Ohio: Democrats, GOP Take on Biden's Ballot Eligibility

Facts

• With the US Democratic Party's presidential nomination convention set for August, a political problem has developed in Ohio, as the national convention is after the state's legal deadline for registering a nominee. Accordingly, the party will hold an earlier virtual event to nominate Pres. Joe Biden to try and keep him on Ohio's ballot.¹
• Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, whose party currently controls the state House and Senate, called a special legislative session to pass a law to fix the issue.²
• The state legislature has dealt with this dilemma twice before — in 2012 and 2020 — and passed exemption laws when political parties couldn't make the August 7 deadline. However, this year, the GOP is divided over whether to pass a new exemption.³
• Some Ohio Republican lawmakers have said they won't pass the exemption law unless it includes unrelated campaign finance provisions. The GOP holds a supermajority in both state legislative chambers.⁴
• It's yet unclear how the virtual convention will affect the legislative session, which is expected to continue through Thursday. The Senate and House have offered separate proposals which need to be reconciled in order to pass.⁵
• While the DNC has set June 4 as the date of its virtual convention, which would fall within the 90 days before the election deadline, Gov. DeWine has called on his party to pass what he called 'prudent legislation...to get this done.'⁶

Sources: ¹BBC News, ²wsj.com, ³New York Times, ⁴FOX News, ⁵NBC and ⁶New York Post.

Narratives

• Democratic narrative, as provided by Cincinnati CityBeat. In a state where 500K people just voted to nominate Biden as their party's candidate, extremist Republicans, led by pseudo-moderate Gov. DeWine, are threatening to strip them of their right to vote in the presidential election. Instead of following historical precedent and passing a simple law to put Biden on the ballot, the GOP supermajority is tacking on an amendment to prevent grassroots organizers from running future campaigns.
• Republican narrative, as provided by wsj.com. Democrats voted to change the deadline 10 years ago, and then, for whatever reason, proceeded to schedule their party's convention for after that date. After complaining that their opponents were not enforcing election rules, they've now decided to claim that enforcing them threatens Democracy. The Ohio GOP has offered a deal to fix this, so now it's up to the other side to decide whether they want to clean up the mess they made.

Predictions