The NPR Politics Podcast - Abortion Is Top Of Mind In Ohio's Closely-Watched Senate Race

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Ryan are contesting Ohio's open Senate seat. Social issues including abortion are top-of-mind and the race is surprisingly tight in a state that has trended increasingly red.This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, and congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh.Learn more about upcoming live shows of The NPR Politics Podcast at nprpresents.org.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's Susan Davis from the NPR Politics Podcast. The news is out. We're finally going back on the road. And Houston, we're heading your way very soon. Join me, Asma Khalid, Tamara Keith, Domenico Montanaro, and Ashley Lopez at Zilka Hall on Thursday, September 15th. You can find more information about tickets, including discounted student ones, at nprpresents.org. Thanks to our partners at Houston Public Media. We hope to see you there. Hi, this is Cohen VanCourt in Houston, Texas, where I'm a work readiness instructor

for young adults on the autism spectrum. It's the best job in the world. This podcast was recorded at 12.36 p.m. on Wednesday, September 14th. Things might've changed since then, but I'll still be counting the days till I can see the NPR Politics Podcast live. Woohoo! Enjoy the show. I think at this point we're counting the hours to the live show, not the days.

She's in lock. It's coming up soon. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And today we're going to talk about Ohio's Senate race, which is not exactly a state I thought we'd be discussing in the fight for the Senate majority in 2022. To back it up a little, it's an open seat contest. Republican Senator Rob Portman decided to retire. Republican J.D. Vance is running against Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan. It's a Republican-held seat in a state where Republicans have been winning pretty comfortably statewide for a time now. So, Danielle, you just spent some time in Ohio. Help us understand what's going on in the state.

Sure, yeah. So first things first, this race pits Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman who our listeners might remember. He ran for president in 2020, and he is running against J.D. Vance, who our listeners also may have heard of. He wrote the book Hillbilly Elegy, which was a big, big deal just after Trump got elected. Specifically, what I was reporting on in Ohio, though, was not the quote-unquote working class issues that these two guys are running on quite a bit, but the topic of abortion. Because a couple of big things are happening in Ohio that are happening in a lot of other states. One thing is a big jump in women who are registering to vote, and in particular, it appears they're registering to vote Democratic. That is data that we know from a guy named Tom Bonier, who is the CEO of a Democratic group called Target Smart, who has been doing a lot of data analysis on this.

But also we've seen this borne out a bit in polls that post-Dobbs, Tim Ryan, the Democrat who is pro-abortion rights, he has done better among women. In particular, I'm looking at polling from Suffolk University, which shows that in early May, Tim Ryan was beating Vance among women by eight points. And then after Dobbs, he was beating Vance among women by 13 points. So that would suggest, at least, that Dobbs had something to do with that. And Dobbs, of course, was the June Supreme Court decision that overturned the established Roe v. Wade federal protection to abortion. Right, exactly. One thing I think about Ohio specific, and Mara Lyson has brought this up a lot, that blue collar women tend to actually be one of the groups that are the most swingable voters. Ohio is a place with a lot of blue collar women tend to actually be one of the groups that are the most swingable voters. Ohio is a place with a lot of blue collar women.

What did the voters you talked to there tell you about how abortion might be affecting their vote? Sure. So abortion is very much a motivating issue. I mean, the women I talked to bore this out, but it's really interesting who it's motivating and how. One woman I talked to is a woman named Susan Barry. She considers herself an independent. And I met her at the groundbreaking for an Intel plant at which Joe Biden and a number of politicians were also speaking. She and I got to talking about abortion. And she told me a story about how she had recently had a bad fall.

And she's currently getting a lot of health care and has a lot of young women who are health care workers who are helping her, caring for her right now. And she's been talking to them about this. And they face a lot of challenges ahead of them in terms of obtaining birth control and being able to make decisions that they consider to be ones that are dearly personal to them. I'm at an age where that's no longer a priority for me personally, but in talking to them and talking to a lot of their, sharing their concerns with me and their friends, it really is an issue that is terribly, terribly important to them. I've been reporting on abortion politics in a number of states this year, and over and over I hear just that women are talking a lot to each other about this. And that is something you don't always hear about other policies, like tax policy or what

have you. This is something very much people are chatting with their friends, their co-workers, their whoever about. One other woman I talked to is Laynala Porter. I met her at a county fair in a pretty conservative part of the state. Now, she is 19. She is not yet registered to vote, but she plans to register and register as a Democrat so she can vote this year. This will be her first time voting. And one of the big issues for her is abortion. I'm very, I'm pro-choice in a large way, yes. It just doesn't seem very fair to make a woman pay for and have a child when she just isn't ready or if it can potentially kill her. So Danielle, how are the two candidates talking about their positions on abortion? Sure. So their positions have shifted and or clarified, depending on how you want to look at it. Vance, in late 2021,

was asked about exceptions to abortion, and he has gotten a lot of criticism from Tim Ryan and other Democrats on this. At the time, J.D. Vance said in cases of things like rape and incest, really awful cases like that, he said that two wrongs don't make a right, essentially saying that he considers abortion another wrong on top of a wrong that was already done to that pregnant person. And now he has sort of backtracked on that. I asked him, I pushed him when I talked to him about what exceptions you think are appropriate. I think you have to have reasonable exceptions on the issue. And I do think that, I mean, you know, for example, the 10-year-old girl, the really tragic situation that got a lot of news, I think that certainly she should have qualified. Now, he did not specify to me exactly what other exceptions he would promote, but it's fair to say he has softened his position.

Now, Tim Ryan has also clarified things. He had been unclear up until recently on limits, on what limits he would want to impose on abortion if he had his say. So when I pushed him on this, he did say, I think that Roe was a good regime. Tim Ryan Yeah, I think we go back to Roe. That's been established law for 50 years. It was stable and, you know, now we're seeing nothing but chaos. Those are their positions. But as far as how much they talk about abortion, this is not an issue that is at the center of their campaigns by any means. You ask them about it, they'll talk about it. But they are both very much running on other topics. I think we've also seen this with other races around the country.

I mean, Republicans generally want this election, this midterm election, to be a referendum on Biden and his record on the economy. I was just out in Colorado reporting on the Senate race there, and the Republican candidate, Joe O'Day, unlike other Republicans who are running in competitive Senate races around the country, does support some abortion rights. He told me that he supports abortions up to five months, with some exceptions for rape and incest. But in the past, he has voted for a couple of referendum in Colorado that would ban abortions. One was a state ballot measure in 2020 that would have banned abortions after 22 weeks with no exceptions. And then he did say he opposed the law that actually was signed into law this year by the governor that codified Colorado's abortion protections. So O'Day has some sort of inconsistencies which Democrats are focusing in on as a big issue in the race, while he personally focuses on issues like inflation, crime, border security. All right, let's take a quick break. And we'll talk more about this race when we get back. And we're back. And Republicans in

Congress, or at least one Republican in Congress, is trying to keep abortion in the debate. Senator Lindsey Graham, he's a Republican from South Carolina, introduced legislation this week that would codify a federal ban on abortions provided after 15 weeks. Deirdre, this seems like a bill that none of his Senate Republican colleagues were really asking for. Right. I was staking out Senate lunches yesterday and Republicans coming out that were asked about this issue said, oh, I haven't read it. I haven't seen it. I really want to talk about inflation. Some of them outright said, you know, this is the Supreme Court decided this issue. Senator Cornyn said, you know, this essentially goes back to the states. The top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, said that, you know, the rest of his regular weekly press conference to talk

about inflation. Most Senate Republicans don't want to talk about this issue. They've seen how voters in their states are reacting to the decision and they'd rather really focus on what they think the election should be about for them, which is a referendum on Biden's economy. We don't really know how the Dobbs decision is going to affect the midterms, but we do. I think it is safe to say in the short term that Republicans don't like the politics of this, that they have been sort of rattled. And we've seen outcomes in places like Kansas and New York and referendums and special elections that looks like abortion is a bigger motivator for independents and Democrats than I think

Republicans might have been prepared for but danielle when i think about ohio one thing i'm struggling with with this race is like is it reflective of a bigger national mood here or is there something about this race that we've seen thematically through a lot of other senate races that the candidates just aren't that strong i mean mean, this is a state where, look, if Rob Portman was running for re-election, he would probably be sailing to re-election right now. J.D. Vance is a controversial candidate. He won a very contested primary.

He's a Trump-endorsed candidate. And he's one of these candidates that Mitch McConnell has sort of in passing referred to as being a bit problematic for his party in this environment. Yeah, I mean, let's start with the individual candidates. And let's start with J.D. Vance here, because you're right. I mean, he has not unified Republicans, to say the least. And right as I was getting to Ohio, a group called the Republican Accountability Project, which is run by a former Portman staffer, said, hey, we're campaigning against J.D. Vance. He has some

Republicans who just really don't want to see him elected. This race is close, yes, and closer than we might have expected in the first place, as you set up top, Sue. But J.D. Vance is still slightly favored to win by places like the Cook Political Report. But you're right. You'd think he would be winning by more in a red state. Meanwhile, Tim Ryan is running, trying to run a lot like Sherrod Brown, who is a pretty successful Democrat in that state. Tim Ryan is very, very much running an economic populist campaign, talking a lot about unions, talking a lot about factories, jobs, a lot about China. So I'm sure that those sorts of things are weighing on this race. The one thing I would say about national mood is I'm not sure how this will play out, but thinking about Kansas and how that amendment played out, we certainly saw a lot of people fired up. What was interesting there was there were quite a few independent and Republican women who came out and voted against that amendment. The question is, is that enough to get someone to vote against a Republican candidate and everything they stand

for? When abortion is not a discrete issue, but is mixed in with all these other things, will they vote Republican or not? I honestly don't know. And that's what this race is in part going to tell us. All right. I think we need to leave it there for today. But if you're in the Houston area and you want to join us for our live show tomorrow night, there's just a few tickets left and you can find them at NPR Presents dot org. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover politics. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.