There shouldn’t be more than four Democrat seats in OH. The OH-09 should go from Toledo to Northern Lorain (which would have happened had Brown not scared Taft into drawing a safely Dem OH-13 with Northern Lorain and part of Akron); the OH-10 should include white parts of Cleveland, its white Dem suburbs and heavily Dem parts of Lake County; the black-majority OH-11 should include black parts of Cleveland, its black suburbs, and squirrel down to pick up black parts of Akron; and the OH-17 (which will need to be renumbered; I’d call it the OH-13, since the old OH-13 would be eliminated) would go from Dem parts of the Youngstown and Warren area to white parts of Akron and take in Canton as well. The biggest problem in the NE corner of the state is shoring up the Republican OH-14, which would need to gain quite a bit of population (particularly if heavily Dem parts of Lake are excised) despite being boxed in with Democrats all around (and with both the OH-11 and OH-17 needing land bridges to Akron); the way around it is to connect Youngstown to Akron via Alliance, Canton and Massillon in Stark County and include GOP parts of NE Stark County in the OH-14.
There is no need to draw a Dem CD in the rest of the state. The OH-01 can be shored up by giving it Warren County precincts currently in the and having the OH-02 take in white-majority Dem or marginal precincts (splitting up the black pop in Cinci could create unnecessary problems); the Dem-trending Columbus districts could be shored up by (i) adding Morrow County and the rest of Licking County to the OH-12 (and decreasing its Columbus precincts), (ii) adding Logan, Auglaize and Shelby Counties to the OH-15 (and decreasing its Columbus precincts), and (iii) excising Clark, Ross and Perry Counties from the OH-07 and adding all of those Columbus precincts that used to be in OH-12 and OH-15 (the OH-07 already had a bit of Columbus; it could have a lot more and still have voted 56% or so for Bush in 2005). This would necessitate eliminating Jim Jordan’s OH-04, which is not such a bad thing because he will likely run for the Senate against Sherrod Brown in 2012; since one GOP district has to be eliminated (OH will lose two seats), it might as well be the one of the guy running for the Senate and whose GOP counties will help shore up surrounding districts.
Can you be more specific?/s
That being said, it’s possible that Bob Gibbs and Bill Johnson will see their districts combined.