David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, Contributing Editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir:
And I'm David Nir, Political Director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency. From Senate to City Council. You can email us your thoughts at thedownballot@dailykos.com or find us on Twitter @DKElections.
David Beard:
And please subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you don't mind, leave us a five-star rating and review. Well, let's go ahead and get into today's episode. What are we going to be covering today, Nir?
David Nir:
We have some primary runoffs in Georgia that we have to discuss because Donald Trump took another big fat series of losses. There are also some weird machinations going on in the Alaska special election to replace the late Congressman Don Young. There was a late redistricting curveball thrown at us by the courts in Louisiana. And finally, we have a couple of international elections in Columbia and France that we want to recap. After that, we'll be joined by Daily Kos Elections Contributing Editor, David Jarman for a deep dive on the late-breaking redistricting action that took place across the country since our last episode on this topic. So, we'll be drilling down into the new maps in a bunch of districts.
David Beard:
Great. Let's get started. This week was a relatively quiet one in the month of June, that's seen a large number of primaries. But we did have a few notable races, particularly in Georgia, where a number of runoffs were held. Nir, tell us what happened there.
David Nir:
You may all remember Georgia's May primary where Donald Trump went 0 for 3 in his big endorsements. Well, guess what happened again in Georgia's runoffs on Tuesday night? Donald Trump went 0 for 3. He had endorsed candidates in three different House races in the 2nd, 6th, and 10th Districts and all of them lost. But one of them is particularly funny. In the second district, this is a seat in southwestern Georgia that Democrats have held for a long time. The incumbent is Sanford Bishop. It is a seat that would've supported Joe Biden by about 10 or 11 points. Republicans feel that the area is trending in their direction. And so, they're interested in targeting it this year. And a lot of establishment figures had rallied around Army veteran Jeremy Hunt, but he lost to an Air Force veteran Chris West by a 51-49 margin.
David Nir:
And the reason why this is so funny is because Donald Trump endorsed Hunt in the most bizarre way possible. Just before the runoff, over the weekend, Trump was at something called the Faith and Freedom Conference and he gave a shout out to a bishop named Garland Hunt who had supported him in his 2020 reelection. He said, "Bishop Hunt, I know your son, I just endorsed your son and he won big. What a great son." No one had any idea what Trump was talking about because Trump had not in fact endorsed Hunt's son, Jeremy Hunt. And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution even wondered if Trump had gotten Jeremy Hunt confused with another Black guy, Wesley Hunt, who had in fact won a primary in Texas for another House district earlier this year and Trump did in fact endorse him. So, Trump was describing this endorsement of Jeremy Hunt in the past tense as though it had already happened. It certainly happened, the winning big; again, the race hadn't happened yet.
David Nir:
Hunt's campaign said "we took it as referring to coming first place in the primary," which was all very, very weird. Anyhow, it certainly didn't help Hunt at all, since of course he wound up losing. He didn't have time to capitalize on it. Trump gets another L added to his column, except it's really important to stress once again, that in really all of these races, while these might be individual losses for Donald Trump the man, they are by no means losses for the Trumpist movement. Because all of the winners, in other words, the candidates Trump did not back, they all love Donald Trump. They all ran as ardent Trump allies. They ran ads touting their fealty to Donald Trump. So, really when we look at these sorts of results and we've said this before, but we'll stress it again: the final tallies show massive and widespread support for Donald Trump in GOP primaries from coast to coast, whether or not it's his preferred candidate who winds up winning.
David Beard:
Exactly and we've seen Georgia has really been a unique situation given how bad Trump's record has been, but it's really a very esoteric sort of win in that the Georgia Republican party has sort of fended off Trump's attempt to try to choose specific people. But has not at all tried to stop him from leading the ideology, leading the party, none of that is in doubt. It's just Georgia's establishment has held their own in terms of keeping their people there instead of the specific Trump selections.
David Nir:
And it almost certainly is the case that they've done a good job with this because it's been sort of impossible to out Trump the locally preferred Georgia candidates, as opposed to the Trump preferred Georgia candidates.
David Beard:
Exactly. So, I'm going to take us over to Alaska, which we talked about last week and their special election primary that took place. The four candidates who advanced from the first round were indeed, as we discussed former governor, Sarah Palin and businessman Nick Begich, both of whom are Republicans. Independent Al Gross and Democratic former state representative Mary Peltola. So, those were the four candidates who placed first. And as a result of Alaska's new law are the ones who advanced to the second round where ranked choice voting takes place. However, in a big surprise on Monday, the Independent Al Gross announced that he was withdrawing from the second round and that led some, including Gross himself, to think that fifth place finisher Republican Tara Sweeney would advance in his place, so that there would still be four candidates on the ballot. And Gross even released a statement co endorsing Peltola and Sweeney, and saying that "as two native Alaska women, that they would both be good candidates to support in the runoff."
David Beard:
But the state division of elections later announced that while Gross could be removed from the ballot because the ballots hadn't been printed yet, that Sweeney would not be bumped up into the top four due to their reading of state law and the fact that it was fewer than 64 days before the election. Sweeney's campaign has announced that they're not going to challenge this decision, though it is still conceivable that someone else could as the ballots still haven't been printed for a few days yet. But the assumption right now is that Palin, Begich and Peltola will be the three candidates on the ballot for this second round. And as we talked about a little bit last week, Begich would probably have the advantage against either Palin or Peltola, though it's fairly unlikely for Begich and Peltola to be the final two. But Palin would probably have the advantage over Peltola. So, the big question as we do this ranked choice between these three candidates is who ends up in third place and gets eliminated, whether that's Peltola or Begich?
David Nir:
There was a truly Alaska moment as this drama unfolded. Sweeney's campaign manager said that the candidate was in a part of this state without cell phone reception. So, it's very possible that Sweeney for a while, didn't even know that Gross had dropped out and had endorsed her and wanted her to take his place. But ultimately I think it's near certainty that either Palin or Begich will win in that instant runoff second round on August 16th. In the first round of voting, Republican candidates combined for 58% of the vote and Democrats only got 17% of the vote. So, it's a pretty disappointing showing. Alaska is one of those states where Democrats often seem to be competitive, but ultimately wind up falling short.
David Nir:
Over in Louisiana, we had what is probably the final redistricting curve ball thrown at us when a federal judge ruled recently that the state's congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act because it did not create a second congressional district where Black voters could elect their candidate of choice.
Black voters make up about a third of this state, so you would think it would make sense that there should be two Black seats out of the six that Louisiana is entitled to. In fact, the map that was struck down, Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards vetoed it precisely because it didn't create a second Black seat. The court said that the Voting Rights Act requires this second seat to be drawn. It ordered the legislature to come up with an alternate map. Louisiana's Republican-run state legislature simply declined to pass anything at all. So, now a map will be drawn by the court, but this is huge, there was a very similar case out of Alabama earlier this year where again, a Federal court said that the Voting Rights Act required Alabama to draw a second Black district.
David Nir:
And the Supreme Court simply put a stop to that case. They said it wasn't really clear what the court's reasoning was though, in a concurrence, Brett Kavanaugh claimed that there simply wasn't enough time for Alabama to draw a new map. That was really total BS on a number of different grounds. And in fact, the District Court, which ruled against Louisiana's map, spent quite a bit of ink trying to argue why those arguments that apply to Alabama don't apply to Louisiana.
The one slight bit of good news is that what lawyers call the procedural posture of this case is different from the Alabama case. Here, the case will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals before it goes to the Supreme Court, and the Fifth Circuit is notoriously ultra-conservative and far-right. Yet the Fifth Circuit declined to block the lower court judge's ruling from taking effect.
David Nir:
Now, Republicans have appealed that ruling from the Fifth Circuit to the Supreme Court. We could yet see the Supreme Court intervene once more and stop the cause of enhanced Black representation. If the Supremes decide to stay out of this one, then Louisiana will in fact get a new map, and another district will be created both that is very likely to elect a Black person and specifically a Black Democrat.
David Beard:
Yeah. It's unfortunately pretty unlikely given what we've seen the Supreme Court act on previously, but it would be very positive news if this were to happen. If only for the cycle, as I'm sure the appeals will continue beyond the cycle. To wrap up weekly hits, I'm going to go to a couple of international hits in Colombia and in France. In Colombia, the leftist former rebel and longtime legislator, Gustavo Petro, became the first left-wing president elected in Colombia's history, narrowly defeating right-wing firebrand, Rodolfo Hernandez, 50% to 47%.
David Beard:
Colombia had faced a long term leftist insurgency from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which had made it all bit impossible for left-wing politics to really flourish in the country. But that insurgency was ended by a peace deal in 2016, and that's allowed the left-wing politics to develop in the country in a much more comprehensive way. Now, large protests took place last year by Colombians, frustrated by longstanding problems of poverty, inequality, and state violence, and that really helped propel Petro to the presidency in this recent election.
David Beard:
But obviously, those problems are very intractable as we've seen in a lot of countries. He'll have a lot of work to do as he becomes, as I said, the nation's first left-wing president. Petro identifies as a democratic socialist, so fairly left-wing, but Colombia's really never had a president of any shade of left. It'll be interesting to see how this develops as he takes the presidency and governs the country.
David Beard:
Then over in France, legislative elections took place just two months after centrist, Emmanuel Macron, won reelection is president. Now, since this schedule had formed where the legislative elections took place just two months after the presidential election, the winning president had always also won a majority in parliament in the subsequent legislative elections. But this year, Macron's centrist alliance, while still coming in first, only won 245 seats short of the 289 needed for an absolute majority in parliament.
David Beard:
The left-wing alliance took 131 seats, the center right took 64, and most concerning is that the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, who lost the runoff to Macron a couple of months ago, won 89 seats, which is a massive increase on the three seats they won in 2017. Now, France uses a runoff system for their legislative elections as well. It's always been very hard for the far right to actually win these seats as whenever they make the runoff, the other parties and the voters of the other parties usually consolidate for the other candidates so that the far-right candidate is not elected.
David Beard:
But that really fell away in this election for the first time as both left-wing and centrist candidates didn't really gain by being in a runoff against the far right. It seemed like for centrist candidates, a lot of the left-wing voters stayed home, or in some cases there were left-wing voters as polling showed who voted for the far right against the centrist parties.
David Beard:
Then when it was a left-wing versus a right-wing candidate, again the centrists did not go overwhelmingly to the left-wing candidate. A lot of them stayed home, and some of them did even vote for the far right. There was a real loosening of the fact that previously the far right had been very isolated in these runoffs, and that really wasn't the case anymore in the selection, which is definitely concerning as you look towards the future in France.
David Nir:
Now, I saw Daniel Nichanian, who we've had on this show before, talking about this outcome. He said that in the presidential race, Macron emphasized this importance of standing against the far right, and Le Pen for the good of the republic to save the republic. Then his party seemed to turn around and run on a similar message against the left-wing candidates in the parliamentary elections. It almost feels like you have a three-way fracturing in French politics that has maybe ended to whatever extent there was a united front between the center and the left allowing Le Pen's party to search.
David Beard:
Yeah. That's the difference. It's one thing to say, "Oh, we can't let the far right get into power." This is much more important than petty politics, and that's how it had previously been. Here Macron's party really didn't use it that way, because as soon as they needed to do something similar against the left, they were like, "Oh, we can't get the left into power," just the way they were like, "We can't let the right into power earlier."
David Beard:
It then just became another political machination and lost that idea of a popular front against the far right. The other thing that I'll just note is that Macron has the ability to call new legislative elections, though there's some debate about whether or not he has to wait a full year or not. But it seems at least possible that if there's an opportunity for him to call new elections where he thinks that his party could do better, but that may happen next year at some point during his term.
David Nir:
Well, that does it for our weekly hits, but stay with us. We are going to be joined by Daily Kos election's contributing editor, David Jarman, who is going to take us on a deep dive, wrapping up the remaining redistricting action since we last explored the national congressional map. Stick with us. We are back with Daily Kos contributing editor David Jarman, who is going to walk us through the states that saw late redistricting action this year. David, thank you so much for joining us again.
David Jarman:
Yeah. Glad to be back. Thanks for having me.
David Nir:
Let's start off with my home state of New York, which saw a lot of upheaval Democrats passed a new congressional map that was very much gerrymandered with the party's favor. The state courts ruled that the legislature lacked the power to draw a new map and also delayed the primary for congressional and state Senate races until August.
David Nir:
As a result, we saw a lot of districts change one way with the Democratic map, and then shift back in a totally different direction with the new state court-drawn map. Let's start with New York city where the 11th district really underwent some serious changes under the Democratic map, and then reversed those changes under the court-drawn map.
David Jarman:
What happened with the 11th is this was a district that used to be centered on Staten Island, which is the most Republican part of New York, and it also included some Republican-friendly areas in Southern Brooklyn like Bensonhurst. What happened with the original, with the democratic map that got struck down, is that instead of that southern part of Brooklyn, it took a jog up to the north, including Park Slope and hipster neighborhoods like that that are closer to the center of the city.
David Jarman:
That made it a light blue district instead, one that it seemed like Democrats would be able to pick up. But then that map was struck down, as we've discussed, and the map drawn by the special master returned it to more of its original state from the 10s district, although it's slightly bluer than it was in the 10s district. But unfortunately, it's most likely to reelect the Republican incumbent, Nicole Malliotakis.
David Jarman:
The leading Democratic candidate there is still Max Rose, who started running when all of a sudden, wow, this is a blue district, easy pickup. But he's continuing to run there even though the district has reverted to its light red roots. Maybe it was going to be a bad look for him if he bailed out at that point. But he might also think that given his unique appeal to the Staten Island part of the district, he might still have a shot here anyway.
David Nir:
Moving north of the city, we have a trio of interconnected districts, the 17th, 18th, and 19th in the Mid-Hudson Valley that saw quite a few gyrations and also a whole lot of political fallout in terms of who's running where, and a lot of hurt feelings and angry members of Congress as a result.
David Jarman:
Yeah. A lot of really crazy shifting around of where people intended to run. The current version of the 17th is represented by Mondaire Jones, but he was more or less bumped out of the district by Sean Patrick Maloney, who I'm sure we'll discuss further. He's also the head of the DCCC right now, who does have some overlap: he's currently representing the 18th, which is a little further up the Hudson Valley.
David Jarman:
The 17th is more of a suburban Westchester and Rockland County district. But the 17th is a little bluer than the 18th, and Maloney said, "Okay, that seems like a good place," and Jones, instead of pursuing the primary against the head of the D-trip, decided to run in the 10th, which is down on Manhattan. The 17th isn't necessarily going to go to Maloney though, because he attracted a primary challenge from Alessandra Biaggi, who's a state Senator who represents part of Westchester County.
David Jarman:
She's best known for defeating an IDC member in a primary four years ago. She has the more lefty credentials and still presents a pretty dramatic matchup against Maloney. Now, there's also the 18th district, which now became an open seat because Maloney vacated.
But we have a reasonably strong Democratic candidate there anyway, in the form of Ulster County Executive, Pat Ryan. He's the leader of one of the bigger counties in the district, which is sort of an exurban county further up the Hudson Valley. But he's a name brand, and that's also a similarly blue district to the 17th. It's current under the new lines that Biden won at 53 to 45. So reasonably good chance to hold that one, even though it's an open seat. Now, that leaves the 19th, though, which has a whole different set of circumstances. It used to be represented by Antonio Delgado, who picked a seat up in 2018, had kind of a rising star vibe about him, but the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, just recently picked Delgado to be her new Lieutenant Governor, after the previous Lieutenant Governor had to resign after being indicted.
David Jarman:
So that makes sense for Delgado, in the sense of that's a good way for him to get statewide name recognition. He'll probably want to run for something bigger than Lieutenant Governor in the future, but that leaves us with a really big hole in the 19th district, which is also a very swingy district, although it's one that Biden still won narrowly, even under the current lines. The Republican nominee there is likely to be Marc Molinaro, who used to be the Westchester County Executive, and was previously the Republican gubernatorial nominee. So he's well known and in a district that's that closely divided in a midterm year, especially against a Democrat, the Democrat later to be named, he probably has a good chance of picking that district up, unfortunately.
David Nir:
And there's also sort of a little twist here, which is that there will be a special for Delgado's vacancy, the 19th district under the old lines, and the candidate, you mentioned, who's running for Democrats in the 18th, Pat Ryan, is running in that special election, but a right wing group just released a poll showing Molinaro crushing Pat Ryan, 52/38 in the special election. We haven't seen any contradictory numbers yet, but that's feeling like a difficult seat to hang onto.
David Jarman:
Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't hold that special election either. Especially, kind of like the open seat that we just saw in Texas's 34th district, where this is just the wrong time to be having a special election in a light red open seat.
David Nir:
But there is another district further upstate that is probably Democrat's best shot at pickup in New York. And that is the 22nd district. So what's going on there?
David Jarman:
Yeah, that used to be the 24th under the old lines. Most of its territory moved into the 22nd. New York lost an upstate seat, so there was a lot of rejiggering of the numbers. That's the seat that's been held by John Katko for a number of years. Republican John Katko, who's one of the most moderate Republicans and also just a really difficult out in terms of the Democrats have tried many times to defeat him, with good candidates, and have always come up just slightly short in this swingy, but I guess you'd say, light blue district. Now, the overall numbers haven't changed. It's still a district that Biden got 53% under both the old and new lines, but with Katko out, there's definitely a better shot here for democratic contenders.
David Beard:
So let's move down to Florida where the map kept getting delayed, kept getting delayed over Republican infighting, where Governor DeSantis stood really firmly on the idea of getting a really aggressive Republican gerrymander, despite the fact that Florida has anti-gerrymandering laws, because he clearly and seemingly correctly believed that the Florida Supreme Court, full of his appointees, would not stop him from passing a gerrymandered map. And eventually, he got what he wanted. He got a map that really hurt Democrats on a number of places. So unfortunately, we're going to go through those now, and we're going to start with Florida's fifth district, which is a voting rights district that is designed to elect an African American candidate that stretches from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, or did, represented by Al Lawson. And now it is not that. So tell us what it looks like now.
David Jarman:
Yeah. The fifth district, like you said, used to join African Americans at both ends of the panhandle in Florida. It was a very long, skinny district. But, under the current configuration, it's limited just to Jacksonville. And basically what's happening is the fourth district used to contain the white parts of Jacksonville, which is represented by John Rutherford. He's the Republican incumbent. He's going to run in the fifth. So the fourth is really where there's a Republican hole. I suspect the nominee there is going to be Aaron Bean who's in the State Senate.
David Jarman:
But what's happening with Al Lawson, unfortunately, is probably the best place for him to run is the Florida second district now, which is Tallahassee-centered. But that district is one where Biden lost it 44 to 55, because it no longer contains the black part of Jacksonville. It's just Tallahassee, which is a blue city, but it's surrounded by some very dark red countryside. So although that district became a lot bluer -- it used to be one that Biden lost by 32% under the old lines — it's still a district that Biden lost by double digits and probably Lawson too. Lawson isn't going to have much hope there, but it's good to see him at least persisting.
David Nir:
And it should also be pointed out that Lawson is facing off against a fellow incumbent Republican Congressman Neal Dunn. So that really just makes his task even harder because Dunn represents maybe about two thirds of the new second district and Lawson only around one third or so.
David Jarman:
Dunn represents Panama City, which is kind of the right wing resort area on the coast and a lot of countryside in that district. So yeah, he's already pretty well ensconced. He's been there for a while.
David Beard:
And honestly, kudos to Lawson for going for it in, really, very difficult circumstances. We've seen a lot of representatives who would've bailed, who would've been like I got stuck with a really tough seat that I probably won't win, so I'm just going to retire and become a lobbyist. And he is going to give it a shot. And hopefully, even if he doesn't win the cycle, hopefully that'll chauffer good things down the road. He'll probably want to run again somewhere at some point.
David Jarman:
I suspect a lot of, even a lot of Democrats would've taken the opportunity to not just retire, but resign, already to get a jump on their lobbying a little earlier, but he did not.
David Beard:
Yeah. So, let's turn to the Tampa Bay area, where if you think Ron DeSantis is done going after African American voters, he is not. As the 13th and 14th districts got changed, again to the advantage of Republican, so tell us what happened there.
David Jarman:
The 13th, very briefly, for the four or so years where we had a reasonably fair map in Florida included the Black parts of St. Petersburg. In the earlier parts of the 10s, it did not, which is why it was a bit of a Republican-leaning district. And it became a light blue district after redistricting, but it's reverted more or less to its old form. And new Florida 13 just contains the white parts of St. Petersburg plus suburbs in Pinellas County further to its north. And it's now back to more of a light red district. And most likely the nominee there is going to be Anna Paulina Luna, the Republican, most likely Republican, nominee. She's going to face off against Eric Lynn, who's a former defense department official, who's the only Democrat running there. But this is a district that's now one that Biden lost 46 to 53. So it doesn't seem like a likely hold for the Democrats, especially since it's an open seat since Charlie Crist, of course, retired to run for governor.
David Beard:
And then finally, yet another district where DeSantis successfully was able to go after a Democratic seat and basically browbeat the legislature into giving him what he wanted, was Florida's seventh district, which is currently Democratic, is a very competitive seat and probably won't be going forward. Correct?
David Jarman:
That's right. And Stephanie Murphy, who was the representative for a number of years, retired even before the new map came out, I assume, under the expectation that she'd be dealt a much worse hand and she was proven correct, eventually, once the legislative wrangling was done. But yeah, that used to be a district that Biden won by 10 points in the Orlando suburbs, which are pretty diverse and, like a lot of other Southern suburbs, moving left pretty rapidly, but the district was reconfigured to include less college-educated areas further to the east, closer to Daytona Beach, and that made it a bit redder. And one worrisome thing about this district is that the Republican nominee here could be Anthony Sabatini, who's a particularly wacky member of the state legislature, but he probably has the name recognition advantage in the Republican primary.
David Nir:
One thing we should note is that there are still legal challenges pending against Florida's map under the fair district's amendments to the state constitution, which were passed a decade ago, as Beard mentioned a little while ago, DeSantis and his predecessor, Rick Scott, have managed to stack the state Supreme Court with ultra-conservative far-right justices. So it remains to be seen whether the plaintiffs will get any satisfaction from the court. We know they won't this year, Republicans often gerrymander illegally, knowing that they'll get a temporary advantage, even if the courts later overturn what they've engaged in. There is still a chance, though, that some of DeSantis' gerrymander gets undone, if the state Supreme Court in Florida does have an attack of the conscience and actually reads the law correctly. It's sort of a similar situation in Ohio where voters also passed amendments to reform the redistricting process in an attempt to crack down on gerrymandering.
There though the Supreme Court struck down the Republican-drawn Congressional map, finding that it was an illegal gerrymander, Republicans passed a replacement map that was still a very aggressive gerrymander. Maybe they backed off just a little bit. And the State Supreme Court let them off the hook this year. The litigation again is ongoing. Again, it's possible that a new map could come into effect in 2024, but for now, Ohio is stuck with this gerrymandered Congressional map. But there are still some opportunities for Democratic success, and maybe the most interesting district that's gotten transformed is Ohio's first district in the southwestern corner of the state.
David Jarman:
Yeah, that's the Cincinnati-area district that's always, even the last decade, was a common Democratic target, even though it was slightly Republican-leaning. But what happened in the first district is this is a Cincinnati area district. It used to include a lot of Cincinnati's more conservative suburbs to the north, but redistricting in the last year condensed it a bit more to just Cincinnati and its more inner suburbs. So it's actually a considerably bluer district than it used to be in previous configurations. It's one that Joe Biden won 54 to 45 in 2020. And it's been represented ever since 1994, except for a two-year period following 2008 by Steve Chabot, who is also a really conservative Republican for such a swingy district, but he's managed to hold on, and this might finally be the end of him. His Democrat opponent is Greg Landsman, and he may be the lone new addition to the Democratic caucus in Ohio.
David Nir:
Yeah, Landsman is a Cincinnati city councilman. He seems to have consolidated party support behind him and probably like you say, has the best chance to flip a seat from Republicans. But conversely, the GOP managed to really paint a major target on the back of veteran Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur in the northern part of the state in the Ninth District.
David Jarman:
Yeah, she's the dean of the delegation, and just given her weird opposition, she might be able to survive, but we're going to be on pins and needles about that one. Basically, what happened is this district, in the previous decades, stretched all the way from Toledo to western Cleveland. It was a Democratic vote sink, and the new version just centers it on Toledo without the weird arm that reaches across the state. So it's now a light red district. Biden lost the 9th district 47 to 51. And like I was saying, the surprise winner of the Republican primary is a random businessman named J.R. Majewski, who's QAnon-curious and has a long track record of saying iffy things on a conspiracy theory level. So that potentially creates an opening for Kaptur if he continues to act on the kooky side and she's able to exploit that in advertising.
David Nir:
And finally there is an open seat in the northeastern corner of the state. That's Ohio's 13th district, though I think it might be fair to say that it's the successor of two different seats because Ohio lost a seat in redistricting. So it's the offspring of maybe both the old 13th and the old 16th, both of which were open?
David Jarman:
Yeah, it really has more of the flavor of the 16th than the old 13th. I always think of the old 13th as being the Youngstown district, which is where Tim Ryan's from. And now Youngstown isn't even in the 13th anymore. It moved to the sixth. So the 13th is now more of an Akron and a Canton area district. It's a lot more condensed, which also makes it more suburban and less blue-collar. But interestingly, the overall numbers didn't even change. The old version of the district that Biden won 51 to 48, and the new version is one that Biden won 51 to 48. It's just in a somewhat different part of the state.
David Jarman:
And the Democratic nominee is Emilia Sykes. The Republican nominee is someone named Madison Gesiotto. And I think we've seen a few recent polls that give Gesiotto quite a bit of an advantage. I think they were Republican internal polls, but the Democratic rebuttal poll found a very close race. So I'm not super optimistic about that one in its current state.
David Nir:
So finally, let's look at a couple of smaller states that also had very delayed redistricting that really went as long as they could, until they finally, finally got a map in place. Let's start with Missouri, where there was a big fight in the legislature where some conservative senators really, really wanted to make a 7-1 map with seven Republicans with one Democrat down from the current 6-2 map. They ultimately didn't get that passed. What passed was a 6-1 map, but it did make a key change to Missouri's second district. So tell us what's happening there.
David Jarman:
Yeah, that district is a suburban district west of St. Louis. It's been represented for a number of years by Ann Wagner, who's not exactly moderate, but very much an establishmentarian within the Republican party. And she got the district shored up. It went from a district that was nearly tied. It was literally the closest district in terms of the number of votes in the 2020 election, in terms of the Biden versus Trump numbers, although Wagner won a little more comfortably in her own House race.
David Jarman:
But it's currently a district that Biden lost 45 to 53 because the Republican legislature added a bit of a tail that sticks out more towards the west into the more rural and central part of the state. And we're not even sure if Wagner particularly wants that. She's expressed a lot of concern over the years about not having too many quote “wacko birds” in the Republican electorate that would potentially pose a primary election threat to her, though it doesn't seem like she drew any high-powered opposition in the primary this year.
David Nir:
And then finally we'll end on New Hampshire, which despite having a Republican legislature and a Republican governor, could never quite get their act together to pass a map and resulted in a court-drawn map, which means very little change. But just sum up the state of the two New Hampshire districts.
David Jarman:
Yeah, Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire who tries to maintain a somewhat moderate reputation, really just went back over and over again and put his foot down against the Republican legislature's desires to have more of a safe Republican district and then a safe Democratic district. And his rationale might actually make sense, that in a bad midterm year potentially the Republicans could win both of the more swingy districts, though the converse is that they could wind up losing both of them under most other circumstances.
David Jarman:
But yeah, there was almost no movement at all. The specially-drawn map moved literally only about half a dozen towns from one district to the other, and that did not change the overall numbers of the districts at all. The first district stayed as one that Biden one with 52%, and the second district is won that Biden won with 54%. So they're both pretty swingy and could put both Democratic representatives at risk this year, but in a more normal non-midterm year, one with a Republican in the White House, those would be a bit more Democratic-friendly seats.
David Nir:
And the amazing thing about New Hampshire was that despite making the tiniest of changes and it is a state with only two Congressional districts, it was actually the last state in the nation to finish the Congressional redistricting process. So you never know what kinds of crazy parochial battles you will see when it comes to redistricting fights. They don't always play out along obvious partisan lines, and that's exactly what happened both in Missouri and in New Hampshire, and in several other states around the country. We have been discussing the late-breaking redistricting developments across the country with Daily Kos Elections contributing editor, David Jarman. Jarman, thank you so much for joining us once again on The Downballot.
David Nir:
You're welcome. Thanks for having me again.
David Jarman:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to David Jarman for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts, and you can reach us by email at thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor, Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.