David Pepper: I think a lot of people make the mistake of equating Donald Trump to the broader attack on democracy. If that were the case, we would have seen democracy rise between ‘21 and ‘24. We didn’t. Because the heart of the attack on democracy is happening in states.

 

And so the lesson that I would tell people is if all we do is win a presidential election—one-for-one office, although it’s important—and we don’t stop the rundown of democracy [unintelligible] state, it’s a short-term victory while the long-term erosion of democracy continues.

 

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about the past, present, and future of democracy. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is David Pepper. Pepper has served in several elected offices in Ohio and was the chair of the Ohio Democratic Party from 2015 to 2021. These days, he’s an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati Law School.

 

And he’s also a prolific writer with two nonfiction books about American democracy, 2021’s Laboratories of Autocracy and 2023’s Saving Democracy. He also writes a daily substack of political commentary. And on top of all that, he’s published five novels. He also serves as a senior fellow for the Kettering Foundation. Pepper has a deep knowledge of state politics, which gives him insight into the ways that democracy is under attack in state legislatures.

 

He communicates about these issues with passion and purpose. You’ll hear that in this conversation, and it also comes across in books like Laboratories of Autocracy, which manages to tell a complicated story about nerdy topics like gerrymandering while also being entertaining.

 

Pepper’s most fundamental insight is that during the last few years, while Americans have been attending to the drama of national politics—and there has been a lot of drama—many state legislatures across the country have been quietly undermining democracy. After all, state governments are the ones who draw legislative districts for both state and federal offices, and state governments are also directly involved in setting elections policies.

 

This gives state legislators a lot of power to keep themselves in office not by winning over new supporters but rather by creating maps and administering elections to protect themselves at the ballot box. This is possible in part because Americans just don’t pay that much attention to state politics. For example, in one poll from 2018, 81 percent of Americans admitted they couldn’t name their state senator. Now that I think of it, maybe I should google who mine is.

 

The mismatch between how much power state officials have and how little attention they receive creates possibilities for corruption and attacks on democracy. But while Pepper thinks American democracy is at risk at the level of state government, he also thinks there’s something we can do about it. The first step, of course, is simply paying attention and understanding the forces pushing state governments to be more extreme and less representative.

 

So if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re already doing that. What comes after that? Well, that can vary a bit depending on where you live. But Pepper has some good advice for all of us in this interview. A lot of the conversation you’re about to hear focuses on Ohio, the home state of both the Kettering Foundation and David Pepper. And if you live in Ohio, Pepper really is a voice you should be listening to.

 

But the trends he’s talking about are playing out in states all over the country and affect politics at every level for every American. So if you care about American democracy, stick around, and listen to what’s been going on in the Buckeye State and what it means for you. David Pepper, welcome to The Context.

 

David Pepper: Thank you. Great to be with you today.

 

Alex Lovit: So I’d like to start off by asking you how to undermine democracy. Let’s say I’m running a major political party in a state, which is a job you’ve had, actually. But let’s say maybe my party has a slight lead in elections in that state. We win more than we lose, but we still lose sometimes.

 

And I’m looking for ways to solidify my party’s hold on power. And I don’t want to do anything dramatic. I don’t want a violent revolution. I don’t want to cancel elections. But I want to make sure my party is insulated from swings of public opinion, and I want to do it without too many people noticing. What tools do I have at my disposal? What policies can I change that I can slant future elections in my party’s favor?

 

David Pepper: Well, sadly, we have a lot of precedent of doing exactly what you just described. And especially since you framed it around the state, as I try and write about and talk about, it turns out the single best place to do this from is the state house of your state. And this is what’s happening. Most people don’t know about it, and that’s one of the reasons why a state house is so perfect. It’s under the radar.

 

But state houses basically are the keys to the democracy of that state. And you can use the tools in state houses to shape the electorate to some degree. In the right hands, that could be a very good thing. It could be used to allow the most participation possible out of the electorate. In the wrong hands, it could be used to keep certain people from voting, which, if you try to keep power, is frankly a tool that you can take advantage of for bad reasons.

 

At the same time—we all know this—in most states, the state house continues to control the districting process, which is the districts of the very people we’re talking about. In the right hands, that can be used to have a fully participatory democracy with accountability. And in the wrong hands, it can be used to frankly rig the whole thing so that very few incumbents ever worry about getting knocked out of office.

 

And where a slight majority across the state can be manipulated by gerrymandering end up being a decisive majority so that it’s really impregnable to the voters. And so to your question, I wish it weren’t happening, but the truth is what you just asked about has been happening for some time. The state house turns out to be the best place. And once you get ahold of that, there are many, many tools—again, voter rules, gerrymandering, and others—that can be used to accomplish what you’re talking about.

 

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s bracket gerrymandering for a minute because I do want to dive deep into that. But outside of gerrymandering and redistricting, what other policies are being used to undermine democracy at the state level?

 

David Pepper: The state houses really are the ones that set the rules about how you vote, when you vote, how you register, how you purge. So that’s a tool that very directly can impact democracy and whether or not you have a fully participatory experience so that the overall election reflects the voters. But by making things difficult for certain voters, you’ve shaved their bloc enough down that they’re no longer as representative.

 

And that has happened. You see certain blocs in Ohio where their numbers just aren’t what they were. Now maybe some took themselves out of democracy—they’re no longer engaged—but in other cases, it’s because they’re moving enough so they’re purged from the rolls. Or they don’t have the new voter ID, and they’re not going to get their driver’s license updated in time. So that’s one. That’s the most direct one. That obviously gets some attention.

 

But then I’d say there are a lot of other levers over democracy in America and in states. And they are used in different ways. We see that around power shifts in certain agencies. A big front line in the battle for democracy right now is schools—what’s taught in schools? What is an ideology brought by those in charge of schools?

 

Well, we’re seeing those types of things impacted by people in office in the state house. Who runs the school system in Ohio, for example? You also can, believe it or not—and this gets very lost—what’s a really important component of a rule-of-law based democracy—independent courts. Courts that will step up and strike down efforts to do things that violate the rule of law in that state.

 

Well, what can the state house do? They can change the way courts are elected or selected to make it so it’s less like that court is independent. So there’s the very direct stuff around voting, but there’s also all these other parts of government that, in theory, are supposed to be independent or independent checks. But a state house can play a very direct role in eroding the independence of those agencies in a way that also, I think, undermines democracy itself. And that is happening in many, many states.

 

Alex Lovit: I want to pick up on a couple of things you said there. One is you were describing shaving off voters—not disenfranchising all Democrats but shaving off some voters from the Democratic coalition, for example. And I think one reason there isn’t more public outrage about these kinds of policies is because the numbers do seem kind of small.

 

So for example, Ohio just passed the strictest voter ID law in the country, and there’s various estimates of what percentage of voters are disenfranchised by that kind of law or lack the qualifying ID. But it’s maybe around 5 or 10 percent. And similarly, if you look at how many voters have been purged over the last few years cumulatively in Ohio, it’s about 5 or 10 percent of registered voters. Can you explain why we should be concerned if 90 to 95 percent of voters are still able to vote, no problem, why is it a problem?

 

David Pepper: One is a lot of races are very close, and they’re close in Ohio. Tim Ryan lost to J.D. Vance by 6 percent in a bad year for Democrats. Local races could come down to a few votes—a state house, school board, congress and up. And so one is races are close, and when you start talking about even single-digit percentages, you’re talking about a lot of people. But then the second one is there’s a disproportionality to who’s impacted.

 

So across the whole state, it may be 5, 6, 7 percent, which again is a big number. But if the lion’s share of those impacted by a new voter ID—which as you said, we now have the strictest in America—is young people who don’t have driver’s licenses nearly as much. Or seniors—80 and 90-year-olds—who haven’t driven in decades have no reason to have a license.

 

When you start seeing not just 5 or 6 percent but a massive disproportionate impact on certain types of voters, that’s when you really start to see an impact on outcomes themselves. Or let’s say the process of getting them adds a cost that is borne far more by people of lower incomes, that’s also a problem. So it is somewhat hidden.  

 

And one of the things that’s happened in the last 20, 30 years is, as you said, there is a very effective strand about voter fraud and all these fraudulent elections. So this stuff does feel like common sense to people, who, in their lives, getting an ID isn’t hard because they drive all the time, and they have a license. It turns out there no fraud almost whatsoever of any appreciable size. And what a lot of these folks don’t understand is maybe in their life, it’s not hard to have a driver’s license because they’re getting one anyway.

 

But for a young person who’s going to college here, grew up in Pennsylvania, they’re not going to get an Ohio driver’s license. Or that 90-year-old woman who’s always voted isn’t going to. So it’s a massive difficulty in their life even if the average person doesn’t feel the difficulty in theirs. That stuff really adds up in a relatively close state.

 

And when you see that there’s no fraud to back this stuff up—they can’t even point to it in court cases—the Republican officials brag about how fraud free Ohio is, it’s pretty clear that the intention here is these sets of voters that are disproportionately impacted.

 

In between things like purging of voters and others, there are certain communities where you can see enormous differences in who’s showing to vote as a result of year after year of these types of efforts to make voting more difficult or for some, very, very difficult.

 

Alex Lovit: Let’s talk gerrymandering. Can you explain how gerrymandering works? If I’m trying to draw district lines to help my party win elections, how do I do it?

 

David Pepper: Sure. And this is sort of the professor me from my law school class—what’s interesting is 80 years ago, you didn’t have gerrymandering because you had districts of drastically different sizes. And that was the way that the old white rural interests stayed in power is—the people of Chicago, you’d have 800,000 packed into a district, and in a small part of Illinois, you had 20,000. So the 20,000 had many, many more districts, and that led to a real overweighting of those interests versus urban interests.

 

Well, once that struck down by the supreme court, you had a couple decades where you had things even out, but then people figured out, well, if you draw districts creatively enough—they may have to be the same size, but you can carve them in certain ways—overpack districts with 70 or 80 percent of the other side’s party—so that you then have 55/45 or 60/40 in a bunch of your districts.

 

You might have just taken a 50/50 population and through creative map drawing and other things, created a majority of districts even when you don’t have a majority of the people, or it’s 50/50 and you have 60/40. And the problem is—and I write about this in detail in the book—I think people have gotten a lot more partisan about the mindset that this is okay in a way that 20 or 30 years ago, there might have been a different sense of how far you should take it.

 

And number two, the data—the technology that can be used to fine-tune this gerrymandering has gotten so sophisticated that you can have situations—Wisconsin is probably the most gerrymandered state in the last 15 years. Wisconsin has had elections where, by almost double digits, the voters of Wisconsin chose a Democrat for their state house, yet that would translate into a 2-to-1 supermajority in that state house for Republicans.

 

That wouldn’t have happened a couple of decades ago. It would have happened in the days of the districts of different sizes. But in the last couple of decades, the fine-tuning of the data work—the aggressiveness of it—has led to situations where the minority party has a supermajority. And until courts come along and stop it, the potential of how warped it can make representation is enormous because of especially that sophisticated data work that they’re now able to do.

 

Alex Lovit: Well, I’m happy you brought up the Supreme Court cases that established what I think of as a basic principle of democracy—that every legislator would represent the same number of people, which didn’t happen until the 1960s—that’s short of shockingly late. And so now we’ve talked about how to gerrymander, which is you try to pack your opponents into one district, and then you can crack the remainder across multiple districts —

 

David Pepper: Correct.

 

Alex Lovit:—so that they waste a lot of votes winning the districts they win, and they don’t have enough votes left over to win the remaining districts. What’s the impact of gerrymandering? How does it affect how politicians think and behave, and how does it affect how voters think and behave?

 

David Pepper: One of the interesting things about writing books is you really force you to think about things in a way that you haven’t before. And so my answer to this question is different than five years ago because I really sort of forced myself to think through it. So we have two things happening—gerrymandering and then the additional problem of uncontested districts that are resulting from gerrymandering.

 

I believe the incentive systems that come out of gerrymandering basically turn every incentive that we think democracy leads to in terms of—the accountability of democracy, in theory, creates an incentive for good public service—for delivering good public goods back to the people, who then get to choose whether or not to reelect you. The accountability of democracy leads to a set of incentives that leads to good public outcomes and [more say] or moderate incentives to work together.

 

Because you’re in a swing district, you need to appeal to people of a lot of different mindsets. A gerrymandered system, where essentially the election of most members of that system is guaranteed in the general election—the incentives go upside down. They become warped.

 

The incentive to be more moderate—which, when I was a county commissioner, which I was in Hamilton County when the county was a 50/50 district—if it wasn’t part of my personality, and it was, my incentive would be, well, don’t be too extreme or you’ll lose. Try and reflect the broader mainstream views of this county.

 

Once you have no election in November to worry about, the incentive actually goes from being more broad mainstream to be an extremist so you don’t lose your next primary because that’s the only election that could ever potentially cost you your career. But the other incentive that I think really explains how broken these state houses are is once you never worry about the public in a general election—once you almost always have no opponent in the general election, which is happening in many states, the connection of the people themselves to your world is gone.

 

And this is where the incentive, I think, has taken places that we’ve all assumed for a long time are actually about public service in the first place. But their incentive system is not public service. It’s actually not public outcomes. Those outcomes have no impact on their next election. They can have poor roads, poor schools, lower wages, poor health care, and still get reelected and will. But their incentive is actually that primary, where that big energy company or that for-profit school delivering terrible outcomes could actually impact their campaign in a primary and cost them their election.

 

And their incentive is to keep those people more happy than the public because in the general election, they have no opponent. So I wonder that the gerrymandered systems of states like Ohio have converted what were supposed to be institutions of public service into institutions that generally are using public assets and public dollars for a very strange version of private service using our power to do it.

 

Handing public school money to private for-profit schools, handing out vouchers that aren’t helping poorer kids but are helping lift up private schools that appreciate the subsidy all while public outcomes, like those public schools are falling—I worry that the MO of most places due to gerrymandering is no longer public service at all.

 

And when you start looking around the country at the declining public outcomes by almost any measure in states like Ohio, that is very consistent with what I have just described. If your goal was to improve public outcomes, the minute your policy was failing to deliver good public outcomes, you’d change it, wouldn’t you? But they’re not changing their policies even when the public outcomes are failing.

 

Just as an example, Ohio was ranked fifth in the nation in the quality of its overall education in 2010—fifth. We’re now in the mid-20s. The set of policies that they pursued to drive us from 5 to the mid-20s aren’t changing. They’re accelerating. If you were about public outcomes, you’d do the opposite. But what they are serving is sort of a different set of interests.

 

The for-profit school that wants the public money, the folks who want private vouchers for everybody—they don’t care if it’s draining the public schools. So the downward spiral of outcomes, I think, is a direct result of the fact that the entire incentive systems of these gerrymandered, unaccountable state houses are upside down versus what public service should be.

 

Alex Lovit: You’re talking eloquently, there, about the effects of gerrymandering on the politicians. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how it affects voters. What is it like to live in a gerrymandered district?

 

David Pepper: I think the most dramatic effect is on the behavior of these institutions. And we have an entire generation of officials in the state house in Columbus and all over the country who have literally personally never really been part of a Democratic system. Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House of this country—his first state house election—uncontested. His second—uncontested. Three, four, and five—races for congress—35 percent blowouts. His next race, uncontested.

 

We have people, like the Speaker of the House, who’ve never been involved in a system with any accountability. So I think the first thing that people should see is how much it’s warping what we’ve always thought of as a profession that was supposed to be about public service. But, yeah, number two is clearly what it’s doing is it’s removing voters from the Democratic process.

 

If you don’t have elections or if elections are such blowouts, you don’t even know who these people are. You have no idea what they do. You never hear about the state house budget or what it’s doing to your school system. Think about it this way. The time that you’re most likely to hear about all these topics are in a campaign, where the opponent to the incumbent actually tells you his or her reason to not vote for that person because of this vote, that vote, or the overall direction isn’t good.

 

Once you’ve removed the general election from even existing, those voters almost never hear anything about their incumbent except what they’re told to hear by that incumbent. Even if there is a newspaper, if there’s no election, there’s nothing to cover. There’s no debates. There’s no forum. There’s no nothing. And so I think turnout suffers, energy and activism suffer, but more broadly, just the transparency that is essential to democracy about what this place is doing, and these state houses are doing just disappears.

 

In some states, like Texas, they cancel the election. It’s called a canceled election. It doesn’t even happen. And that’s the state of play, not just in a few districts in Texas, but a significant double-digit percentage all over the country are not only gerrymandered but no election whatsoever. And that really—and if these were places where nothing happened, it would be problematic in theory.

 

But when these are the very institutions that are doing the most damage to democracy, advancing an agenda that is far removed from what most people in these states want done—the fact that those are the places where there’s no really Democratic process left is especially damaging.

 

Alex Lovit: That’s a powerful argument against gerrymandering. What do we do about it? You mentioned earlier federal legislation that would have imposed a federal mandate redistricting—

 

David Pepper: Yeah.

 

Alex Lovit:—all states, and that was blocked by a filibuster in the Senate. I think you’re supporting the constitutional amendment being proposed by Citizens Not Politicians here in Ohio. What can we do about gerrymandering and how do we solve it?

 

David Pepper: If there’s an opportunity—and I hope it’s bipartisan, by the way—to end gerrymandering after the next election through federal law, it should be the first thing they do. And my hope is beyond one party. I doubt it will be. But the best solution is a federal, one size fits all set of rules so that neither Democrats in Maryland or Republicans in North Carolina or Ohio can gerrymander. And once each side realizes the other can’t gerrymander, I think the incentive to go downhill disappears. So the federal solution [is the best].

 

I wish we had a supreme court that, frankly, would impose it directly. They haven’t. I don’t think they will unless there’s a dramatic change. So that’s first. But I think anyone listening to this—let’s say you’re in a blue state, and you’re just thinking, well, there’s nothing to be done. I would say make sure that your representative commits that the first thing they will do, if they manage to win in ‘24, is to do this at the federal level. 

 

Don’t wait a year. Don’t put it on the backburner. Number two—any state—we’ve learned pretty clearly, in Ohio, that when voters, as they have recently, figure out just how broken and how dishonest gerrymandering is—electing majorities by gerrymandering, it’s not honest democracy. It’s a rigged system. And we’ve seen the voters, every time they’ve had a chance since 2014 or so to weigh in, they’ve said we don’t like gerrymandering. Every poll shows us that that’s true right now.

 

And we have in Ohio an effort building to try and change the law in November so the politicians can’t draw their own districts. If you’re in one of the states—and it’s about 19 states—luckily for them, they can do direct democracy constitutional amendments to end gerrymandering—figure out how to do it. That’s what we’re doing in Ohio. That’s what Michigan did. Other states have done it. And the best system is the system, like Michigan’s, where you basically fire the politicians from being involved in any way.

 

And you have an independent commission do it because I guarantee you whoever’s on the commission will be better than a bunch of politicians who clearly have a ridiculous bias in not drawing against themselves. Number three, I would say even if you don’t have an independent commission—we saw this play out in Wisconsin—state supreme courts can play a huge role in ending gerrymandering.

 

In the last 10 years, without changing their constitutions, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court found that gerrymandering could be found to be illegal under the state constitution. The North Carolina Supreme Court found the same thing. The Wisconsin Supreme Court found the same thing only a few months ago. Wisconsin, as bad as I just described it, is about to be un-gerrymandered.

 

So if you can do a direct democracy amendment, do it, but know that some states are ending gerrymandering by electing supreme courts that also see it as an attack on democracy. And they’re finding within the constitutional language they already have [of this problem]. Like North Carolina, unfortunately, like Ohio, the state house defied the ruling long enough that they were able to get away with a gerrymander, but in Wisconsin, that’s not going to happen, I don’t believe.

 

And all of the sudden, this state with a terrible gerrymander is seeing it go down. So there’s federal. Then there’s independent direct democracy. And if you’re not in a state that has that option, which most don’t, see if a supreme court process is possible. But here’s my advice to anybody anywhere. And this is the part that might sound the most glass half-full, but I couldn’t feel it more strongly. Even if you’re in a state with terrible gerrymandering and there isn’t quite a path to change it, you still got to run everywhere.

 

Having 50 percent of those Tennessee Republicans who kicked out their two colleagues for being part of an anti-gun protest—having 50 percent of those incumbents face no opposition is worse than the fact that there are gerrymandered districts. Because once these people go back to office without even an opponent, the disconnect back to the people is even more broken. It doesn’t exist. And so the first step—and we’re starting to see this.

 

In the last three months, I’ve been thrilled by the number of states that are recruiting more candidates—who are not allowing what is almost like a new version of Jim Crow where no one’s even running. It’s true one-party rule, which was how Jim Crow was so powerful. Even if you’re stuck with a bad gerrymander, know that there’s a value to running in tough districts.

 

Even if you don’t technically win the election, you’re winning in another way by bringing transparency, by bringing accountability, so don’t give up. Even if you can’t un-gerrymander in the next couple of years, know that by running everywhere, you are actually really lifting democracy versus leaving half or more of these incumbents without any opposition whatsoever. That’s the true deep damage happening in too many states.

 

Alex Lovit: Earlier we were talking about the mechanics of gerrymandering—that idea of you pack your opponents into one district and crack the remainder—some political scientists argue that the natural political geography of where Americans choose to live benefits the Republican party.

 

Basically, that even without gerrymandering, Democratic voters tend to live in dense, blue cities, and no matter how fairly you draw the lines, those Democratic voters have packed themselves, whereas Republican districts also are somewhat politically polarized but a little less dense. First of all, do you agree with that diagnosis as part of the picture of what’s going wrong?

 

David Pepper: Yeah. Clearly, there’s some truth to that. But there’s a big difference between the natural self-delegation of voters in choosing where to live versus—and you can see it through the shapes of the districts, the intense gerrymandering that’s intentionally dividing far more than how people themselves have chosen to live. And so I’d say it in several ways. One is that this was brought up a lot during the Ohio gerrymander.

 

I watched the John Husteds and Frank LaRose of the world sit up in their meetings and act like that was the reason. And the expert map-drawers said no. You don’t have a 63/36, or whatever map they came up with, because of that. You probably would be in the mid-50s versus the mid-40s. Yes. That does lead to some skew, but it’s not the intensity of an intentional gerrymander. So that becomes a real sort of red herring excuse for what is much more intentional, cynical gerrymandering. But sure.

 

And this is a point I made the other day—actually with Kettering, on a panel that Maureen O’Conner and I were at—I’m actually not running around talking about gerrymandering every day because I think that if only we ended gerrymandering and Democrats had a majority in Ohio and Missouri and where else—that’s not really even my concern.

 

I think if you had an un-gerrymandered state in Ohio, you would likely have a majority Republican delegation most times. You’d have one in Missouri. You’d have one in Tennessee. But you’d have a different type of politician. Because within those districts, you’d have a number of politicians who were in swing districts who would fear that they would lose. And so they behave differently.

 

What they’ve done in Ohio—and the big fight, if you watch closely the supreme court opinions and the repeated mapmaking in violation of those opinions by the Republicans—they are working overtime to make it so that not a single member of their caucus ever worries about a reelection.  And what that does—let’s say if you had an un-gerrymandered, Republican-leaning legislature, five, six, seven, eight of those members on the Republican side would be in swing districts.

 

They would feel some pressure to be more moderate. If someone brought forward some crazy idea, they would say, I can’t vote for that idea. I will lose. But once they gerrymander—and this is the irony—what is happening in Republican states—this is a war on moderate Republicans as much as it is on Democrats. They are going extinct largely because of gerrymandering.

 

And what happens is they are eliminating that sense of balance, that sense of mainstream, that sense of moderation and replacing all those formerly Republican moderate candidates with more extreme candidates. And so that balanced reflection of Ohio would also reflect the moderation of Ohio, even if it was a Republican majority. Once it’s all gerrymandered districts, there’s no one in the middle speaking up for that middle view, which actually better reflects Ohio.

 

Alex Lovit: Well, speaking about this disconnect between the moderation of Ohio Republican voters and the extremity of the Republicans in the state house, your book, Laboratories of Autocracy, which lays out a lot of the arguments we’ve just been talking about, came out in 2021, which really isn’t that long ago. But the last couple of years have been eventful ones for the state of Ohio, including a couple of elections about changing the state constitution that made national headlines.

 

And I think there’s a story here to be told about the disconnect about the disconnect at the state house level of the people. Can you help explain what’s happened in Ohio over the last couple years?

 

David Pepper: Sure. I mean a lot of what we’ve been talking about was born out, that a majority of those gerrymandered legislatures pushed by certain interest groups on the far right on certain issues repeatedly push for things that, in hindsight, most Ohioans thought didn’t make sense.

 

They pushed to destroy our direct democracy by raising the threshold of constitutional amendments to 60 percent. Then they push an abortion ban—no exceptions—even though every poll tells you that somewhere close to 60 percent of Ohioans have been generally for reproductive freedom—a woman’s right to choose. And what happened in Ohio last year was the voters clearly said, okay, we’re going right to the polls through direct democracy to exert our will against a gerrymandered legislature.

 

These were not close fights in the end. Each election—the one in August that would have destroyed direct democracy, a bipartisan coalition defeated it 57-43. We saw counties that voted decisively for Trump vote basically as a multipartisan coalition against the Republican state house. Geauga County, Greene County where the governor’s from—a number of others that are very clearly places that voted for Trump voted for democracy, decisively.

 

Then in November, same thing for reproductive freedom—getting rid of that ban. Butler County. Again, Geauga County. Delaware County. Republican strongholds voted against that ban and for reproductive freedom. So it really was a whole year reminding Ohioans—the state house folks don’t seem to really see it yet. They are in their little gerrymandered world, completely out of touch with the broad views of the state of Ohio, and in many cases, with the people of their own districts.

 

And so I think it really was a lesson learned. And what’s interesting is when I wrote this first book, Laboratories of Autocracy, I wrote it very alarmed that no one was seeing this and that the strategies being pursued by those who care about democracy were not smart enough to take on this state house-based laboratory of autocracy strategy, if we can call it that.

 

And what’s interesting is the last year and a half, not only there was Ohio issues, but many elections where election-denying Secretaries of State lost in 2022 or the Michigan and Pennsylvania state houses flipped in 2022. I think we’re seeing that if people really focus on democracy itself and energize around that—and not only for federal office—the truth is there actually are many wins to be gotten. And those Ohio examples in ‘23 are a perfect example that the voters saw through it.

 

The voters didn’t trust the state government’s views on these things. The voters showed up in August when no one thought they would and again in November and actually won. And it wasn’t just Democrats. It was Libertarians, a whole lot of Republicans, a whole lot of Democrats saying to a bunch of folks in gerrymandered districts, sorry, you’re out of touch with us. So I think it was a hopeful sign that these things can happen when everybody comes together in the right way.

 

Alex Lovit: We’re talking a lot about Ohio here, which is where you and I both have the good fortune to live. And Ohio is a red state, so we’re talking about a Republican gerrymander and Republican efforts to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters. There are blue states that have Democratic-leaning gerrymanders. Do you think that these policies are used disproportionately by the two parties?

 

David Pepper: Gerrymandering’s been around for centuries. Democrats have done it. Republicans have done it. In the famous case a couple of years ago where the Supreme Court decided not to disallow partisan gerrymandering, both North Carolina, a Republican state, and Maryland, a Democratic state came up as clearly the evidence [unintelligible] gerrymander. So on one side, it’s clear that both sides do it. I would argue, even though I was a former Democratic chair, it’s bad when anyone does it.

 

And this is one of the theories of my books is once you have a gerrymandered system with no accountability, governance and representation simply get worse whether it’s Democrats or Republicans doing it. At the same time, I don’t think this is a both sides situation. There are efforts to end gerrymandering taking place in Washington. There was a vote a year ago on that. Every Democrat voted for it, and every Republican voted against it.

 

This is a law that would basically eliminate gerrymandering in all 50 states—or at least really curb it, and Democrats supported it. A couple of them wouldn’t overcome a filibuster on it. But I do think there’s more of an interest in ending it among Independents [and] Democrats [than] Republicans, although in practice both sides do it.

 

And my view is a national curb on it would keep everyone from doing it, which is actually exactly what we need. I will say also—this is an interesting point. I think red states are clearly engaging in more aggressive purging and suppression of voters. But there are some blue states, and I hear from their activists all the time out of frustration that haven’t quite moved to a very sort of 21^st century best practice of voting either.

 

Reforms that we can talk about—automatic voter registration, same-day registration and voting, a big open window for vote-by-mail. Some states, like Washington State and Oregon, have done this, but other blue states haven’t. And you scratch your head, and you wonder why haven’t they. Their fellow partisans in other states talk about doing this.

 

And my guess is that I have a sneaking suspicion that some of those updates may not be being made because those in power also might worry that that might empower a different type of Democrat who could then beat them. So I don’t think they’re suppressing the vote in some of these states, but I think in some of the blue states, they’re not moving as quickly towards what I would call the best practices of voter participation perhaps out of a fear that those might actually hurt their chances in the next election.

 

Alex Lovit: So we’re talking a lot about democracy on the state level here and state-level policy. Of course, there are also threats to democracy at the federal level, but a lot of your argument in your writing is about the state level. Right now, it’s a national election year.

 

There’s going to be a lot of attention on the race for the president, so arguing about state policy is swimming upstream a little bit. Can you make the argument for why it’s so important to pay attention to the state level? And is a lack of attention at the state level part of the problem? 

 

David Pepper: It’s an enormous part of the problem. It’s literally why I wrote this first book, Laboratories of Autocracy. I had no plans to writing that book. But the whole national environment is so focused on Washington that it goes back to your very question. It creates a perfect environment to use much less focus on state houses that do most of the damage to democracy while we can all watch Washington admit nothing even happens there.

 

They don’t pass anything. They don’t largely do anything. They just bicker all day, and that’s frustrating if you’re watching as a citizen. But what you really should see is while they do nothing, back in most of these gerrymandered red state houses, it’s a full-on assault on democracy in the ways we’ve talked about.

 

And it only took a few months after Joe Biden beat Trump and after Democrats won the congress—celebrating as if they had won the battle for democracy overall—to realize that, oh, my gosh, democracy is still being subverted in state after state. Winning only the federal offices is clearly not enough. Defeating Donald Trump—and I think a lot of people make the mistake of equating Donald Trump to the broader attack on democracy.

 

If that were the case, we would have seen democracy rise between ‘21 and ‘24. We didn’t. Because the heart of the attack on democracy is happening in states. And so the lesson that I would tell people is if all we do is win a presidential election—one-for-one office, although it’s important—and we don’t stop the rundown of democracy [unintelligible] state, it’s a short-term victory while the long-term erosion of democracy continues.

 

Alex Lovit: So this dynamic you’re talking about—a lot of attention on a few swing states, on major federal elections, and lack of attention on the local and state level—how do you see changes in the media being a part of that?

 

David Pepper: I think the decline—and I say this having been a college journalist, which I know the professional journalists won’t think that amounts to much, but it gave me sort of a journalistic perspective. And so much of that local journalism that I was doing, that we all grew up seeing, is in a dramatic decline. And again, going back to your very first question, if you want to do something that’s attacking democracy that no one pays attention to—that no one sees—go to the place where there’s no journalists.

 

Go to the place where there’s no coverage. And by the way, in Ohio, we’re better off than a lot of states. We still have major media outlets who cover the state house. But that local paper—the daily or the weekly in a mid-sized or small town that would cover, with some granularity, who your state rep is, what they’re voting on—the good, the bad, and the ugly—those papers are disappearing so fast.

 

And the lack of journalism—and by the way, at the same time that you and I can watch TV, you’ve got 80 reporters following Mike Johnson and Kevin McCarthy through the hallway as if each one of them’s going to get their own scoop by following him with a microphone. What I would say to the journalists out there is balance it out a little bit. Cover state houses, where most of the push against democracy is happening, with at least equal vigor as following Kevin McCarthy to say the same thing to all 80 of you.

 

And there are ways this is starting to happen, but let’s try and bring some life back to local and state-level journalism. Because without it, you have these state houses grinding away, every day, many bills—and there’s almost no journalistic infrastructure in place to keep up with it. That’s another real danger to democracy. And what is that being replaced by—that local reporter-based journalism? By insane cable television—national. It’s half opinion, if not more opinion than fact.

 

A story will get on there and bounce around the world before anyone can figure out if it’s even true or false. We had a perfect example of this. Do you remember that story a year ago of the 10-year-old rape victim in Columbus who was forced to go to Indiana for abortion care that she couldn’t get here? Within a day or two of that coming out, you literally had Fox News interviewing Ohio officials saying that story was false. And that bounced all over the county as a false story, that it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen.  

 

Well, a Columbus Dispatch reporter a few days later showed up in a courtroom in Franklin County and looked right at the defendant who did the rape. And it turned out that it was absolutely the case, and because that journalist on the local level did her job and found the story, the national people had to stop saying it was made up.

 

But in the future, as you see more and more of the local journalists fall away, the story in the future may be only the Fox News story that something wasn’t true and no local journalists to do the actual work of figuring out that it is true.

 

That story was a great example of how important local journalism is and a great reporter who found the story but also a real warning bell ringing that the more local journalism disappears, the more you’ll get these hyper-politicized stories at the national level with no bearing, actually, in terms of the facts on the ground. And no connection back to that because local journalists aren’t around enough to even dig up those facts in the first place. So it’s a real contributing factor to the problem.

 

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk a little bit about your advice for citizens who want to be a part of saving democracy. And you write a lot of that advice in your 2023 book, Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American. Can you give us a taste of that book? Tell us a couple of things that every American can do.

 

David Pepper: Yeah. I actually wrote the book because anyone who read Laboratories of Autocracy—I think you’ll know from reading it—is concerned, to say the least. And I put a bunch of tips in there about once you realize that the battle for democracy is as we’ve described it, the liberating part of that observation is there’s actually a lot more you can do than sitting around and hoping that we win a few senate races far away from here in some swing district.

 

Which is kind of the only thing that the traditional narrative leaves you to think is a way out. Well, if only we win the Pennsylvania Senate race, everything is solved. No. Actually, once you realize that the frontline of democracy is at the state level, that means it’s where you are—or the school board level or that court race we talked about. It means that everyone in America is actually sitting on the frontline of the battle in a way they never realized.

 

Once you realize that this is not just a partisan battle of R versus D—it often is equated to that but it’s not. It’s a larger battle for democracy itself. Once those two things become clear, there’s so much more we all could be doing to lift democracy than we’ve ever thought. I’ll do it in two ways. One, I don’t care if you’re in Oklahoma or New York State or California or Ohio, once you’ve read my books, I hope you see there’s work to be done where you are for democracy.

 

In New York—you remember how I talked about these blue states that aren’t really updating their voting laws? Well, let’s get to work on that in New York or Massachusetts, where they could be best in class but aren’t. So there’s activism to be done there. It could be that Democrats are telling other Democrats do better. Or in Oklahoma, they’re left to think they are not at all relevant to the battle for democracy.

 

When I was in Oklahoma, what did I tell them? Well, your first step in your battle for democracy is to make sure that next time around, 60 percent of the Oklahoma incumbents in that state house are not uncontested. If you get to 40 percent or 30 percent, you’re making progress. Let’s keep going. Or that in ‘23, it’s every school board race in the country. That’s a frontline democracy battle.

 

On the flip side, the other thing I’d say is once you see the battle for democracy is not only about R versus D, and you see that what we talked about at the very beginning of the conversation—a lot of the attack on democracy is by attacking certain voters. My hope is you realize that whatever you do in life, there are networks that you’re a part of that could actually lift the very voters that have been removed from democracy.

 

And this is where I go through an analogy I put in my book, and I have diagrams. What’s your footprint? What do you do beyond your political activity? Do you volunteer at the food bank? Do you give money to the homeless shelter? Do you know the mayor of a city? Is that homeless shelter registering voters—registering the people they serve when they come to the homeless shelter? Or is the food bank, or is the health clinic, or is the rec center?

 

My guess is there are probably not many places. These are the very voters being removed from democracy in the ways we talked about. And the people who are for democracy too rarely take the time to figure out that in a non-partisan way, they could be lifting those voters back into democracy. Are you part of an apartment building complex? Could you take ownership to make sure that people in that complex are registered to vote? Who’s doing it? Usually nobody.

 

Once you realize that there’s a lot of nonpartisan activity that could be used to lift democracy and that many times the best ambassador to the voters being removed from democracy isn’t a party at all—it is the food bank. It is the health clinic. Use those networks to actually go to bat for these people. The reason I think this is so important—and this is sort of the glass half-empty/half-full—the scale of the attack on democracy, when you take a step back, is actually quite large.

 

It’s billions of dollars. It’s networks like a think called ALEC—the American Legislative Exchange Council. It’s full-time government work in some states being used to subvert democracy. The side that cares for democracy is too often viewing this as sort of a volunteer activity. We have the numbers on our side. Most Americans still want a good, healthy, rule-of-law based democracy.

 

But if all we do is fight for it a couple months late in the year, a couple hours in that week—part-time split the pot while the other side is enormous—the scale is not going to win. And so one key way to get there is if everyone incorporates saving democracy into what they do every day, I think our scale starts to get very big very quickly. But we just haven’t thought of it that way for a long time. So that’s some of the advice I give.

 

And by the way, this applies to business leaders. Every university and college should be registering—every student who registers for classes, register to vote. Incorporate it into business and nonprofit and university operations in any way you can because that’s how you start getting to the stream of voters and people that it’s going to take to lift all those removed from democracy right back into it.

 

Alex Lovit: All this talk about the dangers of democracy can be a bit dispiriting.

 

David Pepper: Yeah.

 

Alex Lovit: It’s like we’re saying to people, the game is rigged, and in order to fix it, you’re going to have to work harder to overcome that rigged game.

 

David Pepper: Yeah.

 

Alex Lovit: Do you have a response to that? Do you have thoughts on how people should find their motivation?

 

David Pepper: There’s nothing worse than thinking you’re winning when you’re not. So if it’s a splash of cold water to say, hey, listen, the strategy of thinking we could only win by winning a few federal elections is a losing strategy. The only thing worse than that observation is to not see it. Because then you’re losing even when you think you’re winning, which has been what’s happening in the battle for democracy. So yes, it is a wake-up call. And it is sobering.

 

But I actually think, in the end, it’s helpful to see that we’re not in—our entire country’s history has been a battle for democracy. The battle of Civil War, the women’s suffragists, the Civil Rights Era—no, we are not the first generation of Americans, post-60s, to magically be in a moment where democracy is here to stay if no one fights for it. And so if that reality check is sobering, too bad. We need to see that, or we will lose.

 

So we are like all our forebearers. They had to fight for democracy. So do we. That is sobering. But I also hope it inspires. What I also hope, more than anything, is once you see the battle that way, you see what we’ve been doing wrong. You see some wasted energy.

 

And you see, I hope, like I do, very clearly, that if we apply our energy somewhat differently and more strategically, we can work the same—or maybe harder because we’re more inspired—to much greater results than we have been when we haven’t viewed it the right way. And not only is that sort of the theory of my books—and by the way, I leave most presentations with people energized for that reason.

 

They’re thinking, my God, I finally see it. I can now be smarter about what I do in my activism. What’s really good news is, as we talked about with Ohio in ‘23, in the last couple years, we are seeing a winning streak for democracy once you view it as the broader battle. We saw counter-historic wins in states around the country in ‘22. We saw the end of gerrymandering in Wisconsin in late ‘23. We saw a Kansas referendum go a way no one would have thought in August of ‘22.

 

We saw state houses flip when you never would have imagined they’d flip. When one party is in the White House, normally, it’s very bad. Well, they went the other way. And I think we’re seeing that because people are starting to see that the state-level battle is where it’s at. And when we apply our energy there, where it’s been so long overlooked, there’s actually more value brought to bear by energy there than being a drop in the ocean in some of these federal races.

 

So I think the eye-opening nature of it at the first moment is hard to take. In the second, it’s like, okay, I’m glad I see that now. And third, it’s wow, I can feel myself doing so many more things I never thought to do now that I see this whole struggle in the right way versus the wrong way, which was if I only help John Fetterman and Bishop Warnock, I’m doing my part. Nope. Now, it’s much better, but it’s also right where you are, so there’s far more you can do about it than you ever imagined.

 

Alex Lovit: David Pepper, thank you for joining us on The Context.

 

David Pepper: Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

 

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The opinions expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers. I’m Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the Foundation. A bunch of other people also help to make this show possible, including Isabel Pergande as a research assistant, George [Drake], Jr. as episode producer, and Melinda Gilmore as Director of Communications.

 

You can find more information about Kettering and subscribe to our newsletter at kettering.org. To contact the podcast, email thecontext@kettering.org. People only listen to podcasts if they hear about them, so if you like the show, please rate or review us or tell a friend who you think might be interested. We’ll be back in this feed in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.

 

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Kettering Foundation contractor and may contain small errors. The authoritative record is the audio recording.