Ohio is the quintessential swing state, with Obama winning the state in 2008 by 51.5% to 46.9% for McCain and 1.6% third-party candidates. Nevertheless, our current Congressional delegation is 5 Democrats and 13 Republicans, without any extreme gerrymandering. There are a few subtle tricks that the Republicans used the last time, splitting urban Democratic areas and adding enough rural and suburban Republican areas to them to make a district marginally Republican. We are losing two districts this time, and the stated goal of the Republicans (who control the process) is to squeeze out two of the remaining Democrats.
I used Dave's Redistricting App. I’ve tried to redistrict Ohio in a natural, organic way with a minimum of gerrymandering or splitting urban areas, just to see what happens. I followed a few basic rules:
1) Keep cities and towns together unless they are too large to fit in a single district. I therefore set aside one district for Cincinnati, two for Columbus and suburbs, two for Cleveland and suburbs and one for Toledo, Dayton, Canton and Youngstown. I started with the urban areas and then added enough rural precincts to make up the needed population.
2) Keep counties together, as much as possible. When cities or towns are located on a county border, I tried to keep the town together, along with the immediately surrounding townships.
3) Keep the districts as geographically compact as possible. The one linear district I made is the 6th, along the Ohio River.
4) Keep the one VRA district (the 10th) by making it as close to the current 11th as possible.
By definition, the 17th and 18th Districts disappear. Neither are currently exclusively part of an urbanized district, so after I drew the 1st (Cincinnati), the 3rd (Dayton), the 9th (Toledo) the 10th and 11th (Cleveland), the 12th and 15th (Columbus), the 13th and 14th (Akron and Youngstown), and the 6th (along the Ohio River, I filled in the rest of the territory. I generally used the number of the existing districts that more or less occupied similar territory, and weren't stretched too badly across the state.
Things I did NOT explicitly do were to:
1) pay excessive attention to the partisan makeup of any district,
2) watch for the racial makeup of the district (other than the 11th)
3) check which Congressperson lives where. I don't know (or care) if I've created more than two incumbent conflicts, or any open seats. I just think these districts make more geographical common sense.
The result – 8 districts that went for Obama, 5 that went to McCain and three that are dead even, and no ugly gerrymanders.
With that, on to the districts!
District 1 (dark blue) – Cincinnati (55.7% O / 43.3% M) – Cincinnati is currently split into two districts, with enough Republicans in suburban and rural areas to outnumber the Democrats in the city itself. Cincinnati and its suburbs are just a bit larger than one congressional district, so I started with the city and parts of Hamilton County that surround it. The 1st now starts at the Indiana border and marches eastward to an awkward boundary in the middle of the metro area. I started at the eastern boundary and moved west, most of the way to the beltway surrounding the city. This district is slightly more Democratic than the state.
District 2 (green) – Rural southeastern Ohio (35.7% O / 62.7% M) – This includes eight whole and part of a ninth county, and the cities of Springboro, Lebanon, Washington Court House, Chillicothe, Portsmouth and the eastern fringes of the Cincinnati metro area. This is the third most Republican district in the state.
District 3 (purple) – Dayton and Xenia (49.1% O / 49.4% M) – Dayton is currently gerrymandered badly, with much of Montgomery County in the 3rd, along with parts or all of three counties I put in the 2nd with no continuous road really connecting them. Meanwhile, the northeast part of Dayton and its suburbs are in the 8th (which now wraps around 3 sides of Dayton, and Greene County to the east is in the 7th District. There’s no good demarcation between Montgomery and Greene counties, so I kept them together, and added enough of rural areas contiguous to them to fill out the population needed for a district. This is the closest to a swing district of any of the ones I made up.
District 4 (red) – I-71 corridor (49.4% O / 48.5% M) – This is one of three districts I redistricted last (the 4th, 5th and 7th), by making the most compact districts possible out of the rural land between the urban centers. All three are substantially Republican, but the 4th ended up as a swing district due to the addition of a stretch of the Lake Erie shorefront and the distant western fringe of the Cleveland area.
District 5 (yellow) – rural northeast (38.5% O / 59.5 % M) – This is another of the “rural leftover” districts, fitting around Toledo. It more or less corresponds to the existing 5th district, with some tweaks around the borders.
District 6 (teal green) – Ohio River/Appalachia (47.3% O / 50.4% M) – This district snakes along the Ohio River from just south of Youngstown almost to Portsmouth. Due to population declines here and throughout the state, this district extends farther to the west into counties that don’t border the river.
District 7 (light gray) – southwest, south and southeast of Columbus (42.9% O / 55.1% M) – This is the third of the rural fill-in districts and extends along I-75 except for Franklin County.
District 8 (light purple) – western rural counties (34.4% O / 64.1% M) – This largely matches up with the existing 8th District, losing the “hook” into Montgomery County and picking up the western end of Hamilton County. It is the most Republican of all of the districts that I have drawn.
District 9 (turquoise) – Toledo and suburbs (59.7% O / 38.7% M) – The 9th currently runs along the Lake Erie coast from Toledo almost to Cleveland. In keeping with a goal of relatively compact districts, I’ve lopped off the eastern two counties and added more to the south of Toledo. There’s a small square to the southeast of the district. A city is located right on the border, and I’ve kept it together, along with the township surrounding it.
District 10 (lavender) – western Cuyahoga County and adjacent suburbs (55.6% O / 43.0% M) – I started this one by redistricting the VRA 11th (lime green) and then by adding the rest of Cuyahoga County to the 10th. I then extended the 10th westward into the western suburbs of Cleveland.
District 11 (lime green) Eastern Cuyahoga County and adjacent suburbs (77.3% O / 21.9% M) – Since this is a minority-majority district, I tried to keep it intact, by starting with the current 11th and adding enough fringing precincts to make up the population and keep it majority-minority. As expected, this is the most Democratic district in Ohio. If you wanted to break this district up to help other districts, it wouldn’t really help, as the surrounding districts are Democratic as well.
District 12 (light blue) – eastern Columbus, suburbs and Delaware County (53.7% O / 45.1% M) – I started with the 15th (the tan district) and after it had the requisite population I added the rest of Franklin County, all of Delaware County and the fringe to the east of both to get to the required number.
District 13 (tan) – Akron, Summit and Portage Counties (56.4% O / 42.1% M) – This urbanized area between Cleveland and Youngstown includes almost all of the two counties surrounding Akron as well as part of rural Geauga County that didn’t fit into the 14th District.
District 14 (olive) – Youngstown and the northeastern part of the state (56.9% O / 42.1 % M) – I started with Youngstown, and then added the counties to the north to the northeastern corner of the state, and then started working south along the Lake Erie coast and the rural belt to the east of Cleveland.
District 15 (brown) – West Columbus and suburbs (57.7% O / 40.7% M) – For this district, I started with the western side of Franklin County (Columbus) and worked eastward. I added a tract into Union County to keep Dublin and the urban portion of Columbus together.
District 16 (light green) – Canton, and parts of Medina, Wayne, Stark and Tuscarawas Counties (48.3% O / 49.8% M) – This district fits around the 6th, the 14th, the 13th and the 10th in the industrial northeast of Ohio. It is one of three evenly balanced between Obama and McCain, along with the 3rd and the 4th.
So there we have it, sixteen districts that accurately reflect the diversity in Ohio without any outrageous gerrymanders. There’s one runaway Democratic district, the 11th, which is surrounded by other Democratic districts. There are three that are overwhelmingly Republican, the 2nd, the 5th and the 8th, but they don’t really border any overwhelmingly Democratic area. By shifting borders again, the Republicans could move slightly Democratic areas in the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts into these three overwhelmingly Republican districts, and make five strongly Republican districts, like they are now. I think that my version is much fairer, more reasonable and honors the community of interests far better that the last gerrymander, or the one we’re likely to get.