Next week, Ohio voters will decide whether to add reproductive rights to their Constitution, after their gerrymandered legislature banned abortion and tried to make it harder for the people to amend the Constitution. David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of Saving Democracy: A User's Manual for Every American, joins Julie and Zephyr to assess what's at stake in the upcoming abortion referendum in Ohio. With intense gerrymandering, corruption, and citizen mobilization, can Ohio be a bellwether for the battle between the forces of autocracy and the forces of democracy at the state level throughout America?
To learn more about threats to democracy in Ohio, read David Pepper's 2021 book, Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines .
Read David Pepper's latest book, Saving Democracy: A User's Manual for Every American, and find more practical tools here.