Will redrawing of voting districts change anything?
A couple of big words – redistricting and reapportionment – come down to a couple of plain-english questions: Will the GOP continue to dominate Ohio’s General Assembly and U.S. House delegation, thanks to skewed districts? And will the voting rights of Black Ohioans be respected?
There are 99 Ohio House seats, with Republicans now holding 64 of them (or 65%). Ohio currently has 16 U.S. House seats – though it is losing one beginning with the 2022 election – and of the 16 seats, Republicans hold 12 (75%).
Yet in 2020 and 2016, Ohioans cast 53.2% and 51.3%, respectively, of their votes for Republican Donald Trump for president, and in 2012 and 2008, 50.6% and 51.4%, respectively, for Democrat Barack Obama for president.
True, the presidential vote is a statewide vote, while a legislative or congressional district includes only part of the state. So, for example, until recently it was nearly unthinkable that a majority of Mahoning County (Youngstown) voters would support a Republican for president. Meanwhile, only once since the Civil War – in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was the GOP nominee – has Clinton County (Wilmington) voted for a Democrat for president.
That is, there can’t realistically be a one-to-one correspondence between Ohio’s statewide presidential vote and its congressional and legislative contests. Still: The GOP commanding 65% of the seats in the Ohio House and 75% percent of Ohio’s U.S. House seats? That’s gerrymandering, and it’s brazenly partisan.
At least with the 99 Ohio House districts, though, there are some constitutional rules.
In contrast, drawing U.S. House districts is a freefor-all.
Last time, in 2011, then-u.s. House Speaker John Boehner, a suburban Cincinnati Republican, ordered up new districts like take-out from the legislature. That led to such geographic absurdities as Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s Toledo-to-cleveland district, with only Ohio Rt. 2’s Edison Memorial Bridge over Sandusky Bay connecting the district’s wings.
Also indefensible: Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan’s district, which stretches roughly 150 miles from Oberlin, in the greater Cleveland area, to west-central Ohio’s Urbana, the Champaign County seat and Jordan’s hometown.
Redistricting and reapportionment evoke lots of folderol about what’s “fair” and “right.” But in Ohio, it comes down to, a) making it as easy as possible for Ohio’s members of Congress – from both parties – to win re-election; and, b) assuring that one party will be likelier than its rival to win a majority in Ohio’s Senate and House. (Republicans also currently hold the state Senate as well as the House.)
Redrawing General Assembly districts will fall to Ohio’s Redistricting Commission: Five Republicans, including Gov. Mike Dewine, and two Democrats. The commission’s two Democrats are Black legislators: Sen. Vernon Sykes and House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes, both of Akron. Vernon Sykes is Emilia Sykes’s father.
Sen. Sykes was the prime co-sponsor of Ohio’s voterratified redistricting reforms – HJR 12, of 2014, and SJR 5, of 2018.
The General Assembly, not the commission, will draw the 15 U.S. congressional districts to which Ohio is now entitled. (U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, a suburban Warren Democrat, is running for governor, making it easier for legislators to shrink 16 districts into 15 by redrawing boundaries in the Cleveland-akron-youngstown triangle.) If the General Assembly is unable to fashion new congressional districts for Ohio, that job would become the Redistricting Commission’s.
In the end, districts will be finalized in one of two ways: Judges (state or federal) will decide who gets what territory. Or, to head off voting-rights lawsuits, Republicans will make sure redrawn districts won’t reduce the number of legislators of color whom Ohioans elected to Congress in 2020 (two: Rep. Joyce Beatty, of Jefferson Township, and then-rep. Marcia Fudge, of Warrensville Heights, both Democrats) or to the state legislature (19, all Democrats: five senators and 14 representatives).
Cosmetically, “the process” has been reformed by constitutional amendments Ohio voters approved in November 2015 (for General Assembly districts) and May 2018 (for congressional districts).
But no one on this side of the Pearly Gates can take the politics out of Ohio politics – and that miracle doesn’t seem to be on the agenda, least of all with 2022 contests looming for the governorship and U.S. Senate.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.
tsuddes@gmail.com