Intro:
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my idea of what a fair congressional map for Pennsylvania would look like. Directly to its west, Ohio is also a horribly gerrymandered mess. Unfortunately, while there’s an effort underway to prevent that from happening in 2020, it looks like the maps Ohio has now are baked in, barring a truly great Supreme Court finding. What would fair districts look like for Ohio? Keeping in mind first the VRA, but then primarily communities of interest, municipal boundaries, and finally county boundaries, here is my interpretation.
Map
Districts
OH-01:
Cincinnati really deserves its own district, despite its crimes against chili. Of course, the city’s not large enough for its own district, so I need to add its suburbs. The more densely urbanized of the suburbs extend to the north, so the district does as well, so as to keep a district with a more urban character. This district does not split municipalities, and some of the rougher edges are a result of that. Besides Cincinnati and its enclaves, the only municipality of notable size is 43,000 person Fairfield.
In terms of partisanship, this becomes a fairly safe district for Democrats. Obama won it 56.7-42.2 in 2008, about 56-43 in 2012, and Clinton did better than either of his cycles, around 57-40. The current 1st’s congressman, Steve Chabot would likely jump into the 2nd. The district is also 63% white and 29% black, meaning there’s a good chance for a black representative here.
OH-02:
The outer, whiter Cincinnati suburbs and exurbs are collected here. And boy are they conservative. It’s R+18. But who would they go to? OH-01’s current representative, Steve Chabot would basically be forced here. That leaves current OH-02’s representative, Brad Wenstrup (who lives in Cincinnati) to choose between running in the 2nd and 8th. There’s no real center of political gravity in this largely homogeneous clump of suburbs, so who knows how a primary would go?
OH-03:
The Columbus metro should get two districts, but how to divide it up is tough. I went with inner core vs suburbs as the theme. Pickerington really belongs in the other district, but doing that would have created something atrocious geometrically. This works pretty well otherwise. It preserves a lot of the current 3rd, and Joyce Beatty would likely retain her now D+16 district easily.
OH-04:
The 4th district is the western part of the Cleveland metro, and a few small towns along the lake. While not necessarily better educated, it is a higher wealth concentration than average for the area. It’s white for the Cleveland area, at 86%. It’s also very swingy. Obama won it 55.8-42.7 in 2008, but it’s since gone right, with the Clinton-Trump numbers hard to pin down, although I’d guess a small Clinton win, in the neighborhood of 49-47. By PVI, it’s D+2, with ancestral Democratic roots, so in this environment, they’d probably be favored, but it’s by no means a sure thing. In a more neutral year, this would be a swing seat. No Republican congressman would plausibly want to run here, so it would likely be an open seat.
OH-05:
The 5th covers most if the rural, white, deeply Republican “basically just Indiana” chunk of farming country and small towns. I tried really hard to come up with something interesting about this part of Ohio. All I got is that Ben Rothlisberger is from Findlay and Glee is supposed to take place in Lima. So no, not really. Also, Trump won the 5th 70-24. This district basically forces Jim Jordan and Bob Latta into a primary with each other. Whoever wins that primary would be the new rep in the R+21 district.
OH-06:
The current 6th runs along the Ohio river and contains a lot of small rust belt towns that were in noticeable decline in the 80s, and are shells of themselves now, along with mining towns that are somehow in even worse shape than that. The redrawn 6th is substantially similar. I cleaned up some of the lines, and pushed it down the river a little to accommodate the changes in the northeastern part of the state (more on that later). This 6th also has the addition of the liberal college town of Athens, which doesn’t really belong in the 6th, but, to be fair, also doesn’t really belong where it is in the state, and like State College, PA, will just have to deal with being drowned out by voters with very little in common with them. Like the old 6th, this 6th is the only distinctly Appalachian part of the state, and has more in common with West Virginia than Columbus.
This can be seen in its political movement. Starting at 51-47 McCain in 2008, it inched right to 54-44 Romney in 2012. This, incidentally, is probably why Republicans drew it the way they did. That year, Bill Johnson beat Charlie Wilson by 6.5% in the current version, which went for Romney by 12.5%, as opposed to this one’s 10.3%. That alone might not have put Wilson over the top, but it could have made it uncomfortably close. But that was both versions of the 6th’s last flirtation with the Democratic Party. 2016 saw this version go for Trump by 65-31, a shocking 23.6% marginal difference, which, like the current 6th’s 30.1%, would be the largest in the nation. The current 6th wound up being a bit of a GOP vote sink under our new political paradigm, so this redraw, where it’s now “only” R+13, is one of the few places where cleaning up the lines could aid the GOP, theoretically. Bill Johnson, of course, will be able to fend off challengers from any party, considering this district is mostly the same as his old one.
OH-07:
Despite looking a lot less ugly, this is conceptually the same type of district as the current 7th. It’s a bunch of small towns and rural areas that serve as a bit of a buffer between the Cleveland/NE Ohio area, and the Columbus metro. Its exact configuration depends on how I set NE OH up, but again, we’ll get to that later. Bob Gibbs lucks out of a primary challenge to keep this seat. He still lives here, and Jim Renacci, whose 16th makes up a decent portion of this district, is running for governor. This configuration of the district is slightly redder, at R+15. Either way, unwinnable for Democrats.
OH-08:
Okay, I know the immediate thing you noticed upon seeing the shape of this one is how ugly it looks. But hear me out. The outer boundary of the district etches out a rough sort of boundary of the Cincinnati and Dayton metros. Strictly speaking, Madison County is more Columbus area than Springfield. But equal population demands mean that the district can’t be perfect. The inner boundaries of this district mark the end of the denser, inner suburbs of the Cincinnati (OH-02) and Dayton/Springfield (OH-10). So what’s left is a combination of more rural areas, but ones that are more connected to a couple of similar cities than off on their own, like in the 15th. The ugliness is there, sure, but there’s ultimately a community of interest in what’s left once you outline this area and take out OH-01, OH-02, and OH-10. Also, because of a small strip of this district in Montgomery County, OH-10 would be an enclave of OH-08, the only such district in the country currently, and first since NV-01 from 1992-2002.
Politically, this is a very Republican district, with McCain’s more than 30 point blowout in 2008 actually a low point for the party. It’s R+23, the most Republican in the state, and probably had a similar margin to OH-05 to the north. Warren Davidson would obviously run in the primary here. With OH-01 and OH-06 obviously not realistic options, Brad Wenstrup would have to choose between taking on Steve Chabot in the 2nd or Davidson in the 8th.
OH-09:
The current OH-09 is often held up as an example of the worst gerrymanders in the country. Called the “mistake by the lake” by some, its dedication to including only Democratic voters on the shore of Lake Erie is so thorough that it isn’t actually contiguous at very high tide. This 9th is a lot more compact, running from Toledo to Huron, and extends south to pick up smaller cities like Bowling Green, Fremont, and Bellevue, which are satellites of Toledo, Sandusky, and the like. This district is still safely Democratic, at D+6, and Clinton still won it safely, but more like 51-44 than her 22 point blowout in the current 9th. Marcy Kaptur will be fine here, in a district more like the one she used to have before 2010.
OH-10:
The current 10th actually isn’t terrible. But I think it should include Springfield, which is a pretty similar city to Dayton. So I redrew it to include Dayton, its inner suburbs, Springfield, and some small cities in between, including Xenia. It’s largely the same district, however it is about 3 points bluer, and is now R+1. It’s the first of the Obama-Trump districts in the state as well. Despite the bluer tint, Republicans are heavily favored due to the incumbent, ex-Dayton mayor Mike Turner. While he’s not necessarily a moderate, he does have a reputation as district focused, a good campaigner, and part of the reasonable wing that doesn’t pull Freedom Caucus type stunts. While he was in a more Republican district then, he weathered both 2006 and 2008 without breaking a sweat, so he wouldn’t start out as anything but a favorite. But without him, it would be a hotly contested swing district.
OH-11:
If the Obama administration had played hardball during the last redistricting, the current 11th would probably have wound up in court. The current 11th goes into Akron for no good reason, both diluting black voting strength outside of Cleveland and making black population of the district itself less unified. You can make VRA compliant district entirely in Cuyahoga County, and I did. This district is half black, and actually has the same partisanship as the current one, D+32, while being a lot more coherent as a district. Marcia Fudge will keep this district.
OH-12:
I mentioned in the description for OH-03 that I started by creating a two district-sized Columbus metro, and then gave my reasoning for splitting it up the way that I did. While this map has at least three Obama-Trump districts, this is the only McCain-Clinton district in the state. Obama lost it by about 3 points each time, but it swung to about 51-44 Clinton in 2016. Much like the other traditionally Republican districts that Clinton finally broke through in after decades of Republican dominance, this would be a top target for Democrats in 2018, especially since Pat Tiberi’s retirement would leave it open.
OH-13:
Tim Ryan styles himself as a WWC whisper who can revive the Democratic Party in the Midwest. That may be true, but he doesn’t really have anything to prove it. He’s in a district Clinton won by 6.5%. That doesn’t mean he isn’t — after all when he threatened to run statewide if he got a red district in 2010, Republicans gave him an Eastern Ohio district so blue even Hillary Clinton solidly won it. Well, now he’ll have the chance to prove his mettle in 2018. This Youngstown district is 86% white and went from about 56-42 Obama to 52-44 Trump. The PVI is EVEN. I will say that I kind of took Youngstown and added the areas around it until I hit the natural boundaries around it, state lines to the east, OH-16 to the west, and OH-14 to the north. The biggest thing I was unsure about in this district was whether Steubenville fit better in OH-06 or OH-13. Ultimately, I decided it was more Appalachian than Youngstown-area, but I could be talked out of that. Although, not including Steubenville made the districts fit better, so there’s that.
OH-14:
It’s an exaggeration to say I did nothing to the 14th, but not a large one. The boundaries were slightly tweaked to accommodate other districts, and that’s about it. It’s still the eastern WWC suburbs of Cleveland, and still a pretty coherent community of interest. In terms of partisanship, it moves very subtly to the left during the Obama years, but Trump would have done slightly better under these, but those minute changes aren’t really going to change much about this district. It’s still Joyce’s unless a huge wave washes him out in 2018.
OH-15:
How dare you accuse me of putting a bunch of small cities that are all near the center of the state in one district and calling it a day? This very carefully planned. More seriously, even though it just sort of happened because the rest of the state was taken, this district makes a lot of sense from a COI standpoint. It lumps together a Chilicothe, Lancaster, Zanesville, Marion, Mt. Vernon, and other small towns that exist outside of major metros, but don’t quite have the cultural distinctions of being basically WV (OH-06) or IN (OH-05). It may not be a “good” shape, but these areas have a lot in common with each other. At R+15, the general election will not be competitive, but the primary could still be. Steve Stivers will have to run here. And if a Republican succeeds Pat Tiberi, they likely will opt to as well, since the current 12th would be a climb in a year like this.
OH-16:
Akron and Canton just should be together in a congressional district. It just makes sense. They’re substantially similar cities, and their metros even sort of blend into one. So I did, and I think it works well. While it was about 58-41 both times Obama ran, Clinton won by a more modest 48-46, or about. For NE OH, that’s pretty close to safely Democratic in a year like 2018, but perhaps not in one like 2014 if it lacks a strong incumbent. It would be an open seat.
Final Notes
In the current OH map, there is one safely Democratic district in Columbus, one along Lake Erie, and two in NE OH, one of which is VRA. The current map also has 4 safely Democratic districts, although the non-VRA district in NE OH is swapped out for one in Columbus. The big change in partisanship comes from the creation of 5 swing districts (OH-04, OH-10, OH-12, OH-13, and OH-16), although OH-09 and OH-14 could fall in a wave. In 2012, Obama won 8 districts, and in 2016, Clinton won 7 of them, I think. I’m not entirely certain who won OH-10. I think Trump did, narrowly, but I’m not sure at all. So the final map is 4D-7R-5 swing. For a state that just had an election where it was 10 points to the right of the country, that seems fair.
Like last time, there are some parts of the map I like better than others. Overall, I think the general conception behind all of the districts is the right idea, but there are a couple I’m uncertain on. I don’t know that I made the best possible choice in splitting up the Columbus metro. In particular, I don’t like how Pinkerington wound up in the 3rd. Some of the decisions for the boundaries for the 10th felt a bit arbitrary, as did the Cincinnati area in general. But for how frustrating NE OH was (besides the 16th, every combination of things seems like it’s the wrong size for a district), I think it turned out pretty good.
So what are your thoughts? Would this be a fair congressional map that balances interests evenly? Do you hate the way I cut something up? Did I let some egregious typos slip through? Let me know.