As we do every four years, Daily Kos Elections is calculating the results of the 2016 presidential election for all 435 congressional districts, and this series of posts explores the most interesting results on a state-by-state basis. You can find our complete data set here, which we’re updating continuously as the precinct-level election returns we need for our calculations become available. You can also click here to learn more about why this data is so difficult to come by.
Things in Ohio did not go well for Team Blue at all in November. While Barack Obama carried the state 51-48 in 2012, Donald Trump took it 52-44. The GOP-drawn congressional map gave Mitt Romney a win in 12 of Ohio's 16 congressional districts, and Trump took the exact same 12 seats: Republican congressmen hold those 12 districts, while Democrats represent the four seats that backed Obama and Hillary Clinton.
To our surprise, Clinton actually carried the 13th District, a Youngstown seat represented by Rep. Tim Ryan, by a 51-45 margin. Nancy Pelosi herself insisted that Trump had taken the 13th: While Ryan was waging his unsuccessful campaign against Pelosi for House minority leader, Pelosi literally laughed off Ryan's suggestion that he could make the Democratic Party more appealing in blue-collar areas and told the Huffington Post that Ryan "didn’t even carry his district for Hillary Clinton." Of course, Clinton's 51-45 victory here is still a huge drop from Obama's 62-35 win. Clinton decisively carried the other three Democratic-held seats.
Right now, none of the 12 GOP held districts look like particularly good targets for Team Blue. The one possible exception is the 1st District in the Cincinnati area, which Trump carried 51-45. Romney won the 1st, represented by Rep. Steve Chabot, 52-47, so at least it didn't move very far to the right. It's still not exactly a swing seat, but it might be a target in a good Democratic year.
However, two seats that Romney only narrowly won in 2012 were much redder this time around. Romney carried the Dayton-based 10th just 51-48, but Trump won it 51-44. GOP Rep. Mike Turner, a former Dayton mayor, has never faced a close race since he was elected in 2002, so this district wasn't exactly high on the Democrats' target list to begin with. The suburban Cleveland 14th District also shifted dramatically from 51-48 Romney to 54-42 Trump. Democrats didn't seriously target Republican Rep. Dave Joyce in either 2014 or 2016, and that probably won't change in future years.
It wasn't that long ago that Ohio Democrats could at least hold their own in the rural eastern portion of the state, but Trump absolutely cleaned up there. The 6th District, which is represented by Republican Rep. Bill Johnson, was already pretty red at 55-43 Romney, but Trump took it 69-27. In fact, the 6th leapfrogged the 8th District, which was represented by John Boehner until 2015, to claim the title of reddest district in Ohio: The 8th backed Trump "just" 65-31.