in 2004 stark county voter for john carrey george w bush carried the state and won the election so i would caution you about the bell weather county thing because you know it sometimes is wrong and of course ohio might be might not vote for the winner in this election um so but um but stark is an interesting place to look montgomery county where Dayton is typically just a tiny little bit more democratic than the state but a but a good indicator and i think increasingly Hamilton county where Cincinnati is is a county that's increasingly important for democrats and i think that if clinton doesn't win Hamilton county it probably means she's not going to win statewide because i think that um the way the county's been trending um obama did better there in 2012 than he did in uh in 2008 the same is true of franklin county yes the world's kind of moving toward the democrats so if they would if if frank have Hamilton would snap back to being republican for trump that would probably be a good indication that um things aren't working out for clinton statewide and and maybe even nationally too well that's yeah i wondered about that most of you know there's a lot of long-standing ties between ohio university in general and all the library particularly with southeast asia and uh kyle just came back from a kind of study or visit or a lecture visit to southeast asia to malaysia and i think singapore as well and i am curious to ask this is not strictly speaking about bellwethers what are the kinds of questions you got from people in those countries about this election or about political situation in our country sure so uh malaysia is actually a you know islamic country officially uh and there were a lot of people there who were interested in and concerned about um donald trump potentially banning muslims from entering the united states of america uh and there were particularly questions i talked to a lot of uh colleges universities over there um and people who maybe would aspire to actually go to go to the university in the united states and maybe worried that you know maybe they would come and they're not be able to or they wouldn't be able to come at all uh and so you know that was that was of a lot of concern over there um and but i i also just think more generally uh people all over the world are just very interested in this election in fact i sometimes wonder if they're more interested in it than we are that uh uh you know just that the trump thing is so fascinating and particularly over there the business community and i think a lot of the universities too are very interested in the trans-pacific partnership which is this big free trade deal and you talk about anti-free trade populism in this election both trump and clinton oppose the trans-pacific partnership rock obama supports it in fact governor kasek here in ohio uh supports it too uh but there just are not that many defenders of free trade right now um and i think that that's worrisome to certain interests over there because the tpp would include um singapore japan melasia a lot of huge trading center for real trade yeah so you know one striking thing about singapore is i was able to get up on a skyscraper there and you look out in the port i think it's the second busiest port in the world and it's just ships as far as the eye can see um and you know just you know it uh it just kind of blew my mind the uh the amount of the amount of economic activity over there and also the amount of construction all over the place but particularly in melasia where essentially the chinese are just building a bunch of condos i mean just huge complexes in fact someone was telling me that they were there's this some companies do this thing where they they they sell two for one condos you buy one in beijing and you get one in um in kuala lumpur or johar baru or some of the other cities of melasia so it was just something that you know i mostly just thinking about you know american politics and so and that's what i was talking about over there uh but it was very interesting to just see you know just see a different see things from a different kind of perspective another high angle about this election is i was checking earlier and we talked earlier i think it was i kept saying there were 90 republican candidates for the presidency there were 17 actually 98 98 all right yes and i'm not mistaken the only two of those who uh obviously mr trump got the nomination who have not endorsed trump by the tred kuzhez our governor kasek and i think former governor jeb bush in florida that's right again this is speculative is all get out which of course that's what news people sometimes engage in um what does this signal about governor kasek's possible circumstances i mean i know it's we can only theorize about that but how would he be seen by other republicans for having as far as we know standing back up from his election presidentially so what we've seen particularly recently is that trump has done a pretty good job of unifying the republican voter base um and there were some questions of whether he'd be able to do that but he's been able to uh but there are still some elite republicans holding out governor kasek is one of them jeb bush is another one uh and i would say a lot of the foreign policy establishment of the republican party just doesn't doesn't like trump i think the anti-free trade stuff is part of it uh and i also think that in some ways some of the bush administration era um foreign policy people actually think that clinton is closer to their beliefs than trump is so you know be that as it may um what um uh what what uh uh is interesting about kasek is that i think a lot of people expect him to run for president again in 2020 potentially even to primary a president trump i don't know how successful that would be but kasek is the flag bearer for the um you know kind of the never trump republican movement but it's kind of a lonely group at the moment and also if trump in fact loses the election but maybe let's say well he loses by a little or a lot whatever um i can't imagine that he would be magnanimous about it and i can't imagine uh you know i think one of the first things he would say is john kasek is the reason i lost or john kasek and his ilk are the reason i lost and you know what i think a lot of republicans would believe him so i think what kasek did in the primary i understand why he did it but you know he's a i think he's a fairly conservative republican governor of the state in fact tom you wrote when he uh took office and i think this was an excellent point that when kasek was elected in 2010 that he was arguably the most conservative person elected governor of ohio in probably a half century because he was probably more ideologically conservative than bob taft george voinevich george voinevich certainly james a rhodes in terms of our republican governors um and yet here he was trying to be the most moderate candidate in republican field which in fact he actually probably was um but running to the center in a republican party primary that is increasingly about being conservative or at least being conservative on certain important issues um doesn't seem like the right track to to win nomination however i think i think there's some historical precedent that uh that kasek might be looking at as a way to sort of justify what he's doing and that is that uh so if the republicans do lose this election they will have lost three straight presidential elections which actually an american election is kind of hard to do as a you know one party losing three straight um typically after two terms of one president the people will want to change they go to the other party and so that's why i think when this election cycle started i kind of looked at the republicans as sort of a generic favorite to win the white house um and trump may very well win anyway yeah in part because of that desire for change but uh there was another recent instance of a party losing three straight presidential elections and that was the democrats in the 1980s uh reagan killed carter in 1980 destroyed mondale in 84 and george hw bush very comfortably beat michael dukakis in uh in 1988 and i think the democrats sort of came to this realization that what they were doing was not working uh and they needed to find a new kind of candidate and there was this movement in the democratic party it's called the democratic leadership council it was basically to moderate the democratic party and the candidate that they ended up settling on was a southern governor from arkansas named bill clinton who maybe we don't think of him now as a kind of southern moderate but that's what he was when he got nominated and it worked uh and i think that maybe kasek is thinking um well in 2020 if the party has been in the wilderness for 12 years um they may decide that they need to pick someone who's more electable and that's me so um i just wonder if that's actually how it how it would shake out but that's the history that i think maybe explains it yeah actually i was with some republicans recently for it's a long story and out of central ohio and they said there's so many of the effect that uh several republican perspective governors uh in ohio should hope that um this is clinton wins because the tradition is that the second year after like in 2018 when we elect another u.s senator or senator brown will run for reelection elect all statewide elected officials governor secretary of state the other party typically does better yeah the midterm trend is very strong in american politics and that is that the midterm vote is often a protest vote against the white house and so um i think the statistic is that the president's party is lost ground in the u.s house in 36 of the 39 midterm since the civil war and that now applies to statewide offices as well so if clinton were in the white house i would think the republicans would have um maybe not a 50-50 shot to beat sherrod brown but have a decent chance to win that seat and then defeat defeat brown uh and also probably to take control of all the statewide offices again which they already control all of them you know i would i've been holding back asking you this question because i but everyone here has probably had his topic on his or her mind and given your knowledge of ohio and also the presidential campaigns in general um what was your take on the debate last night so i think when um we try to analyze debates it's it the the time right after debate and even now when really we don't have any sort of data telling us what's going on i mean there are these kind of fly-by-night insta polls that are that are conducted right after the debate saying that you know so-and-so won the debate or whatever but um so by those metrics clinton probably quote won the debate but um i think i'm also i think we also need to be cognizant of the fact that the country is so divided and there's such a cultural difference between the trump supporters and the clinton supporters in fact there's a lot of good research that basically indicates that many clinton supporters don't know a trump supporter and many trump supporters don't know a clinton supporter um that it's possible that um that someone like me who um let's face it knows a lot more clinton supporters and trump supporters um if i look at it and think that clinton win won or did better which is what i do think um that maybe i'm i'm missing some piece of it i will say this that uh i think that trump came into the debate with a couple of liabilities or there are questions about him in terms specifically in terms of whether people think he's qualified to be president or not uh majorities in polls say that they don't think that he is and so he's had to prove that uh and also questions about his his temperament and personally i did not see him uh provide any satisfactory answers to those questions of if of of qualification and temperament last night uh but i don't think we'll get a good sense of where things are at until we get like real polling which really won't be until the weekend or later when we sort of fully feel the impact of the debate but but before the debate the race was sort of falling into basically a tie or or or pretty close to a tie maybe clinton with a small advantage uh and so if i think the danger for clinton is that if she ends up not gaining any ground despite getting really good coverage and the sort of unanimous thought amongst the chattering classes that she won the debate um things might be really going haywire for her because she has been slipping quite precipitously over the past four or five weeks you mentioned something everyone here has probably paid attention to anyway and generically but as i indicated to you earlier you in a great position to answer this question to kind of be a consumers uh consumer reports for us the rest of us um on polling on websites that analyze politics which are the ones that you and your colleagues at the center for politics consider kind of the gold standard either as to polls and or as to certain political websites so a lot of people will ask uh sort of what uh what's the what are the best polls and really there are a lot of very bad polls because a lot of them are just l cheapo stuff um i would say that if you're looking for information about national trends um and uh a little bit on sort of the horse race for the for the presidential race um the pew research center does great work and they have reports on you know people's attitudes about party identification for politics and you know uh what people think about guns what people think about same-sex marriage abortion etc so if you're looking for that kind of information pew really is the best place to go for um horse race political polling uh typically what i say is is look at the averages because you know people will cherry pick polls because they're all over the place and say oh well my guys up by 20 or you're guys down by you know 15 or whatever and um what what some websites do including real clerk politics and huffington post pollster is they just average the polls they have different ways of doing it but i would recommend both real clerk politics and uh huff post pollster um i'm you you're all probably familiar with with nate silver and his 538 website um silver's model is basically a poll average um and so you'll probably get a good sense of where the polls are from from that site too although um they it's a it's a model and it kind of reports percentage chances of candidates winning individual states um there are also some people like to look at betting markets uh there's a website called predict wise um that sort of aggregates um prediction models uh predict wise is a lot more bullish on clinton um than 538 is you know we'll see who's right uh our own um center for politics crystal ball forecast we have clinton with 272 electoral votes at least leaning to her in our rankings we have i think about 50 electoral votes worth of states in the toss-up column and then we have 215 at least leaning to trump so um we still show clinton as a favorite but for much of the cycle we had clinton at around 345 electoral votes so recently we shifted a lot of those ratings toward trump but what do you and your colleagues have analyzed and of course you really do immerse yourselves in these data and also uh the the real-time coverage of politics to what do you attribute and there's probably no one thing um senator clinton's um decline in public estimation so part of it is that the lead she had after the conventions was uh a little bit artificial in that it's common in american politics for um a the candidate who just held the convention to get what we call you know polling bounds and it makes sense because a convention is essentially just a four-day commercial for one of the parties you know the party spent the whole time tearing down the other candidate and lifting up their own candidate and so trump actually got a little bit of a polling bounce and then clinton had probably a better convention got a bigger bounce out of it and then over time that lead is just kind of eroded part of it is that i think trump has been on slightly better behavior i think he was uh getting involved in a lot of uh excuse me controversies after the the including um his uh feud with the con family that you all may remember um the uh gold star family that spoke at the that the democratic convention um i think that was a pretty damaging story for him and then so so that sort of kept clinton's lead up after the convention that and other things and then trump kind of figured things out clinton left the campaign trail for a little bit to raise money um and it just seemed like clinton sort of fell out of view clinton also had um there were some health concerns about her of course she had yet pneumonia around the time of september 11th um there was a i think a fairly damaging video of her you know basically passing out or being helped by uh by by guards or by handlers to uh you know get back into a car and so and also just more stories about um her use of private email while she was secretary of state the fundraising practices of the clinton foundation and what we've actually seen in this race is that really the candidate who gets more attention at a given time actually tends to do worse because both candidates are viewed pretty unfavorably and so if you shine a spotlight on one of the candidates it may actually like you know people may may not actually like that and i think what we might be seeing is that trump's back on the spotlight now after the debate and so that may suggest that um clinton will get a little bit of a bump out of the out of the debate but then that could fade too you know i think there'd be some democrats who would say who looked at the debate last night and said oh i'm relieved this is you know she finally figured it out and all that well don't be so sure yeah because these because those that polling bounce can fade away too what are you and your colleagues see right now in terms of i i do look at the material but i my mind is aging badly and i forget things about the prospects of either the libertarian candidate or the green candidate having any effect at all in terms of i guess ultimately electoral vote but also in terms of the outcome of this campaign between mr trump and miss clinton so libertarian gary johnson and green party candidate jill stein will not win any electoral votes although there's always the possibility that there's a rogue elector who will decide to cast their vote their electoral vote for one of third party candidates actually a rogue elector gave the libertarian party a vote in 1976 so the libertarians have in fact one electoral vote but otherwise they've been sort of a non-factor in american politics i feel pretty confident saying the libertarians will have their best election ever in 2016 because their best election ever was 1.1 percent so gary johnson is generally pulling in the high single digits there's been a little bit of a sign of a fade recently stein has much lower level of support but she will probably do better than her i think it was like 0.35 percent of the vote she got in 2012 is the green party nominee and if you take the uh if you take johnson and green and stein together they tend to be hurting clinton a little bit more than trump in fact one of the reasons why is that a lot of younger voters which is generally the most liberal most democratic group of voters they they don't really like clinton they really don't like trump and a lot of them up to a third of the of the youngest voters in certain polls say they're going to support steiner johnson and that's too high of a number for clinton because she needs a big margin amongst the youngest voters and so it's important to clinton that she figures out a way to get some of those young voters to come home to the democrats um so i think that if if johnson and stein score a higher number that might be problematic for uh for clinton even allowing for we all got each of us i think got a crash course in the electoral college during the gore versus bush mess in 2000 and again i respect the fact that you and you'd know that neither uh miss stein nor governor johnson is going to affect the electoral college but in the unlikely event as they say in aircraft about accidents in the unlikely event that um knowing that some majority electoral college my recollection is that the united states house then picks the president and is by delegation correct and so for example we know that ohia would vote for republic and probably what i haven't got time to go through this if that happened with the delegation we think we're going to have with the 50 states which party would win the presidency so um what you're right in the way you're describing it in that all 50 states would get a single vote in the house so california with its 53 members would get the same uh the same single vote as wyoming which has one member um and uh the uh which presumably whichever party controlled an individual individual states delegation would determine who voted so in some states again like wyoming wyoming has a single uh republican congressperson in fact that congressperson is probably going to be liz cheney the daughter of dick cheney because she uh um she ran for ran for the house there and won the republican primary but um a little bit of trivia but um so basically there's no way the democrats will have a majority of the house delegations i i did the math about it a long time ago and i still think it stands up uh so if there's a 269 a 269 tie the uh the house would vote for trump probably but there's a lot of opportunity for shanagans in this oh yes one of them is that a stray elector could cast his or her vote for say house speaker paul ryan and then the electoral college count is 269 clinton 268 trump and one for paul ryan and the house decides not between the top two finishers but between a bit among the top three so what the what someone could do is basically essentially place paul ryan's name and nomination and then the house could choose him to be president there's another funny there's another little interesting thing here that is that um the uh what if the house doesn't produce 26 votes for one of the candidates that means they basically forfeit their choice and the selection falls to the u.s senate and the way it works is that the house is responding in the event of no one getting a majority the house uh the house picks the president the senate picks the vice president um if the house doesn't produce a president the person that the senate chooses to be vice president becomes president and so in that and they can only choose between the two vice presidential candidates so what if what if house republicans say well actually we'd rather mike pence is president of donald trump which is pretty imaginable uh then the choice might fall to the senate some house delegations might abstain from the vote and uh mike pence would be president i uh i'm at a loss for words that's our wonderful it's our wonderful system it is a wonderful system that and the fact that um i'm reassured for the future of my country because we're going to have another cheney in washington and with that i'd like to ask members of our audience our guests this evening if anyone has a question or questions for our very fine guest this evening i hope you'll sound out what they are and you'll be glad to answer them so the question was about uh endorsements uh newspaper newspaper media endorsements for president uh trump will probably set a record this year for the fewest number of newspaper endorsements and we've seen some regularly stalwart republican newspapers endorse clinton including the cincinine inquirer i don't believe the columbus dispatch has endorsed for president yet not yet um but yeah so um but the dispatch uh famously has not endorsed the democrats since i think wilson in 1916 um and you know but also um you know the the the dispatch is not owned by the wolf family anymore and the wolf family was stalwart conservative the page the editorial page may be changing anyway um so it's it's easy to imagine them maybe not endorsing trump but so i don't think those endorsements really mean all that much i think it is interesting and does generate news coverage when a paper that um is known for having a certain editorial viewpoint decides to endorse against that and some recent examples were i remember the demoine register endorsement rom in 2012 which um was uh kind of a surprise although obama ended up winning iowa by about the margin that you would expect uh and then more recently uh i think it was the denver post uh endorsed cori gardener in the republican senate race in 2014 which i remember being a big moment in that campaign gardener won by two points nationally does that maybe make an impact i don't know um tom you've done research on newspaper endorsements for judicial races what's your what's your thinking on endorsements well i don't think the doors is i think they actually do the research indicates that they do make a difference in races in which no no party label accompanies the candidate's name on the ballot because people simply don't know enough about judicial candidates otherwise on the other hand a lot of people just skip those races altogether um my own view is that they uh especially pop a statement for me based on my years of experience which are years and it's showing i think sometimes i think endorsements are those things that um energize contributors because no matter what they tell you i don't care whether it's the coax or anyone else ultimately they want to go with the winner now they'll still cover their bets they still want to get that invitation to the white house for certain things and and so editorial endorsements sometimes are seen as the inner secret powers know who's going to win that's why they endorse a certain person so therefore i will write a check an extra check now to someone so i wasn't going to write before now i can't document that that's my sense though someone else have a question for our guests this evening yes ma'am clinton this is about young voters potentially coming home to the democrats and what clinton can do about it um i think that clinton's in kind of a tricky spot in that on one hand she's trying to appeal to republicans who don't like trump but on the other hand she's trying to appeal to young voters who are basically the most liberal voters and who overwhelmingly supported her uh social independent socialist uh opponent from the democratic primary bernie sanders and so what do you do if you if you basically just start to move to the left then you might be alienating some of that crossover vote um my thinking is that i think that the chances of a lot of republicans ending up voting for clinton are probably pretty small and so maybe the wiser move for her is just to um to go even further left and to also kind of paint donald trump as a as a traditional republican which in a lot of ways he is based on it by based on his policies so um you know i think that the clinton campaign thought that maybe they could win this election in a landslide by painting trump as unfit for the office and um um and and you know i i think that she helped make she tried to make that case last night but i think the opportunity for a landslide might be gone now in which case this might just be an election about who's who who's party which party base is more energized and that is an argument really maybe for being for sort of um going to the left a little bit and uh really trying to you know reach out to those young voters i did not see last night um i didn't see anything that was particularly directed at younger voters that was just me personally um so she may have some work she may have some work to do on that front i mean i thought that clinton was generally pretty effective um but i didn't see any sort of special appeals there and you know what she might also have to do is start attacking johnson and stein she might have to do some sort of advertising about it um in college communities or something in order to try to shake some of those voters loose but um i i think also that fear can be a great motivator and i just don't know if clinton has successfully made um young democrats liberals fearful enough of trump sure it's great well i think it probably did and that's um that's really good to hear um and uh you know voter registration deadline in ohio is october 11th my birthday yeah um and uh it is uh ohio i think ohioans are lucky even though there are often disputes over um how much early voting we should have or what kind of absentee voting we should have it's very easy to vote in ohio i think there is a lot of in-person early voting and we have no fault absentee voting um which a lot of states don't have so um you know if you still aren't registered to vote um i guess if you're attending yes there you go there you go um i think this is probably pretty pretty politically savvy crowd which you didn't ever know um and yeah and yeah great timing on that because uh the debate viewership i think was about 85 million people um which is a record now um the the nixon the nixon and reagan the the nixon kennedy first debate in 1960 and the reagan the nixon kennedy 1960 reagan carter 1980 um those debates were watched by a far bigger percentage of the voting eligible public so the 80 the 85 million to me is not really a record um but just in terms of raw numbers it was a it was a record and uh you know there's i mean on one hand a quarter of the public doesn't like either candidate and so maybe that's a suggestion that and there's a lot of undecideds and people voting for third parties and that might be a suggestion that turned out might be low on the flip side 85 million people watching the debate and um you know a lot of and there's a lot of requests across the nation for absentee ballots in in states to track that sort of thing and early voting back in ohio the the number of absentee ballot requests are quite high historically um that's an indication maybe turnout will be higher we had a story like say we cleveland dot com had a story this afternoon which is running now it was posted and it'll be on the print paper i think tomorrow uh that indicated that my colleague bob higgs wrote it and i think it's bob and he said that uh numbers in the boards of elections indicate that uh requests for absentee ballots are running i think several hundred thousand more than they were at this time in 2012 now you can argue that either way maybe there's a republican i don't know but i think it it does show energized voters to some extent and i think it also shows the vote show of the no fault absentee voting which makes it hard not to vote unless you really just don't want to vote for one thing whatever your political preference is i want to add one thing to what carl said just just because i watched the debate and uh not because i don't usually after you're covering our speeches for 40 years you don't always want to cover or watch the debates again but even if i were a trump supporter and i can't ever claim that i am although i'm neutral about a lot of things um to me mrs clinton's recitation of some of the rather sexist and swineish things as he has said about women again it's a free country i recognize that um hearing someone in a position of authority just recite those just plainly and flatly uh was shocking i don't mean shock meaning it was shocking in a sense of deplorable i mean they are deplorable words but i think it really um shows the kind of um that i don't know what to call the atmospherics of this year's election and the kinds of things that are in play um my own experience has been that um again uh everyone knows you but having someone else recite these is almost like someone reading a deadpan version of um of some script of a movie about some of the most dramatic parts and you say you think of this in a new way when you hear it recited it's a flat non-dramatic way and i think i i have to wonder people of all political persuasions of all gender as i understand that but i have to wonder sometimes if enough people if those kinds of things aren't really going to help decide the election in part and the part of those you might otherwise either not vote at all maybe some people have voted in favor of those sorts of things i don't know but i thought it was like a cold slap across the face to hear those recited that way and i and i believe me i have about about sexist stuff i have a vocabulary that says witch and anglo-saxon burbages anybody's but but um for a candidate national candidate to say those sorts of things is i think unprecedented and again i'm not being judgmental your opinions i respect whatever they are and i think that may be something that's going to be if not determinative then very potent in her campaign but i could be wrong about that i think that's a great point and one other thing i would add about the debate as long as we're on the topic is that um i think there were some republicans who support trump who frankly were upset that he didn't seem particularly prepared now granted that is a that is a tall order for someone who's never been elected to office before to to go to that debate and to perform well um but you know i mentioned earlier that trump doesn't he's got this barrier to cross in terms of qualification and he's not particularly conversant on policy at least in the way that clinton is now you know again a lot of people that doesn't bother them and that's again that's fine too um but uh i think there were some republicans you know a lot of times these these debates are um it's almost like watching it's like a pep rally or watching a football game and yeah most people will even admit that they tune in to basically to root for one side over the other because particularly the clinton and trump voters very high percentage of them of them say that their mind is already made up with johnson and stein it's a little bit different which is why they might yeah they might get shook loose uh potentially by by trump or by uh or by clinton um but in that regard it was probably a deflating experience for um for the trump supporters however if you remember in 2012 barack obama basically sunk out the joint in uh in the first debate against mit romney yeah and uh that depressed democrats and obviously it didn't really have much impact on the outcome of overall even though uh there were some polling changes that happened after that but it seemed like it was kind of a mirage so that's why i say if if we get into the weekend and clinton is back up by five or six points don't necessarily assume that the race is over because it could be artificial based on the debate good point i saw someone else's hand up for another question i think and um toward the back maybe or oh yes sir um so there this is a question about al gore um and what his role in the campaign was and you know actually there was a story i don't know a week or two ago um and i believe al gore has endorsed trump or sorry no not not that it's endorsed clinton i apologize i'm sorry um al gore has endorsed clinton um and there was actually a story recently suggesting that clinton was going to dispatch gore across the country to talk to young voters about basically the dangers of voting third party because if fewer people had voted for ralph nadir in 2000 gore would have been president because if you just do the math in florida you know uh bush won the state contested um disputed by um 537 votes i think and you know nadir got much many more votes than that and so um there was been some talk about gore potentially playing that role in this campaign however i don't think that that has actually happened yet um and maybe it will or maybe it won't but there has been some discussion about that of course you know it's interesting on the democratic side you have all the heavy hitters in the party involved in the race you've got brock obama stomping for clinton which is really rare for an incumbent president uh to be stomping for a for a candidate typically the incumbent president either doesn't like the the um you know doesn't like the the other person or gore tried to keep bill clinton out because he wanted to be affiliated with with clinton i think that was a mistake in such a close election because clinton was very popular but so you've got obama you've got joe biden you've got michelle obama you've got um elizabeth warren you've got bernie sanders you uh you know obviously um uh bill and chelsea clinton are out there too the republicans you know the bush family is silent mit romney doesn't support the nominee john mccain is running his own reelection campaign um you know it's just it's just a different thing and i think it it speaks to the fact that actually um you know the old joke about the democrats was the god i forget who said it but the old i think it's will rogers or something that you know i don't belong to organized political party i'm a democrat um and and the democrats have always had this the the sort of caricature of the parties was the republicans were like the party when you get in line and the democrats were the party that had all sort of internal strife and i would definitely say that that stereotype is reversed now the democrats are the top down party we saw that in the primary i think uh and the republicans of the party where the voters don't like their own leaders and the establishment of them any power and we see that in terms of who's out there campaigning the democrats it's the whole establishment slate and even the anti establishment slate is on board with sanders and warren and with republicans it's you know donald trump has got like don king and his events and um bobby night i'm sure is just inspiring to you tom as being out there on the trail that's decisive and um and and some other kind of basically kind of celebrity figures but it it tells us something tells us something greater about where the parties are right now whereas the republicans are the kind of anti-establishment party right now and the democrats are sort of more the establishment one i'm wondering the same thing actually i saw some losses handed toward the back of the room another question about from mr. kondick about uh yes sir it it seemed like clinton got some hits uh in on trump over the tax return question i do not expect that trump will release his tax returns uh and you know clinton suggested last night that it's possible that he basically hasn't paid any income tax um and uh i can i can tell you that it seemed like one of the moments of the debate that may have been damaging to him is when he sort of cut in and said i forget specifically what it was he was basically bragging about not paying any taxes in fact you could say that he admitted he doesn't pay any income taxes based on what he said whether that's true or not i don't know but um you could you could certainly infer that from what he said uh so i think it's something that has been doing in damage and in fact um you know i think that we we we heard a lot from clinton attacking trump last night that was pretty similar to what obama said about romney in terms of obama kind of attacking romney as a rich plutocrat essentially um and the the tax return question feeds directly into that kind of standard it's a very standard democratic critique of a republican candidate and that is that you're you know basically a tool for the rich uh and um and that's what clinton did to trump last night and that's what the tax return thing does i don't necessarily know if it's decisive but um there's got to you know there's you know there's some reason why he hasn't released the tax returns and that's what clinton was sort of hinting at last night yes ma'am yeah so um um i was in professor stewart's class today uh and uh i showed a table or a chart a couple of charts that indicated that of the voting eligible public uh or the voting age public uh there is a basically baby boomers and millennials now make up the same number of people roughly but the baby boomer turnout rate is 70 percent and the millennial turnout rate is about 45 and i would think that given that millennials are the most liberal and democratic of the age groups at this particular point in history the larger the millennial turnout the better it is for clinton uh the question is whether ohio will lose uh an electoral vote after the next census and i believe that it will it will lose at least one and probably two yeah it's going to be it's it's at 18 now which is actually the lowest it's been in a very long time i think going back to the 1800s ohio at one point in the middle of the last century had i think either 25 or 26 i think it did and that of course also reflects our um our representation in the u.s house you know every um every electoral vote represents well two senators and then each each uh member of the house represents an electoral vote so we have 16 members of the house two senators 18 electoral votes so we'll probably have 17 after this that would still make ohio a pretty considerable prize but over time what we're going to see probably given the shift of population from the rust belt to the sun belt which has been going on for decades is that state like north carolina um which has 15 electoral votes right now within the next couple of decades i bet north carolina will be a bigger electoral college prize than ohio is uh and there may be other states ohio will still be a important because it's it's still bigger than i think it's still the seven tied for the seventh most popular like that um but it's just not quite as big as it used to be relative to the rest of the nation someone else had his hand up over there yesterday one of you guys over that way nobody somebody uh the question is about uh voter suppression um yeah so there's a there was this um i have to admit i'm a little hazy on the details of it but there is a court decision basically the secretary of state's office um cleans out the voter rolls i think it's if you had not voted since 2008 it's a it's a it's a span of years it's either four or five years or something like that yeah and and basically if you hadn't voted in that time period then you're removed from the rolls and you know there's some level of that that's required to you know get dead people off the rolls and people who moved away and what have you um but i think a lot of people particularly on the left have argued that that was sort of um um you know voter suppression and that a lot of those people who might have been registered actually wanted to vote and would be surprised to know that they're not registered but there was a uh a judge uh through that out although how that gets resolved now i'm not exactly sure i'm not sure how it's going to get resolved either but um one thing that uh i just was saying this is strictly me being an opinion writer uh i always find it interesting when people do want to limit voting because they say well it's uh it's too easy now or it shouldn't be easy anyway and i keep reminding people that i mean whether you're a republican or democrat or anything else the basis of sovereignty in our country and our state is the individual and he or she is supposed to be the sovereign and if it suits his or her convenience then so be it that's what it should be done for i mean it's not to suit the bureaucrats or the bean counters or the party bosses and i haven't confirmed this completely yet but you may have seen stories recently about so-called golden week in which the legislature essentially revoked would have been a long-standing circumstance in which you could both register to vote as well as cast an immediate in person absentee vote if you wish to i mean sounds contradictory in person absentee um and what i'm finding out is that um it wasn't really clear in the beginning that golden week has existed forever but what changed in 19 2005 was we made for no fault absentee voting so the number of people who could have bailed themselves increased tremendously and then we decided we had a problem with it i think it was the wrong kind of people that wanted to vote that was the problem and i'm sorry that's my opinion that's the case one point i want to think about ohio population many of you will find this surprising at least i did maybe it's my age showing i don't know but through the 1940 census the highest population actually was greater than that of california 1940 and lots of other things happened changed that obviously including the growth of the aircraft industry and people migrating but i should also add one of the reasons a lot of people if you're from northeast ohio you probably are aware of this that a lot of um civic minded people in the whole pittsburgh youngstown teledo um acron cleveland corridor is that they would welcome more immigration from overseas people that are really able to contribute to the economy and to the educational institutions and so forth and so it's an interesting paradox because it would actually if we did that had more people of hispanic heritage move into our state our population losses would at least stabilize and maybe reverse which in turn would be good for the state it seems to me but um that's one of the sub issues it's not being talked about much other than people just saying immigration is a bad thing which i think is bolder dash personally but that's me uh the questions yes sir it's a great question it's about how you balance the so-called fundamentals of an election versus polling and demographics and so at for our forecasting um you know again some some places use like kind of a model like 538 for instance and you know i'm not bashing them it's a great site but they're different than us in that basically they get numbers and plug them into the machine and then the number sort of creates the the forecast whereas ours is sort of more old school and that we're you know qualitative as opposed to quantitative so um we take all the information we account and then we sort of will say oh well this means now that ohio is leaning to trump or is leaning to clinton and so we'll we'll make that change to our ratings as opposed to just um you know putting it into the computer and seeing what that what that tells us um and it allows you to be kind of holistic in your thinking and so you can take into account polling but you could also say well actually the five polls that we have now are from lousy firms and we don't quite believe them so maybe we don't believe that quite as much and then there's also um forecasting models based on the so-called fundamentals and those are very basic factors like what's what's gdp growth what's an employment what is uh is is there an incumbent president is there not an incumbent president how many terms has a party been in the white house what the president's approval rating is et cetera and a lot of these models in fact we've run a lot of them in our crystal ball newsletter um they actually suggest that a generic republican um and a generic democrat uh would be in in a very very close presidential race in fact if you if you sort of average all the models together a couple show the republicans winning a handful show the democrats winning a few hours of together you get uh 50.5 for the democrats and 49.5 for the republicans in the two-party vote and a lot of people thought that oh the models are maybe not right this year because basically trump would underperform a generic republican and yet here we are right now and the race is very close just like the model suggested so those are things that we also need to take into account that aren't factored into the into the polls i would like to turn our proceedings back to our hostess our host rather and thank you all very much for your time and attention i recommend the book to you highly and not just because i've known kyle for many years it's really a very valuable and important guide to the political circumstances of our state special thanks to uh barbara fiochi library's event planner and ohio university press you can purchase the book from little book a little professor right here and thank you very much my pleasure thank you he's the star