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.”

How the districts changed

Ohio Republicans have made the redistricting process work to their advantage in recent years after gaining full control of the process in both 2000 and 2010. Despite voting patterns that show a fairly even division between the parties, Republicans have secured a greater number of the congressional seats. Here is a comparison of the votes following the four most recent redrawings of the congressional maps.

1982-1990

1992-2000

2002-2010

2012

1982-1990

1992-2000

2002-2010

2012

Red: Republican votes/seats

Blue: Democratic votes/seats

Source: Plain Dealer analysis of Ohio Secretary of State records

Note: Excluded are votes for third-party and independent candidates, as well as votes in special elections. Analysis: Rich Exner;Web development: Peter Zicari





“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.

The remainder of Ohio’s Democratic Congress members easily won re-election – Tim Ryan of Niles with 72 percent of the vote, and Marcia Fudge of Warrensville Heights with 100 percent because she had no opposition.

The only Republican congressman who lost out in this year’s remapping process - Beavercreek’s Steve Austria – retired rather than face Rep. Mike Turner of the Dayton area in a primary.

The redistricting process was less divisive 10 years ago because Ohio lost a single seat. The fact that former Youngstown-area Democratic Rep. Jim Traficant was bound for prison on corruption charges made his seat an easy target. The GOP-controlled redistricting board fused Traficant’s district with turf represented by Akron Democrat Tom Sawyer. Sawyer lost the Democratic primary to Ryan in backlash over Sawyer’s vote to implement the North American Free Trade Agreement.

This year, redistricting was much more contentious. A report released by the Ohio Campaign for Accountable Redistricting showed that Boehner’s political staffers privately made key recommendations on how to configure Ohio’s new congressional districts. The resulting map prompted critics to launch a petition drive for a state constitutional amendment that would have changed the process. But the issue, on Tuesday’s ballot, was trounced by voters.

Issue 2 was a proposed constitutional amendment that would have shifted the redistricting process away from the state legislature and handed it to a 12-member redistricting commission composed of four Democrats, four Republicans and four independents. Its passage would have scrapped the maps adopted last year and created new districts for the 2014 election.

The bill was backed by unions and opposed by Republicans and their allies.

Carlo LoParo of Protect Your Vote Ohio, a group that placed television and direct mail ads against Issue 2, said its changes still would have allowed one party to manipulate the process for its own gain, and allowed no mechanism for bipartisan agreement. He noted it was rejected in 86 out of 88 Ohio counties, and said Democratic groups funded the initiative.

“It was an unaccountable bureaucratic board that would have added more politics to the redistricting process,” agreed Ohio GOP spokesman Henderson.

Daniel Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor who helped write the Issue 2 proposal, said that having “both parties in a smoke filled room instead of one party isn’t much of an improvement.”

He said the initiative lost because it was outgunned financially, and “the other side was very successful in muddying the waters.”

“We need districts that serve the people, not the politicians,” Tokaji said.

Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said he anticipates there will be another effort next year to “reform the gerrymandering process.”

“We are eager to continue the process,” said Redfern. “At some point, we will succeed.”