Redistricting makes taking back the House difficult for Dems

[TJ in Oregon]

The reason why the current Ohio map looks like a bipartisan gerrymander is that Gov. Bob Taft was worried about Sherrod Brown running against him in 2002 so he gerrymandered OH-13 to be a safe Democratic seat instead of a toss-up. They also drew a strange tail of OH-18 into St. Clairsville to try to get Charlie Wilson to run in OH-18 instead of OH-6 to give the Dems both seats in southeastern Ohio instead of just one (which only wound up happening after 2006 and backfired in 2010).

However, the rest of the state is a Republican gerrymander outside of the forementioned places. The southwest part of the state manages to give reasonable districts to 6 Republican congressmen all living withing 50 miles of each other covering almost half the state. It is really designed to shut the Dems out of Columbus and Cincinnati but just didn't count on Columbus trending Dem and the greatly increased black vote in Cincinnati in 2008. Otherwise it has been a pretty good Republican gerrymander.

Northwestern Ohio has the Republican version right now because it attaches Lucas county to the counties to the east along the lake instead of soaking up some solid Rep territory to the west as OH-9. This is an example of a spot where gerrymandering is almost impossible to avoid. If you try to draw a fair map in NW OH, you'd start by putting Toledo in a district. But then where do you go for the other 300k people? Any Dem map will go west and any Rep map will go east. Both are equally valid choices from a COI standpoint. The current map is the Rep option because it goes east.

The rest of NE OH on the current map is really pretty boring and there weren't many options ten years ago. The possibility of drawing a Republican seat on the west side of Cleveland wasn't there then so it looks like a fairly standard Dem-friendly map even though it was drawn by Republicans.

So in short, yes it was a Republican map, but it was drawn by IMO one of the most incompetent governors in the nation's history more out of self-preservation than anything else and really didn't function as a Republican map.