OH GOP Re-districting-Kucinich Has a Target on His Back

[mod mom]

Why Dennis Kucinich Has a Target on His Back

With redistricting looming, the Ohio congressman’s plight shows how the GOP will be able to make 2012 more difficult for Democrats across the country.
From 1998 to 2008, longtime Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich won each of his reelection campaigns by at least 49,000 votes. Even in the Democratic bloodbath that was the 2010 midterms, the former mayor of Cleveland and presidential candidate carried his district in northeast Ohio by a 16,000-vote margin, more than 8 percent. So why should he be worried about 2012?

Because it’s redistricting season again, the time when legislators redraw district boundaries based on new census data, and Republicans in Ohio are holding the pen. The Ohio GOP won the governor’s seat and took over the state legislature in the midterms, part of a nationwide statehouse surge that has placed Republicans in charge of redrawing congressional-district lines in 17 states, which account for a full 193 out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives, including all the seats from the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Come 2011, the GOP will control more state legislatures than at any time since 1928. Democrats, by contrast, have maintained control of the redistricting process in six states and will have sole say over 44 districts (that will rise to seven states and 72 districts if Democrats end up holding the New York state Senate).

Is all that a prescription for Republican dominance until the next round of redistricting in 2020? Not quite. District borders are only part of the election equation. “You still have to have good candidates good campaigns,” says Tim Storey, senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures. But redistricting can give certain candidates a “head start,” as Storey puts it. And the quagmire Kucinich is facing illustrates how the GOP will be able to make life more difficult for Democrats across the country.

The five Democrats in Ohio’s congressional delegation are crowded in and around Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown (see map above), where an exodus of population in the last decade is part of the reason that Ohio is expected to lose two congressional seats after the Census Bureau releases its decennial population count on Dec. 31. If that prediction holds, new district lines will cut the state’s 18 current representatives down to 16.

-snip
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/15/redistricting-could-spell-trouble-for-democrats.html

[liberal N proud]

1. Time for some good ol' gerrymandering.

[WCGreen]

2. I have been saying this since 2008 when it was apparent that

Ohio would lose at least 1 seat. That is why the GOP went so gung ho for this election cycle at the state level. they were making plans for the redistricting and we, well, we were caught playing three dimensional chess...

[Roma]

3. But teabaggers failed to win the Senate

There will be 18 states subject to reapportionment. The Rethugs will control a majority of those, at least ten and maybe a dozen or more. More significantly, a minimum of seventeen state legislative houses have flipped to the Rethugs. There were also Rethug gains in the State House races.






But teabaggers failed to win the Senate.

[The Northerner]

4. The Ohio State Senate? I don't know because according the NCSL website

it's claimed that the OH GOP controls both chambers:

http://www.ncsl.org/?tabid=21317

I hope it isn't true...