Mike DeWine’s Redistricting Flip-Flop Reveals A Governor No Longer In Charge
July 31, 2024
Columbus, Ohio- Today, Governor DeWine endorsed a redistricting plan similar to the one in Iowa, where politicians have the final say.
It’s a sudden switch coming from a governor who previously said that he would be “very happy not to be involved in the future” and said today that we should remove politics from redistricting.
“Governor DeWine’s redistricting flip-flop reveals a man no longer in charge of his administration and it begs the question if he ever actually was,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chair Elizabeth Walters. “Either Governor DeWine suddenly believes politicians actually should be drawing maps for Ohioans despite countless examples of him professing the opposite position, or he knows that future administrations will have a harder time passing the extremist agenda we see coming out of Columbus with a balanced legislature.”
DeWine on Redistricting, in his own words:
I don’t think the legislature should be involved in redistricting. I don’t think the governor should be involved. I would be very happy not to be involved in that in the future… I think that the real question is — somebody’s gonna make these decisions, so how do you get people who are, in fact, impartial and who people can have trust in? And that, to me, is the real concern. – ABC5 Cleveland, 01/07/2024
I’ve been very clear in saying that I don’t think the governor should be involved. I don’t want to be involved. I don’t think the legislature should be involved. And we need to come up with a new way.”- WTAP, 01/07/2024.
“It’s my personal choice to never be involved in that again, so maybe I have a little bias and don’t want elected officials involved, because I sure don’t want to be involved in it again. And we need not to have elected officials directly involved in it,” he said. Ohio Capital Journal, 5/13/2024
“The system we have today doesn’t work very well,” the governor said “[It’s] no great revelation to anyone in this room who watched this unfold — it just didn’t work very well.” Ohio Capitol Journal– 8/23/2023