In evenly split Ohio, redistricting gives GOP 12-4 edge in congressional seats

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Even though most Ohio voters backed Democrats in this year's presidential and U.S. Senate elections, new congressional maps designed to protect GOP incumbents kept three quarters of the state's U.S. House of Representatives seats in Republican hands.

When new congressional districts were drawn last year, Republicans who control Ohio's state legislature did their best to ensure their party's edge in Congress for the next decade by packing the most possible Democratic voters into the fewest possible districts.

That's how a swing state with a fairly even political divide will end up being represented in Congress next year by 12 Republicans and four Democrats.

"This is a tossup state, the battleground of battlegrounds, except when you stack the deck," says Steve Fought, a Democrat who worked on the congressional campaigns of Toledo's Marcy Kaptur and Copley Township's Betty Sutton. "That is the only way they were able to hold their power in Ohio and the only way they were able to hold their power in the House of Representatives. But you have to give them credit. They knew what they were doing and it worked."

Republicans in Ohio deny the deck is stacked in their favor. Cory Fritz, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner of West Chester, says that Republicans won the bulk of Ohio's House races "by listening to Buckeye State voters who want Washington to focus on growing America's economy and helping small businesses create jobs."

And Ohio Republican Party spokesman Matt Henderson notes that Democrats across the country gained House seats "with redistricting systems similar to ours."

For example, Democrats gained four House of Representatives seats in Illinois this year after their party redrew election districts to help their own candidates.

But most political experts say this year's redistricting process was a big boon for Republicans in hanging onto their House of Representatives majority. Nationwide, new redistricting maps helped Republicans pick up at least three North Carolina congressional seats, as well as seats in Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

Political analyst David Wasserman says that a boom in nonwhite voters is helping Democrats win statewide races, but those voters are clustered in too few congressional districts nationwide to help Democrats win the House of Representatives without a "massive wave."

"There's little doubt that generic ballot polls were accurate and that Democrats narrowly won a majority of all votes cast for the House, but a symbiosis of Democratic clustering and GOP redistricting still produced a clear Republican majority," Wasserman wrote Thursday in the Cook Political Report.

Ohio started 2010 with 13 Republican and five Democratic Congress members, but the state legislature had to eliminate two of those seats after Census numbers revealed Ohio's population growth hadn't kept pace with other states.

The GOP plan that Ohio adopted last year consolidated Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur's district in Toledo with Rep. Dennis Kucinich's district on the Cleveland's West Side, forcing a primary duel in which Kaptur prevailed. Kaptur went onto beat Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher with 73 percent of the vote.

Copley Township Democratic Rep. Betty Sutton was put into a GOP-leaning district with freshman Republican Rep. Jim Renacci of Wadsworth, who defeated her on Tuesday with 52 percent of the vote.

In just about every district, the results were predictably lopsided. The map protected Columbus-area Republicans Steve Stivers and Pat Tiberi by creating a new Democratic district in the Columbus area that Joyce Beatty won with 68 percent of the vote.

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