This is the Ohio congressional district map being used for the 2022 election, with 15 U.S. House seats, down from 16 in the elections from 2012 through 2020.
Rich Exner | cleveland.com (TNS)
COLUMBUS – Ohio’s new congressional map appears less gerrymandered than it has been over the past decade by at least one measurement.
The result is the allocation of Ohio’s 15 congressional seats come 2023 will be closer to the partisan split of voters than it has been over the last several election cycles.
“It isn’t as robust or extreme a gerrymander as it was in 2011,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, who has advocated to extricate gerrymandering from the decennial redistricting process.
She said the results look “better” but likened it to improving from an F to a D grade.
There are different ways to assess gerrymandering – a strategy in the redistricting process in which politicians draw new district lines to maximize their own party’s voting power while minimizing that of their opponents. Gerrymandering can distort reflections of the public will by enabling outcomes in which a majority of voters choose one party in several congressional races in a state but only win a minority of seats.
This year, the gap narrowed between the share of statewide votes Republicans won and the proportion of congressional seats they’ll assume in January. They will hold 10 of 15 (67%) of the seats. That’s closer to the average vote of Republicans who won statewide offices (59%) or the average vote share of congressional candidates statewide (57%).
Compare that to the prior decade: Republicans held 12 of 16 seats (75%) compared to the average vote for their statewide candidates (56%) or the average vote share of their congressional candidates (56%).
This marks a narrow success for Ohio’s new redistricting process for legislative and congressional races, established by voter-approved amendments to Ohio’s Constitution. For congressional races, the Constitution now requires lawmakers to follow certain rules shaping the districts and prohibits them from passing a plan that “unduly favors or disfavors a political party or its incumbents.”
While the difference in the GOP’s vote share and its proportion of congressional seats shrank this election, several factors could have contributed to that. Republicans running for statewide executive offices were incumbent officeholders with large fundraising advantages compared with their lesser-known and lesser-funded Democratic challengers, helping them to victories of nearly 20-percentage points.
And as Turcer noted, Democrats won in competitive races and beat expectations in three congressional races. Those seats are viable Republican pickups, whereas the Republican-held seats are likely not vulnerable to a Democratic challenge. Republicans still drew the lines to their favor, she said, but the district lines aren’t destiny.
That helped the Democrats hit their realistic ceiling on the current map, winning five seats total. Rep. Marcy Kaptur beat the odds and held on to her Toledo-area seat by beating a candidate who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, flirted with QAnon conspiracy theories, and faced a barrage of negative headlines after overstating the nature of his military service. Democratic State Rep. Emilia Sykes won a Northeast Ohio District, and Democratic Cincinnati City Councilman Greg Landsman knocked off the longest-serving GOP member of Ohio’s congressional delegation, Rep. Steve Chabot, in Southwest Ohio.
“You can imagine a different year where Kaptur is not up against a guy who lied about his military career,” she said. “The results are not a perfect indicator of how badly the maps were gerrymandered.”
The Ohio Supreme Court overturned several GOP-passed maps, finding they unconstitutionally favored Republicans. Amid a legal standoff, a federal appellate court ordered Tuesday’s election to proceed on a map the state Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional. Legal and political wrangling over what map to use in 2024 continues.
David Niven, a former Democratic speechwriter who now teaches political science at the University of Cincinnati, agreed that the congressional map appears less gerrymandered.
“There’s a grand cosmic irony here that Republicans fought so hard in court to defend their gerrymandered congressional map only to see it knock out the dean of the state’s Republican delegation and leave the Democrats with more seats than they started with,” he said in an email, referring to Chabot, who has served as a congressman for decades.
While Ohio Democrats saw big gains in Congress, Republicans picked up supermajorities in both houses of the statehouse. According to preliminary results, they hold 68 of 99 House seats (69%) and 26 of 33 Senate seats (79%). Both those figures blow out their statewide vote share of about 59%.
According to Turcer, many of the seats the GOP mapmakers deemed to be Democratic were in truth competitive seats. And Republicans’ incumbency gives them an edge with not just voters but donors who want to curry favor with the (likely) winner.
“There are two different factors that come together here: One is there are a disproportionate number of districts deemed by mapmakers to be Democratic but were actually competitive,” she said. “And because the Republican party had resources, they were able to meet these challenges head on and gain more seats.”
House Minority Leader Allison Russo, a Columbus Democrat who oversees the caucus, cited gerrymandering in a statement released after results came in Tuesday reflecting Democrats’ losses. Speaking to Gongwer, a statehouse news outlet, GOP House Speaker Bob Cupp pushed back on this claim, saying candidates, messaging and policy drove the victories – not a map. A spokesman for Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican and key architect of the redistricting process, didn’t respond to an inquiry.
