Ohio Redistricting Map Released

Red State ^ | Tuesday, September 13th | Moe Lane

[Galactic Overlord-In-Chief]

(Via The Campaign Spot) And… it’s subtle. Executive summary:

Ohio loses two districts, overall. Republicans Steve Austria and Mike Turner end up competing with each other in the same district. Democrats Marcy Kaptur & Dennis Kuchinich, ditto. Democrat Nancy Sutton loses her district and gets thrown into a district that heavily favors her new Republican opponent Jim Renacci – and she doesn’t get to bring her power base with her. Or she could compete with Democrat Tim Ryan in yet another district. Columbus (Democratic stronghold) metropolitan area gets a shiny-new, presumably Democratic-leading, district. Everybody else more or less stands pat, or gets strengthened.

So, on first glance… not too awful, right? They redrew districts to give both sides legitimate primary battles, and there’s going to be turnover, and, hey, the minority party in Ohio got a favorable district from the majority Republicans, so that was nice of them and everything. So why are the Democrats scowling? Well, it’s probably because the current map for Ohio is 13 Republican, 5 Democratic (it was 8R/10D last year); that the next map looks like it’s going to be … hold on, this is complicated… somewhere around 12R/4D (11R/5D if the Democrats catch a break); and sets up a potential brawl between two prominent Ohio Democrats (Kaptur & Kuchinich). And – because of that free Democratic district – there’s not much in the way of complaining that the opposition party can do about it, or the fact that most of the GOP incumbents have had their gains more securely locked in. Lastly, the risks for the Republicans overall are minimized: one Red-on-Red primary and a Red-on-Blue general election that has had the risks minimized. But other than that, there’s not much for Democrats to complain about.

As I said. Subtle.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

[OneLoyalAmerican]

Greetings xzins:

...the 6th is silly,

Respectlfully disagree. The sixth being an Ohio River Valley contingent district makes economic sense. Much of the district provides goods and services to the mineral and timber extraction, refining, and waterways transportation industries. And with the exception of the northeast sector, is wholly without an efficient highway transportation system linking sections of the district.

Cheers,
OLA

[xzins]

The 6th is this long narrow district that stretches nearly the entire length of the state. That appears contrived to me.

I would have a computer find contiguous population clusters of the amount of people required to be in each congressional district with the shortest distance possible from one side of a district to the other.. There are clustering analyses available.

[OneLoyalAmerican]

Sixth district is Ohio River region centric, with communities tending to have more in common with the West Virginia and Kentucky river population centers (what we call the tri-state region) than we do with Youngstown, Columbus, and/or Chillicothe.

River centric is both a blessing and a curse. The Ohio River is our main highway; it's possible to travel by boat and visit most of the district. Worst part of sixth district being the long ground travel distances without the benefit of a divided highway system. For example, no where within Lawrence County does a posted highway speed exceed 55 mph.

Contrived? In reality, a district of shared concerns could be stretched west among river counties to Cincinnati. The oddest fit being the district's northerly sector of Youngstown metro juxtaposed against the remainder of the region; population within some of Youngstown precincts exceeds the total population of Lawrence County. Aside from historic footnotes of long past metallurgic ages, this Youngstown region shares little in common with Ironton.