How Redistricting Affects Ohio’s Elections
Ohio’s primaries tonight are taking place on the state’s new congressional map — and Democrats aren’t too happy about it. That’s because the map is heavily biased toward the GOP, with 11 Republican-leaning seats, two Democratic-leaning seats and only two highly competitive seats — despite the fact that Trump won just 53 percent of the vote here in 2020.
A similar map was struck down in January by the state Supreme Court for being a partisan gerrymander, but there wasn’t enough time before the primary for the court to rule on the legality of this map, its replacement. (The map could still be struck down for 2024, however.) Democrats pushed for the court to postpone the primary to avoid holding an election along unfair lines, but that didn’t happen.
At least for Congress. Ohio is also in the middle of a fight over its state-legislative maps. Four times Republicans have passed different gerrymandered state-legislative maps, and four times the state Supreme Court has struck them down. (The Ohio Constitution explicitly says the court can’t impose its own map, which is why Republicans keep getting more bites at the apple.)
If a legal map isn’t drawn by May 28, federal judges have said they will impose one of the gerrymandered maps to ensure state-legislative elections are held this year. At the very least, the standoff has already forced Ohio to remove state-legislative primaries from today’s ballot and hold a second primary for them later in the year, most likely in August.