Ohio Redistricting Prep: Background

This Fall, Ohio politicians will redraw our state’s district lines.

There’s a lot of national attention on this topic right now, because President Trump is telling states like Texas to rig (“gerrymander”) districts to give Republicans more seats in Congress.

But Ohio was already planning to redraw (“redistrict”) its congressional district lines this year.

Ohio is also already using unconstitutional maps that have been gerrymandered to give Republicans more seats in Congress than they’ve earned in votes.

Nevertheless, Ohio Republicans plan to hand Donald Trump even more unearned seats in Congress this time around. Democrats and voting rights orgs will be fighting one hell of an uphill battle to stop them.

To understand how Ohio got here, we need to go back to at least 2010.

In March 2010, Republican strategist Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “he who controls redistricting can control Congress.”

Rove and friends then spent 2010 implementing a strategy Republicans called the REDistricting MAjority Project, AKA "REDMAP.”

The REDMAP plan was to win seats in key state legislatures so Republicans could rig district lines and take near-permanent control of Congress.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) even led redistricting trainings for state level politicians as part of this strategy.

The theme of the trainings was: “Keep it secret, keep it safe.” They taught politicians how to rig districts to ensure maximum Republican seats, and urged them to hide the maps until the last possible minute.

The REDMAP plan was incredibly successful.

In November 2010, Republicans won control of several state government branches throughout the country, including the Ohio House of Representatives and the Ohio governor’s office. They had already controlled the Ohio Senate since 1985.

States are required to redraw their district lines every 10 years to account for people moving, dying, etc. So, in 2011, Ohio began its regular redistricting process with Republicans in total control of state government.

This detailed, nonpartisan report lays out what happened next — Ohio Republicans held secret redistricting meetings in a taxpayer-funded hotel room they called “the bunker.”

Inside “the bunker,” Republicans rigged the state’s districts so their party would control the Statehouse and most of Ohio’s seats in Congress “even if there were a strong Democratic year.”

“…Ohio Republican officials often used their personal, rather than official, email addresses to conduct and discuss the state business of drawing Ohio’s congressional map.”

If you’re familiar with Ohio politics, you will recognize many of the politicians who played a role in rigging Ohio’s district lines in 2011 — including Jane Timken, Gayle Manning, Keith Faber, and Matt Huffman.

Matt Huffman (who is currently Speaker of the Ohio House and the most powerful man in Ohio) served as chairman of the House Government and Elections Committee in 2011.

Huffman sponsored the bill that cemented Ohio’s rigged maps for a decade. He then scheduled a vote on the rigged maps before they were ever made public.

“The maps cleared his committee within 24 hours of their release” and passed “the entire House within 48 hours.”

It’s important to note that some Democrats are also known to have helped Republicans rig Ohio’s districts in 2011.

For example, Republicans Ray DiRossi and Bill Batchelder both testified that their party worked with now-Congresswoman Joyce Beatty while crafting the district that became Beatty’s current seat in Congress.

Seriously. Search for BEATTY in this legal document. It’s infuriating.

The result of these gerrymandered maps? Districts with outrageous shapes that sometimes spanned more than 100 miles across the state.

Ohioans with wildly different needs and concerns were forced to vote for the same elected officials and hope those officials visit their part of the district.

This is an actual depiction of Jim Jordan’s congressional district from 2011 – 2021. It was drawn so it would be nearly impossible to vote Jordan out of office, no matter what he did or said.

Another obvious example of Ohio’s rigged 2011 congressional maps was District 9, known as the “Snake on the Lake”:

“District 9 include[d] fragments of two of Ohio’s major cities: Cleveland and Toledo. After the 2011 redistricting, two Democratic candidates…Marcy Kaptur of Toledo and Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland — were forced into a primary election where only one would survive.”

The 2011 districts were so gerrymandered that you could accurately predict the winner in every congressional district before the election even occurred.

And the same outcome occurred year after year. As the League of Women voters noted after the 2016 elections, “the percentage of each party’s vote share changed from year to year, [but] the percentage of seats each party won remained unchanged.”

This shameful situation led to Ohio’s 2015 and 2018 votes to ban gerrymandering and fix our state’s redistricting process….but I’ll cover that in my next post.