The impact if Ohio loses congressional seat
State expected to lose a seat, despite gain in population.
Ohio’s legislative mapmakers are expected to have fewer chances to make another “snake on the lake” or “duck district” when they draw congressional district boundaries in 2021 under a new process meant to curb partisan gerrymandering.
The new rules voters adopted as an amendment to the Ohio Constitution were written in part to stop the packing and cracking that gave Ohio 16 uncompetitive districts. New lines could draw down the 12-4 advantage Republicans have had in Ohio’s U.S. House delegation since 2011.
But the political cartographers will have another wrinkle to contend with as well: The projected loss of a congressional district.
Ohio’s 16th seat is on the bubble, according to projections based on population trends. That means the U.S. Census Bureau’s decennial count will be significant, not just in Ohio, but also in those states expected to gain seats.
The Buckeye State is growing, just not as fast as those in the South and West that are in line to expand their delegations in Washington, D.C. Several prognosticators have Ohio among about 10 states that will lose a seat, while Florida, Texas and others mostly in the Sunbelt should add to their delegations.
“The thing to keep in mind in terms of apportionment is, what it is is a complicated formula that people think is simple, but it’s not totally,” said Kimball Brace, president of Virginia-based Election Data Services.
Federal law caps the number of members in the House of Representatives at 435. Each state receives one of the first 50 members. The remaining 385 are distributed in proportion to population, allocated based on a formula that Congress adopted in 1941.
The cap, though, means that seats can shift around the country even if a state, such as Ohio, is growing.
Brace projects that Ohio would receive the 438th seat in the House if the cap didn’t exist. Only Alabama and Minnesota, both expected to lose a seat, are closer to maintaining the status quo.
Ohio is about 74,000 additional people — an increase of about 0.6% — from keeping its seat, according to Brace’s projections. The state has lost seats in every re-apportionment since 1970, when Ohioans occupied 24 desks in the House chambers.
“The quality of the count matters tremendously. It won’t take a lot of people to be the difference between losing and gaining seats. What really matters is the quality of the count varies by location,” said David Niven, associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. “It’s really in each state’s interest to encourage full census participation.”
Between 2010 and 2018, Ohio’s population increased by about 150,000. Most of that growth can be attributed to Franklin County, which added 144,000 during that period, the most recent county-level data available through the U.S. Census Bureau.
The population increased by 294,000 across 29 of Ohio’s 88 counties during that period. But the remaining 59 counties lost about 144,000 people.
In Franklin County, about half of the population increase came because births outpaced deaths. The other half is split between domestic and international migration, said Liz Whelan, data manager for the MidOhio Regional Planning Commission.
Columbus’ population boom will keep the city from being entirely enclosed in one of Ohio’s new congressional districts. It is the only city in Ohio that is too large to fit into a single district.
The state constitutional amendment voters approved in 2018 will limit the kind of splitting elsewhere, though, that helped Republicans draw advantageous districts for the party in 2011, said Richard Gunther, an emeritus professor of political science at Ohio State University who helped usher in the changes.
The “snake on a lake” belongs to Democrat Marcy Kaptur, which stretches from west of Toledo along Lake Erie, across the Sandusky Bay Bridge to western Cleveland suburbs. The “duck district” is Republican Jim Jordan’s; it passes through 14 counties from Shelby County, not far from the Indiana border, to Lorain County, just west of Cleveland.
None of Ohio’s 16 congressional seats has changed parties since the new lines were drawn. In 2018, Republicans received a little more than half of the statewide vote but won 75% of the congressional seats.
“Creative gerrymandering can produce wonders, and clearly this is a manufactured majority that resulted from the way the district boundaries were drawn,” Gunther said.
New rules, though, will bar splitting Ohio’s other large cities, including Cleveland, Cincinnati and Akron, across multiple districts. Cincinnati is split into two districts now, and portions of four different districts creep over the county lines in Cuyahoga and Summit counties.
That could be good news for Democrats. Not being able to split Cincinnati, for instance, increases the likelihood of a Democratic district being drawn where two Republicans hold seats now, Gunther said.
Niven said even if more districts aren’t drawn to favor Democrats, they can be more competitive under the new rules.
In most scenarios, new 10-year maps will require more bipartisan support than in the past. Anyone can submit a proposed congressional district map, but it requires a 60% vote of the General Assembly and at least half the votes of each party caucus to win approval.
If those thresholds aren’t met, a new seven-member Ohio Redistricting Commission can adopt the map with a majority vote that includes two members of each party. The third option, if the first two fail, is to send the map back to the General Assembly where it can pass with a 60% vote and only a third of the vote of the minority party.
Without satisfying any of those three scenarios, a majority vote of state lawmakers can adopt a fouryear map without bipartisan support.
Gunther said the uncertainty around which party will rule the state in the short term should induce the majority to pursue a 10-year map. But Niven called the four-year map a “loophole” for the majority party.
“What we don’t know until it plays out is the degree to which the majority party honors the spirit of this,” Niven said.