Like Pennsylvania, Ohio is  a midwestern state that has lost a seat in the House and has an open Senate seat.  There are two key differences.  First, in Ohio, the governor is also a Republican.  Ohio voters have adopted some checks on the majority party ability to redistrict at will, but the majority can force through a map that will last for two cycles without any minority support.  Second, Democratic Representative Tim Ryan has already announced that he will be running for Senate.  While that allows the legislature to keep the remaining incumbents in separate districts, it does not mean that changing the maps in a way that keeps incumbents separate will be easy as incumbents do not always live in the center of their district.

Already, Ohio is a very gerrymandered state with some very weird map shapes.  As with the other states that lost a seat, most of the existing districts are short on voters with two exceptions — the Third District (Columbus) and the Twelfth District (the area to the north and east of Columbus in central Ohio).  Other than the Fifteenth District (the area to the south of Columbus) which is only 15,000 people short, the remaining thirteen districts are between 30,000 and 90,000 people short.  In particular, the five districts that adjoin the current Thirteenth District are a combined 330,000 short.  But as the current Thirteenth has just approximately 707,000 people, that will be around 370,000 people that those districts will have to kick to the rest of the state.  More significantly,  as in the rest of the state, the lines were carefully drawn to pack as many Democrats into the Democratic districts as possible.  The Eleventh District which stretches from Cleveland to Akron is carefully drawn so that the Democrat expected votes are around 80%.  While it borders the Thirteenth District, it can’t move too far east into the current Thirteenth without needing to shed Democratic voters into the Republican districts to the west.  And the Fourteenth District (northeastern Ohio) is a lean Republican district that really can’t afford to give Republicans to the Eleventh District or take in the Democrats around Akron, Ravenna, or Youngstown.  In short, once again, the Republicans are going to be very carefully looking precinct by precinct as they carve up the Thirteenth District and make the necessary shifts of the districts toward the eastern part of the state.

Trying to draw a more favorable map for Democrats, I began by doing two things:  First, there are three counties that are large enough to fully contain a district — Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Hamilton County (Cincinnati), and Franklin County (Columbus).  In the current map, only Franklin contain fully contains a district (Third District).  So I kept Cincinnati intact (which would force the two Republican representatives from the First and Second District into a primary) and drew a map that had eastern and central Hamilton County around Cincinnati in the First District and kept the Eleventh District in Cuyahoga County.  That flipped the First District from a toss-up favoring the Republicans to a lean Democratic District.  It did lower the African-American population in the Eleventh District  Overall, African-Americans are still the largest population group but they are only a plurality and among the voting age population, there are slightly more whites than African-Americans.  African-Americans should still have the majority of votes in the Democratic primary, and the district is solidly Democratic; so African-Americans should be able to elect their preferred candidate.  These shifts force the Second District eastward and northward (taking some area from the Fifteenth District). Continue Reading...