US House Redistricting: Ohio

[dpmapper]

If you wanted to pack the 4 NE districts more, you could drop the west Cuyahoga suburbs in OH-10 and give it more of Akron, and then put some Dem areas of Stark County into Ryan's district (enough to dig out the heart of Canton?).  Doesn't help LaTourette, but it doesn't seem like much can be done about him.  

Addendum:

Something like this:


Renacci takes the eastern slice of Lorain and northwest corner of Cuyahoga - these are lean Bush territories.  Instead of pushing too far south, or into eastern Cuyahoga, LaTourette takes over the southern part of Cuyahoga - these suburbs lean R as well.  Then much of Canton can be taken over in the Dem pack.  

[dpmapper]

I revised my northeast map, scouring the Dem districts for any and all Republican areas.  LaTourette's district was the priority, for two reasons - 1) his is the hardest district to help, and 2) he has the seniority to demand it.  The easiest way to add GOP votes to his district is not to head south - the rural townships of Stark County are strong Republican, but to get there you have to go through parts of Summit that are 50/50 at best, more lean D (I'm using 2004 numbers), and these are more densely populated.  (On the east and south of Akron only Stow is lean GOP, and that's already in OH-14.)  If you go through Portage County then you need the Cleveland-Akron Dem district to take in Kent and Ravenna, which means it can't take all of the parts of Cuyahoga and Summit that you'd like it to.  

So to shore up LaTourette, you take in the southernmost Cuyahoga suburbs and rural northwest Summit County, all of which are reasonably R territory.  

Taking those into OH-14, and Norton into OH-16, allows OH-10 to take in more of East Akron, freeing up Ryan's district to take in pretty much all of Canton and Massillon from Renacci.  Renacci's district is then almost TOO strongly R - there wouldn't have been a single Dem-leaning area in it, I don't think - so I extended a finger down to grab the Dem-leaning cities (not to mention Zack Space's home) from Tuscarawas County; I don't know if that's necessary but what the heck.  

If this is not the optimal way to do the Dem pack, it's darned close - every R-leaning township other than the connecting strips has been taken out.  The only other thing you might try is pushing some of the Dem districts into Lake County, but then you have to worry about OH-11 dropping below 50% black (it's barely over 50% in my map).  

Addendum: I should mention that the parts in the north are unchanged from the previous map, that's why I cut it off.  

[dpmapper]

With the new ACS estimates, my OH-11 is under by 50,000 voters. I don't think there's going to be any way to keep Fudge's district majority-black.

Sure there is.





I think it's much more likely that the GOP will keep 4 Dem districts in N/NE Ohio and keep the Columbus split.  I doubt that it's any less of a Dem pack if you do it that way (but feel free to crunch the numbers if you think I'm wrong).  Drawing districts that stretch from Cuyahoga to west of Columbus is pretty egregious, and would cause a lot of disruption to incumbents.  All that would be avoided if you just maintained the Columbus split, which the GOP knows it can win.  

[dpmapper]

Yes, after playing this game for awhile, typically you do have a sea of marginal territory, a Pubbie zone to push the PVI up to where you want it, and sometimes the Pubbie zone is strong enough to absorb some hostile Dem town or two. OH-04 as I am drawing it, is the exception to the rule. It has almost no marginal territory at all: outside its share of Franklin, Dems are hated, and inside its share of Franklin, Pubbies are hated. So after OH-04 has absorbed this so far in Franklin from OH-15: 18,230 McCain, 39,175 Obama, McCain percentage 31.76%, it still has a GOP PVI of 11%! Which means that since the four CD's in the chop collectively have a 5% GOP PVI,  OH-07 is going to able to do only about a quarter of the work of Dem neutralization.

The problem with this is that the Dem areas are all in the south, in both OH-15 and OH-12, and while OH-04 has about done just enough to get OH-15 over a 4% GOP PVI (most of the under 40% McCain precincts in OH-15 have now been absorbed), OH-12 just has oceans of heavily black precincts; in fact all the yellow that you see in the map below as far east as the NE corner of the brown jut on the map, that reflects what OH-07 is doing under the map drawn 10 years ago, is heavily black east of the blue band, and going north all the way to about the latitude that the northern edge that my blue zone currently has. Now I know why Columbus is so Dem. It's black! There is no way that OH-07 is going to be able to cope with it.

So, Stivers is going to have to have an almost entirely new CD, losing the southern end of his old CD south of whatever links OH-04 to the Dem zone,  plus Madison County, to OH-07.  All he will have is his home precinct, a band running to the north into a friendlier GOP zone, and then take in the NW corner of Franklin, the west end of Delaware, and then into my unassigned zone. There simply is no other way to do it. The Pubbies that are needed to offset Columbus are mostly to the north and northwest, not to the south and east.

In short, it's a nightmare. The CD with the Pubbies (oh-04) is to the NW, and the Dems to be absorbed are to the SE of the Columbus area. It just sucks!

Why don't you run Jordan into Columbus via Madison Cty rather than Union? This gives Stivers more access to the counties to the north; he and Tiberi can take the current eastern parts of OH-04, and Jordan has easier access to the south side of Franklin Cty. 

[dpmapper]

No Tiberi lives in Columbus. I know his address from a title company, and his bio says he lives in Columbus to boot so the home he owns, is the one in which he resides for voting purposes.

http://tiberi.house.gov/Biography/ says that he lives in Genoa Township, which is in southern Delaware Cty.

[dpmapper]

Don't you need Akron's blacks in the 11th to get above 50%?  Also, if you do that with your 10th then it just becomes Sutton's district, which misses the point of giving it to Kucinich.  For this strategy to be effective I think you need to confine the 10th to Cuyahoga and Lorain (and maybe part of Medina), cutting out Sutton's home base in Summit County.  Put Sutton in with Ryan or Fudge.   

Finally, it would be extremely helpful to get Canton into Ryan's district. 

[dpmapper]

I understand that it's more Kucinich territory than Sutton, but it's still the district she would run in (and probably win a primary vs. Kucinich, given that the deepest blue parts have been put into Fudge's district).  For the strategy to be effective, you need to make sure that Kucinich is the Dem nominee, and that means making sure Sutton doesn't run.  It's probably worth it to make it a 55-56% Obama district if that ensures that Kucinich is the nominee, not to mention it allows Renacci to take the redder parts of the Summit section of your 10th in exchange for Ryan's district taking Canton... or at least Alliance. 

[dpmapper]

Good points. I will try to remap it.

I would think that Lakewood, Parma, the small piece of Cleveland, and the rest of the Dem leaning areas in Cuyahoga would give Kucinich enough of a base to win a primary.

Northern Medina County is a place that Sutton lost in the last election, and barely won in the one before. It would be a good fit, though I figured Renacci would want as much of Medina as possible.

That would also help move Alliance or Canton out of the 16th.

Go for it boys. I look forward to seeing that CD that is cyan generically, but pink for Kuch.  It seems a bit too clever by half really.  Plus is Kuch really going to underperform that much in the new more isolationist environment out there?

Well, Kerry got 58% in OH-10, whereas Obama only got 59%.  That would seem to indicate either that the district is trending rightward, or that Obama underperformed there (probably a mix of both).  Kucinich got 57% in 2008, underperforming even Obama.  So in a D+8 district where Obama only got D+6, Kucinich ran as if it was D+4.  So maybe if you make it a D+1-2 district, with a lot of newer, more rural swing voters in Lorain and possibly elsewhere that will be ignorant of Dennis's glory days and only know him from his recent shtick, the GOP would have a reasonably good shot at him. 

[dpmapper]

But if you're going to do that, why stop at D+1? Why not just make it R+3 so that you should win it no matter who the Democrat is? R+3 really isn't any harder to draw and you don't start getting into trouble until R+4.

And yes, I would assume that the western part of Cuyahoga County is slowly trending in the GOP's directon.

Mostly ugliness of the lines. You can condense the Democrats to 3 districts in Northern Ohio with very Torie-like juts, but if they don't do that you are slightly constrained.

I would think it's more that you can save the extra R points for the other NE Ohio GOP districts.  The more D you allow CD10 to be (by moving it farther into west Cleveland), the more Dems in other places (eastern Cleveland suburbs, Akron area, etc) you can stuff into Fudge and Ryan, which benefits LaTourette, Renacci, Johnson.  Making a full-blown 13-3 is tougher than a 12-3-Kucinich swing. 

[dpmapper]

What are the stats on that OH-14, Torie?  Might it be worth it to push OH-10 a little farther west (eg, taking all of rural Lorain other than Oberlin) so that OH-14 can grab redder territory, even if this means OH-11 snakes down to Akron via a less optimal route?  (After all, LaTourette is the GOP's point man on this issue.) 

[dpmapper]

Wild guess: this is being used to scare Austria into accepting more of Columbus than he currently has. 

[dpmapper]

The Turner/Austria district seems to be much of Austria's territory, stretching east from Dayton to the counties south of Columbus.  Stivers's new district is a > shape around it: Union and Madison remain, then through what seems like western/southern Franklin all the way to Athens, and then back to the southwest to pick up Highland County.  Very weird.  

No surprise that with all of this they manage to put parts of Stark (I assume Canton?) into Ryan's district.  The rest of Stark is now in Gibbs's district, which stretches to pick up southern Lorain.  

[dpmapper]

I'm guessing they are trying to keep Austria semi-content by letting him stick with his current counties.  But yeah, that 15th is stupid.  Other questions:

* why triple chop in Mercer and Erie?  
* the path that Fudge's district takes to get down to Akron is unnecessarily Republican and populated.  Bath, Richfield, and Broadview Heights are all Republican-leaning.  

But the idea of taking Jordan into Toledo, so that the 9th can take more of Kucinich's district, is pretty good.  Better than taking him into Lorain or Cuyahoga like a lot of our drafts did.  

ETA: I wonder if Turner is retiring, or heading for a different office?  He loses more of Dayton proper to Boehner (as opposed to some D suburbs which might be less attached to him) and the rest of the district is Austria's territory.  Doesn't seem like something he'd just accept willingly.  

[dpmapper]

Side by side comparison:



Looks like we have a new winner!

Most of the ugliness in Illinois's map is not visible at the state-wide scale.  Zoom into the Chicago area and then put up the comparison again. 

[dpmapper]

Side by side comparison:

Looks like we have a new winner!

Most of the ugliness in Illinois's map is not visible at the state-wide scale.  Zoom into the Chicago area and then put up the comparison again. 

My comment stands.

I'd say they're about even, purely talking shapes here.  OH15 = IL4.  OH7 = IL6.  OH9 is slightly worse than IL7.  OH16 = IL5.  But then you still have the strippiness of IL1,2,3,9,11 to deal with.  Maybe they're no worse than OH1, 11, 13, but there are more of them.  And then add in the fact that the IL boundaries are much more jagged than the OH ones (I suspect they split many more municipalities).  

[dpmapper]

is there something we should know about Clark County that prevents it from being in the same district as Mike Turner and Steve Austria? moving Clark to that district means that the 15th looks less like a melted stapler than before.

There are considerable numbers of people living there. It's marginal. Add it in, and you get a seat only Turner can be *safe* in.

I think he's talking about the part of Clark that's in the 15th, not all of Clark.  The rural parts of Clark are fairly red, and yes, they would make more sense in the 10th, giving the 15th more of Fairfield Cty.  Plus they used to be in Austria's district, so he shouldn't mind trading his former constituents in Fairfield for those in Clark. 

[dpmapper]

Man, this would be so much better.  OH14 is now a McCain district again (by 322 votes, but still...), OH16's McCain percentage is up 1.3% to 51.9%, and OH07 is up .6% to 52.0% (there's an arm from OH13 that takes most of Canton).  Medina stays whole, Portage is only split once... what's not to like? 

[dpmapper]

They're still routing Fudge's district down to Akron via a horribly inefficient route.  And they seem to be obsessed with triple-splitting Mercer County. 

[dpmapper]

They're still routing Fudge's district down to Akron via a horribly inefficient route.  And they seem to be obsessed with triple-splitting Mercer County. 

Not really.   If you go further east you have to go through Cuyahoga Falls.  This takes two relatively skinny cities in Cuyahoga (Seven Hills and Broadview Heights) and then a couple of townships in Summit County.

Further east, and you start cutting into OH-14 and OH-17 (now OH-13).

Well, Cuyahoga Falls can be split if necessary.  Use Macedonia/Twinsburg (bluer) and Boston Township (sparsely populated) to get down south. 

And OH-14 can make up population by taking more of the rural parts of Portage County, and OH-13 can make up population by taking Canton.  Perfect. 

[dpmapper]

See this map:
https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=124180.msg3023697#msg3023697

Taking Twinsburg and the areas west of there away from OH-14, and replacing them with some other Summit/Portage communities is more or less a wash.  This was mapped assuming that there was the 3-way split of Toledo but I'm sure you could get it to work if you bring OH-04 into Lorain instead. 

[dpmapper]

I was under the impression that the GOP map has OH-14 as an Obama district.  Mine has it as a McCain district.  But maybe my recollection is off. 

[dpmapper]

What I don't understand is, given that the mappers are willing to split Rocky River and Parma, why not split Broadview Heights and Independence so that Fudge's district takes in fewer white (and GOP) voters en route to Akron?  Put Seven Hills and most of Broadview Heights into OH-16.  Also, dig Richfield Village (as opposed to Richfield Township) out of Fudge and into OH-14.  Might not be enough to allow Canton to be placed in the Youngstown district, but at least you can put some more light blue Akron outskirts into it. 

Oh well. 

[dpmapper]

What if you don't remove Parma, but instead take more blueish towns near Akron?  (Or you could remove Parma Heights instead.  I recall that that's bluer than southern Parma.) 

[dpmapper]

I wonder what their odds of getting re-accredited are.  I'm guessing slim. 

We need fewer colleges in this country anyway.