Gov. Mike DeWine moves to tighten Medicaid measures amid concerns about possible fraud.
Ohio Republicans say "what took so long"? Democrats say "where’s the proof to back up these allegations"?
Meanwhile, the Trump administration tells states to combat fraud or lose Medicaid funding.
School vouchers are back in the news as an appeals court weighs their constitutionality.
It’s an issue that’s awash in politics and conflicting ideas about the future of public education, raising questions about the concept of choice and who should get billions in taxpayer money.
Mark your calendars for Aug. 7: that's when the back-to-school sales tax weekend begins. Gone is the extended holiday and we’ll tell you why.
It's all part of this week's Reporter Roundtable.
Guests:
- Haley BeMiller, state government reporter, The Columbus Dispatch
- Andrew Tobias, state government and politics reporter, Signal Ohio
- Noah Blundo, executive editor, Hannah News Service
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to the All Sides Reporter Roundtable. An hour where we catch up on the political news of last week and preview the week ahead.
I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Joining me on the Roundtable this week, we have Haley BeMiller, state government reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. Welcome back, Haley. Good to be here. Andrew Tobias, state government and politics reporter at Signal Ohio. Welcome back Andrew.
Andrew Tobias: Happy Monday.
Juravich: And Joe, or Joe. Oh my gosh, I am so sorry.
Speaker 4: It's my middle name.
Juravich: It's your middle name. Yeah, Noah Blundoe. Noah Blundo. Who's Joe? I don't know. Noah Blundo, executive editor at Hanna News Service. Welcome back, Noah. Good morning.
And Andrew had a little kick in his step with his hello because he is all decked out in Cavs gear.
Tobias: Yeah, go Cavs. Go Cavs. Go cats. All right. Well, on to the news.
Juravich: Lawmakers are back after a month away, and Republicans are focused on Medicaid fraud. Does Ohio have a Medicaid fraud problem? It depends on who you ask.
House Speaker Matt Huffman last week blamed the DeWine administration, saying lawmakers over the years pushed to do more, but the governor's office derailed those efforts. Here is Huffmann in some audio that was from the Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau.
Bill Furman: I don't know how far this is going to go, but we've been trying to stop this from happening since 2019. That was before I was Senate president. So these are the same questions we've asked over and over, and there were some other items that we did have in the 25 budget regarding Medicaid that the governor did veto.
Juravich: So Andrew, later that same day, Governor DeWine announced proposed changes meant to provide additional protections while also defending some safeguards already in effect. Was that in response to Huffman's criticism or was what DeWyne announced already in the works?
Tobias: Yeah, I know for us following it, it kind of felt that way because we heard Huffman say those things and then the announcement came out. But this has been in the works for a while. There was actually a joint House and Senate Medicaid hearing in March about fraud. They talked about a lot of this stuff and there's this kind of larger federal pressure on Ohio to reduce fraud and to verify eligibility and stuff like that in general.
So it has been going on for a little while but I definitely think that. External political pressure that has happened since the daily wire ran some articles on this a couple of weeks ago have increased a lot and so I wouldn't say Dewine's initiatives are a direct response to this but I definitely think it's kind of like heightened the the intensity surrounding it.
Juravich: And Haley, can you go over a couple of the things DeWine is proposing?
Haley BeMiller: Yeah, so a lot of this addresses the home health care program. He is asking the Trump administration for a six-month moratorium on new home health care businesses. He wants to do a little bit more to track billing issues that may look like a red flag, may look off, implement some more data to look for anomalies in the billing process.
This is all. Basically geared at putting more guardrails around this home health care program that has been under the microscope, particularly since, as Andrew alluded to, this reporting came out from the Daily Wire, a conservative publication highlighting potential problems within the system. So that's kind of his, DeWine's overall goal with this.
Juravich: Noah, is there evidence that there's problems in all these places or is it just speculation?
Noah Blundo: I think there's there were things in the daily where I report that look suspicious that match up with what the incumbent state auditor Keith Faber called out at this March hearing that Andrew mentioned about there being an outsized share of spending in central Ohio and specifically in some Northeast Ohio zip codes. You know that those reporting had some some charge language about you know welfare queens and stuff. But I mean, it is. And the state attorney general, Dave Yost, said something similar, made some similar concerns.
He said, you know, these are services that are delivered in people's homes. In some cases, the GPS location monitoring is turned off at the client's request for privacy concerns, oftentimes. And so it is difficult sometimes to know whether people are delivering the service. I mean, you create a revenue stream. People steal, there are dishonest people, people will shoplift, people will rob banks, people will create fake home healthcare companies.
But also, Ohio has had a decades-long tracker kind of moving to more home health services because people generally would like to age and get better in their own homes. If they can, they would not like to spend their remaining days in a nursing home if they can avoid it. And people. With disabilities would like the independents to live in their own homes rather than be in an institutional care setting.
BeMiller: And nursing home.
Juravich: Are very expensive. Yes, that is that is very true. So Democrats express skepticism about the scope of the problem. They're questioning the politics around surrounding this.
Senate Minority Leader Nikki Antonio agreed that there must be oversight in the program, but said it's important to make sure any accusation and charges are credible. And then here's what House Minority leader, Dunny Isaacson had to say.
Speaker 8: So far it's been these huge allegations and we haven't seen any real investigations.
Juravich: So to his point, are there investigations underway? I'm Andrea Haley, do you know?
BeMiller: I believe the Department of Medicaid had been looking into some of the allegations around this before the Daily Wire article came out. It's unclear to me at least how far along they are in that, but the department was aware of some of these concerns before it kind of ballooned on social media.
Juravich: And, Andrew, at the federal level, I mean, this is not isolated to here. The Trump administration last week said it would withhold one point eight billion dollars in Medicaid payments to California because they hadn't done enough in that state to fight fraud in the program. So then Vice President J.D. Vance, he heads a federal anti-fraud task force.
He announced the loss of the money for California and then announced An audit of state level watchdog agencies related to the Medicaid fraud control units. I'm sorry I'm losing my voice here. Vance said in his remarks it's not a red state or a blue state issue. Here is a little bit of what he said.
Speaker 9: We see Medicaid fraud issues in Ohio, the state that I used to represent in the United States Senate. We also see Medicaid issues, fraud issues in a state like Maryland, which is obviously a very blue state. But both Ohio and Maryland have worked with us to take this issue seriously. They've worked with the guys behind me. They've work with our entire team to make sure that they take fraud seriously.
Juravich: So Andrew, the fact that JD Vance is mentioning Ohio at all probably causes alarm bells to go off for some people around here, wouldn't you say?
Tobias: Yeah, there's just a lot going on with this storyline and it's almost hard to sort it all out and kind of recap it. So I guess one thing that's happening is that the most recent federal spending bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, instituted deep cuts to Medicaid federally. And some of those are work requirements that are expected to just cause people to not be able to basically leave the roles.
Some of the changes are cutting reimbursements to states and like there's some budgeting tricks that states do. And so it's kind of trying to target, I guess like wasteful spending, although there is still going to be a real impact when some of those changes happen. And so then they're pursuing this fraud enforcement stuff. And for me as a political reporter, it's hard not to see it as like a midterm messaging strategy where it is very convenient for them to go and say, there's this outrageous fraud happening in California, which is. A deep blue state where a potential 2028 presidential candidate is running as governor Gavin Newsom.
We also saw Medicaid fraud enforcement and Republicans make a big deal out of things happening in Minnesota, which Tim Walz, the governor of that state was the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee. So all this stuff is wrapped into it. And I think that for a state like Ohio to kind of emerge as this big story on the right kind of complicates the idea that this is all Democrats fault and we need to do something about it.
But like I said, and I guess the connection between Minnesota and Ohio is that the Minnesota fraud, which had to do with daycare and Medicaid spending was happening among members of the Somali-American community there. Minnesota is the largest population center of Somali Americans and Columbus is the second. So just a lot of different threads getting weaved together in this whole thing, but it's hard not to view it in the context of both the 2026 and 2028 election.
BeMiller: And it's worth noting too that the messaging allegations around Somali immigrants is coming up within this Medicaid discussion too. That was a very big part of the Daily Wire reporting. I think the Daily wire even noted that it started looking into Ohio because it has such a significant Somali population behind Minnesota. So we are seeing as Noah alluded to some of that charge language around.
Juravich: Grant populations here.
You're listening to All Sides Weekly Reporter Roundtable on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking with Haley B. Miller from the Columbus Dispatch, Andrew Tobias from Signal Ohio, and Noah Blundo from Hanna News Service.
So related to these political threads that are being pulled, it seems like this is going to be a lot of political messaging as we head toward November. The case in point over the weekend, Vivek Ramaswami, who's running for governor here in Ohio posted on social media. Quote, crushing Medicaid fraud is an absolute top priority when I take office in January. We'll go fast and they won't know what hit them.
So, and then he's having a press conference tomorrow at 10.30 a.m. To lay it all out. What do you make of the fact that, you know, he said that message, he's gonna crush them so fast, they don't know, they won't know what it hit them and he's havin' this press event tomorrow. Is this gonna be a strong talking point for his campaign, Noah?
Blundo: Probably, and also at that press conference scheduled with him, I believe, are Matt Huffman and Rob McCauley, the Republican leaders of the General Assembly, and Keith Faber, the auditor, who is running for attorney general. So potentially, with those people on his side, he might actually get some new statutory powers that he could employ in the new year if he becomes elected.
Juravich: What does it mean politically, so you just listed all the people who will be at his 1030 press event tomorrow, but like Governor DeWine's not on that list, does that matter?
BeMiller: Yeah, I think in the way that we're seeing some interesting politics at the federal level, as Andrew alluded to with this, I will be curious to see what the message is tomorrow because Mike DeWine is a Republican. He's been leading the state as a Republican for eight years.
Now, of course, there have been plenty of issues within the Republican Party on how he's handled Various things, but you know, one of Ramaswamy's general challenges is how, you know with Medicaid or anything else in this election, is how does he present himself as a change candidate, as someone who's going to do things differently when he and Mike DeWine are in the same party. And I think that's been giving Amy Acton a little bit of an opening to attack Ramasvamy, to attack Republicans on this issue. You know, they've they have been the ones in charge of the state for the last eight years.
Juravich: In the fighting on social media, you know, the back and forth, maybe fighting is too strong of a word, but you know competing posts. Amy Acton posted the response that says Vivek Ramaswami called Medicaid a mistake and now wants to pretend he cares about Medicaid fraud while standing with members who have done nothing about corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse in the state house for decades. The corruption ends with me as governor.
So Andrew, I mean that you know, that's what you would expect her to say but Does she have a point, though, to say that he's going to stand up there and say these things with people who haven't done anything about waste and fraud?
Tobias: So I think the Minnesota Medicaid fraud scandal that I alluded to, I think that was deeply politically damaging to Tim Walz. He was running for a third term as governor. He was kind of making a national tour, including to Ohio as a, you know, he's not saying like I'm running for president, but you don't visit states like Ohio when you're the governor of Minnesota for fun, right?
So, and we haven't heard a lot from him ever since this blew up. He, you, know, he suspended his third term. It's unclear what his political future is gonna be. And so I think Democrats' instinct is to protect programs like Medicaid and to like Amy Acton, even as she's campaigned, has criticized a Republican move to require Medicaid enrollees to re-enroll twice a year instead of, or once a year.
In the past, Mike DeWine made it so that people automatically re- enrolled for three years. It was kind of like a COVID pandemic era reform. So it's tough to say that, you know, on the one hand that there's too much red tape with Medicaid and people just need to be able to get their services. And on the other hand, say, we have to do something about fraud.
I mean, those two things are at tension with each other. So I do think that if I were Amy Acton, and I imagine other Democrats are probably reassessing how they kind of approach issues like this, knowing that it's discrediting to social services if they're not being handed out the way that they're supposed to be. But yeah, I mean Amy Actom wasn't running the Medicaid program, Democrats weren't running it, Republicans were.
Juravich: Well, and all of this at the same time, whoever the next governor is, they're gonna be in office for four years and they're going to have to deal with the idea that there is a lot of cuts coming to Medicaid. I think Andrew alluded to that earlier, that the one big, beautiful bill did make cuts and there's more than half a million Ohioans that could go off the program in the next decade.
There's the threatened closure of 30-some hospitals and clinics in Ohio. Haley or Noah, how do you see this playing out? I mean, this is going to be a continuing issue because these cuts in the One Big Beautiful bill don't happen tomorrow, they happen over time, right?
Blundo: It's very gradual so that they
Juravich: Oh, that's a heavy sigh.
Blundo: How do I explain this? States will often levy a special assessment or a tax on a provider group, like hospitals or health insurance corporations that run managed care programs for Medicaid, and they will take the resulting money and they will use that to match the federal spending because it's generally like two federal dollars for every one state dollar. And the federal government said, no, you can't. Tax healthcare providers who are paid with Medicaid in order to generate money to fund Medicaid is like this very circular recycling of money.
So they've basically said, we're setting a new cap and if you're above that cap, you gotta start ratcheting it down. There's also things called state-directed payments, which is where the rates can be bumped up for certain providers in certain situations and they're saying, you gotta bring those down. So that's gonna be a lot, billions of dollars in the coming years. Somebody has to figure out how to raise that money or cut it or both.
BeMiller: And that'll be happening, you know, depending who the next governor of Ohio is, you know, Vivek Ramaswami is campaigning heavily on eliminating the income tax in Ohio. So if he's elected in November, all this stuff with Medicaid is going to be happening at the same time that the state's going to be trying to figure out how to pay for that. So lots of lots of discussions to come.
Blundo: And another, I think, interesting point is that a lot of what was in HR1, the One Big Beautiful Bill, targets the expansion population, which are just people under a certain income threshold as part of the Affordable Care Act to get in, they're generally the least expensive people on Medicaid, so you could cut 100,000 of them off of the rolls tomorrow it would not make an enormous difference in the bottom line of the program.
Juravich: Well, before we take the break, since we're speaking of financial need, it made me think of food stamps, also known as SNAP. And a few months ago, we had the director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Matt Damtrodon, and he talked about the need to move from swipe cards to chipped cards, but he also talked about how it's not happening very quickly. So Noah, you wrote about the Senate Finance Committee had a hearing, and they heard testimony on replacing the existing cards. Why is it taking so long? Why is so hard for us to go from the swipe to the tap card?
Blundo: Uh, you know, well, government doesn't always move at the fastest speed. And I mean, part of it was, you know, um, government programs generally are not at the vanguard. So 10 years ago, the switch to chip cards was kind of new, but now it's, it's established and it's part of, it is just inertia and part of it is convincing government officials to spend on administrative funding.
And part of I think the drive here now is that another element of the big beautiful bill is that the federal government is no longer going to split administrative costs for SNAP 50-50 with the states. The feds are only going to pay a quarter. So if you want to undertake a relatively expensive administrative change, like converting all of your ABT cards from magnetic stripe to chip, now would be a good time while the feds are still picking up half the cost.
Juravich: But if we're so worried about fraud, I mean, I also talked on that same show with the executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks, and they said that organized crime is skimming the benefits because you can do that more easily with a swipe card. Chips are more secure. So if we are so worried of fraud, we need to have the chip cards.
Blundo: Well, exactly. It's an inconsistency that is worth pointing out, I think.
Juravich: All right, we'll leave it there. But I mean, we will get the chip cards eventually. We have to.
Blundo: One would hope. I mean, there are people who show up to buy groceries for their family for the weekend. The money is gone because somebody put a skimmer on the...
Juravich: Coming up, we are going to talk about the latest with the legal fight over school vouchers, also known as the Ed Choice program. That is when the Reporter Roundtable from all sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
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Juravich: You're listening to All Sides in our Weekly Reporter Roundtable, an hour where we talk all things Ohio politics.
I'm your host Amy Jurovich. Still with us in the studio we have Noah Blundo, Executive Editor of Hanna News Service, Andrew Tobias, State Government and Politics reporter at Signal Ohio, and Haley B. Miller, State Government reporter at the Columbus Dispatch. School vouchers are back in the news as an appeals court weighs their constitutionality. More than half of the state's 600 school districts are a part of an Ed Choice lawsuit. And here is how Mark Wallach, an attorney for the school group Vouchers Hurt Ohio, framed the issue.
Speaker 11: Really the issue here isn't choice, it's education. The school systems exist not to provide choice, they exist to provide education. So we have educated citizens.
Juravich: All right, so can you tell us more about this group? Who is Vouchers Hurt Schools and what are they fighting for? Do you wanna go now?
Blundo: Yeah, so it's a coalition of hundreds of school districts at this point. The plaintiffs are a few school districts and some resident families, and they say that the voucher program violates the thorough and efficient system of common schools clause of the Ohio Constitution, which was part of the DeRalph case back in the 90s, seven years ago. Something like that. 30 years ago, I've lost track.
They say basically... The diversion of the amount of money to private schools has violated the legislature's obligation to create this thorough and efficient system of common schools under the Constitution. And there's also provision of the Constitution that says you can't give control of education funding to religious sects. A lot of these schools are religious Catholic or other denominations.
So that is at the heart of the case, the trial court, Judge Isa Page of Franklin County Common Pleas agreed with these plaintiffs and said, yes, this violates the Constitution. But she put her own ruling on freeze because it happened over the summer and it would have blown up school enrollments for thousands of children. And she said, I know this is going to the appeals court and the Supreme Court, so we'll put this on hold for now.
Juravich: She put her own ruling on hold. So, and Andrew, does this involve all vouchers or just the expansion of the voucher program where they issued more money and made it so that more people can get the vouchers?
Tobias: I think it's just generally the underlying concept of spending public money on...
Blundo: Private schools. The state defense, the deputy solicitor general who was arguing for attorney general's office in defense of the program made a point in his case that said if you accept the school district's arguments then you will be blowing up the John Peterson special needs scholarship and the autism scholarship as well. So you know that's what remained to be seen.
Juravich: I do have a cut from Kevin Neely. He's with the Institute for Justice. It's a libertarian law firm that has teamed up with the state. He views vouchers as scholarships, not state funding for private schools. So here is how he framed the concept of choice.
Speaker 12: When students apply for Pell grants or the GI Bill, they're exercising choice in whether they apply for those scholarships. That sort of choice is again, the constitutional linchpin here and why I think Ohio's program is constitutional.
Juravich: So that's basically what you're saying. So he is, he's saying that these are scholarships.
Blundo: Yeah, so in 1999, there was a court case called Simmons-Harris versus Gough. It was about a Cleveland-specific voucher program as the predecessor of Ed Choice. And it was upheld by the Yoha's Supreme Court. And they basically said, the state is not creating. Parents are choosing to send their children to these schools. The state is simply supporting them in doing so.
There was a little footnote in that case where they said, You know, it's possible that this program could get so big that it causes a problem. And that was a matter of debate at this court hearing last Tuesday. But so a lot of the state's defense of the program has been that these questions were asked and answered 27 years ago. And why are we here?
Juravich: I'm guessing you're not asking me that question. Okay, I'm not going to answer that. Why are we here? Okay. Well, so where are we at right now? So the appeals court heard arguments and we're waiting for a ruling.
Blundo: Oral arguments are waiting for written ruling. It will assuredly go to the Ohio Supreme Court expeditiously upon. I imagine that the 10th district would continue to stay the ruling from a judge page and let this all rest until the Supreme Court can settle it out.
Juravich: Okay. And how quickly would something like that happen? I mean, when, when do you think the Ohio Supreme Court would take this up?
Blundo: Oh gosh, it took probably three years for the trial court to rule. Then, you know, oral arguments here were 10 to 11 months after that ruling. I mean, DeRalph took like seven years to get from trial to Supreme Court. We could be on that, I don't, you now, not tomorrow.
Juravich: Not tomorrow. All right. Andrew or Haley, what about the politics of all of this? Have you covered either candidate for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy or Amy Acton on the campaign trail, talking about vouchers and public education? Is this ongoing case going to come up in the campaign?
Tobias: Brahmaswamy generally is campaigning on private vouchers, it's kind of a component of broader school choice, which is a term that either refers, it often refers to sending public resources to private schools, giving kids the choice to basically leave the public education system. And the argument is that there are areas where the school district isn't great, kid might have better opportunities somewhere else and private schools can be a way to do that.
But school choice can also mean being able to open enrollment within a school district, maybe giving parents more control over curriculum. Within a public school context. And Amy Acton, on the other hand, has campaigned on expanding, you know, criticize Republicans for not giving more money to schools. There's this whole policy fight about the school funding formula and stuff like that. So they haven't directly talked about this case, but something else that I'll point out is that in Kentucky, there was an amendment on the ballot in 2024 that voters overwhelmingly voted against school vouchers similar to what Ohio has.
So I think Democrats see there being a potential political advantage to this issue, although obviously here we're talking about a legal case that's gonna potentially take years to resolve. But there is a larger political context over this fight over how much, if any, public resources to be spent on private schools.
Juravich: So instead of doing a legal case like this, these hundreds of school districts who all banded together for this lawsuit, could they do some sort of amendment on the ballot instead?
Tobias: So that would be funded probably from like the teachers unions or something like that if something like that were to happen. I know there's been rumblings about something like that for years, but putting together a campaign like that costs, you know, five, ten million dollars to get on the ballot. Get on the ballot.
Juravich: You could be spending on other things. Plus.
Tobias: $20 million in ads or whatever. So it's just very expensive. It's time consuming. A lot of times the organizations that fund things like that, they have to agree to fund. It's even like hard to get people to agree on stuff, much less find the money. So there's potential for that, but it just hasn't come together.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides Weekly Reporter Roundtable on 89.7 NPR News. And we're talking with Andrew Tobias from Signal Ohio, Noah Blundo from Hanna News Service, and Haley B. Miller from the Columbus Dispatch.
Lawmakers are hearing from constituents upset about data centers just about every day. Every day it seems there's a new headline related to a county or a township voting to ban a data center or residents are flooding public meetings to talk about data center. There's an effort for a state-wide constitutional amendment to ban them. Haley, I know you've been covering this for a while, you've written about this. Are lawmakers responding? What's going on with data centers?
BeMiller: So they're responding a little bit. Lawmakers from the House and Senate last week announced that they're going to form a joint special committee on data centers similar to what we've seen them do with property taxes and that kind of thing. They said they're gonna bring in stakeholders across the spectrum, tech companies, local officials, residents who are frustrated are gonna be able to testify at state house hearings.
And they are viewing this as an information gathering process. They feel like there are a lot of questions about data centers and the pros and cons of them. And lawmakers kind of just want to set the record straight for people. And so that is the goal of this. It's unclear to me, I think, a lot of... I think a lot of legislation dealing with data centers that's been introduced is likely going to be stalled until this committee completes its work.
Juravich: Did I just hear this morning, or maybe it was last week, over the weekend, the constitutional amendment that they are trying to do to ban large data centers, they announced how many signatures they had? Was that this? Did you hear that this today? I was-
BeMiller: That was recently. I think they have about 25,000, so still a very long way to go.
Tobias: Yeah, I did the math it would take them years at that pace to qualify for the ballot
Juravich: Okay, they need more than 400,000 from all the counties, half the counties.
Blundo: 400,000 valid, so, you know, the person who signs has to have registered to vote and not have updated, their address has to be current. So you burn a lot of these signatures, so you generally want to collect like at least half again as many as you actually need to make sure you clear the threshold. Okay.
Juravich: Okay, so this is, so I talked about this on the show a few weeks ago. So they're trying to put a constitutional amendment to ban large data centers. So I think it was above 25 megawatts or something like that, or whatever measurement they use. Um, so they're very far away from this, Andrew, if they only have, if they announced, they only had 25,000 or they're not making it to the fall ballot then.
Tobias: Yeah, they're not gonna make it to the fall ballot. I think it's a real question. It's always, the way I look at these things, I guess it is possible, and we're following this property tax abolition amendment that listeners might have heard about, that they're kind of chugging along with, as far as we can tell, without the giant injection of outside money, although they're also likely not to qualify for the November ballot.
But it's always who's gonna fund something like this? Because getting the signatures is really hard. You have to, like you said, get a certain amount from 44 counties. It's really technical. If you have a petition where you have multiple counties of residents that the voters are signing the petition, some of the signatures will be thrown out. So there's like these technical paper keeping requirements in the whole thing. So it's just really, really hard.
Juravich: And if you have paid signature gatherers, they have to handle all of that.
Tobias: Yeah, and they generally, although not always, have a better idea of what they're doing. But when you have people who are just enthusiastic with a clipboard, there's just still a lot of work you have to put into it.
Juravich: So the idea that this group of people are coming together and trying, at least, to do something to stop data centers, lawmakers are paying attention to that, right? They're saying, okay, maybe we do need to talk about this. Do we need to rein this in?
BeMiller: I think so. I mean, we saw that with the property tax effort as well. I think throughout that entire process, there was skepticism about whether they would make the ballot, but a recognition that people are really mad and people are real mad about these data centers. And I think, you know, that's and the amendment is not the only way I think that they are getting public officials attention.
I'm mean, they're flooding these local meetings. Flooding their state representatives offices, I assume, you know, it's, it is kind of the issue du jour. It's, um, you now, and we're seeing this nationwide too, but Ohio is, has like the six most data centers in the country right now that are either existing or under Development, so I don't think this is gonna go away anytime soon
Tobias: And local officials are under a ton of pressure on this. I want to say that there have been examples of local councils and township trustees getting voted out. I don't remember that clearly, but I do remember that one of the early local moratoriums that was passed was in Lordstown, which is in the Youngstown area.
And they passed the moratorium literally the night before the election. They got sued and they ended up rescinding the moratorium maybe like a month later. But I see that as just like a clear example of local officials kind of being under the gun politically on this.
Juravich: They got sued by like someone who wanted to build a data center.
Tobias: Yeah, developer behind a project which the community was all up in arms about in the first place.
Juravich: And then there's one other thing that's been looming. We've talked about it a couple of times on this show is that in the budget, lawmakers wanted to stop some tax breaks for new data centers, and the governor vetoed that to allow them to keep the tax breaks. Do I have this correct? And then, there was talk of overriding his veto, but it didn't happen.
Blundo: It's yeah, it's a sales tax exemption. I think for the equipment that goes into the data centers is my I could have that wrong But it's it's worth enough money Yeah To for them to be worth to be arguing about it and the I think the speaker has basically said You know, I can't I get 60 votes To show up that day, you know It's like it they have a little more than 60 votes the Republicans do but you know You need you need party uniformity and you need everybody to show up. Generally. They don't have perfect attendance At a legislative session there are 99 of them, but usually about 90 ish are there
Juravich: So do you think this so we were not going to overread the veto?
BeMiller: They they seem pretty stuck on it. And I think to me, the override debate has been an example of data centers being very politically tricky for both Republicans and Democrats, because on the Republican side, you know, it's. You know, you want to seem pro business, you want to support economic development. And then for Democrats, there are a lot of union jobs that are being created as a result of constructing these. And Democrats don't want to stop that from happening either, so it's just, it's not politically an easy issue.
Tobias: And we'll see what the commission ends up doing. But the comments that the co-chairs of it who are both Republicans made included talking about this as a national security issue. And the idea is that we need data centers to make our phones work. You know, I'm doing AI research here while we're sitting here. It's kind of become even beyond just smartphones and like smart refrigerators and stuff like that.
AI has become a really big part of daily life. And there's a concern at the highest level that if America doesn't excel at it, then China will or some other foreign adversary. And so, and you know, and then it gets into like, who's gonna control the supercomputer and all that stuff. But there, there's this kind of like bigger picture issue too. And I wouldn't say that the commission doesn't seem skeptical as skeptical about this as I would say, like a lot of these, these voters that we're talking about are.
Juravich: And there's that push pull of the economic development, because if we're going to need to build them, then Ohio is basically saying, why not here so that we can have all the construction jobs and we can have the economic benefits of having corporations like the Metas and the Googles and the Amazons of the world in Ohio, right?
Blundo: Yeah, there was a panel discussion after the election that the Chamber of Commerce convened at the State House. And one of the sessions was on this. And they've talked about the data center companies kind of learning from some of this resistance and trying to adapt.
Maybe some of them are moving to more of a closed looped water system to get past the opposition based on their immense water use. They might be, some of them may be pulling back on this use of NDAs, non-disclosure agreements to have local officials basically have their, you know, mouths taped shut about being able to discuss anything in detail about this, these projects, so.
Juravich: All right. Another sigh from no one's coming up. We're going to talk a little bit about November and we're going too. Look at look ahead to November but also talk about some interesting odds and ends from primary night. That is when the report around table from all sides continues on 89 7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides Weekly Reporter Roundtable. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. And still with us in the studio, Hayley B. Miller, state government reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, Noah Blundo, executive editor at Hanna News Service, and Andrew Tobias, state government and politics reporter at Signal Ohio. We are officially into the fall election season. Political ads and messaging are certainly an indication of that. And gone are the days when things waited until after Labor Day to really heat up.
They are heating up by the day and it's gonna continue all summer long. And I just wanted to get a taste of what you're all watching and listening to as we set the stage, not only for the governor's race, which we've already discussed some, but then there's a big Senate race, which is gonna get national attention between Senator John Houston and former Senator Sherrod Brown. Does anyone feel like this whole summer is just gonna be full of political ads?
BeMiller: At least in the Senate race, we saw Brown and Houston drop their first ads before the primary even took place. And I think with that race and with the governor's race, you know, we're we're seeing a lot of this heat up early in part because neither of those really had meaningful primaries, and certainly not any kind of messy primary like we've seen in past elections. So, you know, the candidates in those races have been able to. Already focus on their November opponent without having to worry much about the May ballot.
Blundo: In the future of the Trump administration's ability to pursue their priorities for the second half of his term depends on congressional control. And we have this competitive Senate race. We have one or maybe more competitive US House races. So yeah, we're going to get the onslaught.
Juravich: We talked last week about the Marcy Captor race and Derek Maron, right? Okay, good. Oh, I got the name right. Andrew gave me a thumbs up. Derek Marron, Marcy captor up by Toledo, a rematch basically. But what other, what other races are we watching?
Blundo: Um, the Cincinnati race, Greg Landsman and, um, Eric Conroy, I believe is the nominee. I mean, that one is not, uh, you know, captor has been sort of defying gravity in having her seat become increasingly Republican and then redrawn multiple times to become even more so Republican and is still not falling to earth, but it just, um it's going to get harder and harder every time for the, the landsman seat is not. As competitive, particularly with the kind of blue wave national environment a lot of people are predicting. But, you know, you never can tell.
Juravich: Andrew, what are you watching here? Are we gonna be just chock full of negative ads all summer that by the time the fall rolls around, we're gonna be sick of it? Yes.
Tobias: So the 2024 US Senate race in Ohio, the all in the Democrat and Republican groups and the campaigns combined spent something like 500 to $550 million on ads, which is a ton of money and essentially in real terms just means ads were airing wall to wall people might remember, especially as the election approach, and we haven't gotten there yet in terms of the reservations that different campaigns and groups are announcing, but it's just looking like that.
Ohio is going to be Initially, the top spending district for the big National Republican Senate Political Action Committee Democrats have responded with their own spending. We've seen both campaigns kind of come out negative really fast. Sherrod Brown's first campaign ad was talking about Jeffrey Epstein and associates of Jeffrey Epsteins whose money that John Husted took and then he's kind of responded with kind of his own Well, what about you sort of thing and then the general Republican attack ad is more along the lines of It's almost like as if Biden were still president, you know, blaming Democrat, like, Sheriff Brown for things like inflation and talking about culture war issues. So it looks nasty, it's looking expensive. And yeah, I think it's gonna be a lot of TV ads that we're gonna all love watching.
Juravich: Is it best not to think about what better use all that money could go to?
Tobias: I try not to think about that too much personally, but you know, I'm happy for my friends in the TV business, I guess.
Juravich: Yeah, no, I just after after that whole entire we had like a 15 to 20 minute discussion about Medicaid and I'm like Oh, that's a lot of money that Andrew's talking about. Okay. Now I need a heavy sigh Noah All right so but Andrew something else you also have been watching is You've been watching the prediction markets on Cauchy and how they're doing with like their election predictions Did you follow that after the primary ended? I mean, how did what happened, what people were betting on on Koushi and how the primary turned out? What do you think?
Tobias: Yeah. So we see anytime there's some kind of vice that develops into a big popular industry, there's a strategy when the company's behind it to try to say like, Oh, this isn't gambling. This is prediction markets and we're helping improve the information environment and give people, you know, inputs, help them make more informed decisions.
And so the idea behind betting on politics is that if people have skin in the game, they're going to do really good research. They're going find out who's going to win. And we're seeing in some cases. Kind of insider trading type things happening. So that all combines into, you can track the odds that these websites have of how likely it is they think any individual candidate is going to win. So I found that, yeah, and so I'm interested in it because political polling has been really bad in Ohio. It's really expensive.
Campaigns are doing it, but they're not releasing it publicly because they don't want to tip off their opponents or whatever, and media companies don't have the money to pay for it. So Kelshe showed, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy with a commanding lead by and large. And that transpired. There were the two congressional races that Noah talked about as well as one in the Akron area. And Kalshi was on it with these kind of contested Republican primaries. And those races, they were pretty good in these kind of like second tier Republican held seats that Democrats are hoping to compete in.
And so Christina Knickrenbacher in the 10th district and Brian Poindexter in the seventh district. Beat their, there's kind of favored Democrat candidates who won, Kelshe got those right. There's a third one in the Columbus area for Mike Carey seat here, the 15th district, where they thought, the Kelshey odds thought that Adam Miller was the overwhelming favorite, which I would say kind of like reflected what people in politics thought.
And then Don Leonard, a former Ohio State University professor, ended up winning that one. So basically, Kelsha was pretty good at these higher profile races with one exception. Where they really fell on their face was, and I don't know why people are betting on these races, but there were five Republican-held seats where we had multiple Democrats running, even though they would just get obliterated in a general election because these are like plus 20, plus 30 Republican districts. And Kelshe was kind of, you know, it's like flipping a coin there. So pretty good, and I think it's probably better where, you know there's more people following the race instead of people just kind of I guess flipping a point.
Juravich: Did Kalshi just stick to national races and like Congress and Senate type things? I mean, does Kalsi get down to like local little primaries and stuff?
Tobias: So they had governor like I said, they're doing they have odds in all of these random congressional races Some of which are the high-profile ones some of which aren't there are odds for November on like which party is going to control The Ohio house. I don't think they're taking odds on like who is going be the next Ohio attorney general Although I'm sure it's just a matter of time But so I think it's been a pretty useful signal, but I guess we'll just sort of see because you know This is the only time I've ever followed it before
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides Weekly Reporter Roundtable. We are talking with Andrew Tobias from Signal Ohio, Noah Blundo from Hanna News Service, and Haley B. Miller with the Columbus Dispatch.
And I wanted to touch on, there are a couple incumbent lawmakers who lost their races on primary night, and we just haven't had a chance to talk about this on the show, but it's names that our listeners would have heard us discuss on the Reporter Round Table for years, basically, but now they are. They lost, so they won't be in office anymore. Senator Andrew Brenner and Representative Beth Leir, both from Delaware County, both won't be returning. Noah, how unusual is it for incumbents to lose? And also, tell us what Andrew Brener and Beth Lear were doing, because they were term limited. Right. So they're.
Blundo: So they're sort of pseudo-incumbents. It is, we have a term limits law, but it does not set a hard lifetime cap. It just sets a cap on how many years you can serve in the House or the Senate. And if you leave for a while, you can come back and start the clock over again. So Andrew Brenner is in the Ohio Senate, Delaware County, Beth Lear in the Iowa House in Delaware County. They had hit term limits, or Brenner had hit terms limits.
I think Lear might not have quite been there yet. And wanted to switch. They were trying to switch seats. Switch seats. So they're veterans, they're in office, but they were not incumbents in the races that they were seeking. And Beth Lear was defeated by Ryan Rivers, who was a township trustee. He had the backing of Senator Bill Reineke from Tiffin, who is very likely to be the next Ohio Senate president.
And then Andrew Brenner lost to Sean Stevens. Who has been involved in Delaware County politics for a while and was appointed briefly to the Ohio house when Rick Carfania left to join the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and then defeated by Lear in that primary. So that was a little bit of a grudge match. Well, sort of. Anyway
Juravich: Well, and so, so Andrew, is it a surprise that these well-known names or is it a sign that the voters of Delaware County were sick of the seat hopping? I don't know what else to call it.
Tobias: Yeah, I know I saw some stuff about like, Andrew Brenner being attacked for his vote on guns and I, you know, I just, I think, you know, these are all pretty conservative Republicans and like Noah said, we even have seen Beth Lear beat Sean Stevens in the past. And so I just kind of surmised that voter, it was a negative that they were trying to flip suites, flip seats, especially Brenner was term-limited and so he's looking for a spot and Beth Lear still could have run for re-election and Decided to run for him. So I imagine the whole musical chairs thing wasn't a positive in their campaigns
BeMiller: Yeah, I mean, I think voters generally favor term limits and increasingly this idea of politicians for life I think rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Not that Brenner and Lear were at that threshold yet, but I think seeing people try to circumvent the rules and take advantage of the loopholes and the law may have turned people off. And I mean, we do see that all the time.
Juravich: Is there a way to change the law to make it term limits for, for you, for the person, not for it, like.
Blundo: You and 415,000 of your closest friends signed a petition.
Juravich: Is that how we got term limits in the first place?
Blundo: Yeah, it was in 1992, I believe, so it first took effect in 2000, so we've had plenty of evidence to see how it works and how it doesn't.
Tobias: Yeah, Larry Householder actually was kind of putting together a campaign like that when he got arrested by the FBI. So yeah, to extend them, I believe.
Juravich: So the person, or I'm sorry, the group that did this in 1992, they didn't write it so that term limits would be for like, for life or anything, is that what you meant?
Blundo: Yeah, they they said, you know, no more than eight years at a time in the House or the Senate, but no lifetime cap It doesn't say that you so we'd have to go back
Juravich: So we'd have to go back in time and tell those 1992 people to, okay.
Blundo: You would have to say 16 years period for your natural life.
BeMiller: I would imagine it did not occur to them that legislators would find a way to exploit that, you know, you want to hope for the best with any kind of policy like that.
Tobias: Well, I wasn't there in the 90s. Oh, I mean, I was alive, but I was thinking about like riding my bike, you know? But Republicans basically backed that. They were trying to oust the long-term Democratic speaker. And at that time, the Democrats really had kind of a stranglehold on the Ohio house. And so, you they were trying to destabilize the leadership, I guess, in that sense. And they've succeeded at that because we've seen, you know, a lot of leadership fights since then. But we've also seen kind of these more like rank and file members swap chambers too.
Juravich: All right. We're going to leave it there. That's fascinating. I didn't think we were going to get a history lesson from the 90s. But there you have it. I want to say thank you to Andrew Tobias, State Government and Politics reporter at Signal Ohio. Thanks for being here, Andrew.
Tobias: Go Cavs, happy to do it.
Juravich: And Haley B. Miller, State Government Reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. Thanks, Haley. Thank you. And Noah Blundo, Executive Editor, Hanna News Service. Thanks, Noah.
Blundo: Have a great day.
Juravich: And this has been All Sides and the Reporter Roundtable on 89.7 NPR News. If you missed any part of today's show, listen back at wosu.org slash all sides, subscribe to our podcast and every episode is available for free in our mobile app. Be sure to like the show on Facebook and also follow the show on Instagram. We're looking for more Instagram followers. The handle is at all sides WOSU. I'm Amy Juravich on 89 seven NPR News.