The Ohio General Assembly will take up the always thorny task of drawing new congressional district lines when they return to work after Labor Day.
It will give them a chance to curry favor with President Trump, by targeting two districts — possibly three — that are now held by Democrats and flipping them bright Republican red.
Redistricting was a bloody mess the last time around, during the two years after the 2020 U.S. Census numbers came in, with the Ohio Supreme Court rejecting Republican backed maps five times before the GOP-controlled Ohio Redistricting Commission was able to game the system and adopt maps that could only be used until 2026.
The process that will unfold in the Ohio Statehouse between September and the end of the year — and quite likely beyond — will be no less messy. Maybe even more so.
But that’s OK with the Republican veto-proof supermajority in the legislature because it gives them an opportunity to help Trump achieve his goal of red states putting their thumbs on the scales in order to increase the number of Republican seats in the 2026 election.
Trump is desperately trying to preserve the GOP’s thin majority in the U.S. House. A Democratic House could make Trump’s final two years in office very unpleasant, to say the least. And he does like getting his own way.
This year's redistricting saga started in the Texas legislature, when Trump provoked a rather ugly fight in an effort to flip five districts from blue to red — a fight that had Texas Democratic legislators fleeing the state to avoid Texas House action on redistricting for as long as they could.
The search for more blue seats to flip spread quickly to Missouri and Florida. Vice President JD Vance was dispatched by Trump to Indiana to cajole Hoosier GOP leaders into passing legislation to allow them to draw new maps now, instead of waiting for 2030 Census numbers.
Two of the largest blue states — California and Illinois — are likely to take a page out of Texas’ book and find their own ways to do an early redrawing of district lines in order to create more Democratic districts.
But Ohio is the only one of these states actually scheduled for a redrawing of maps this year.
What do the Republicans in the legislature want to do?
They have targeted two districts now held by Democrats — the Northwest Ohio district of longtime congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who won last year in a district that went for Trump; and the Northeast Ohio district held by Emilia Sykes — a district split down the middle in last year’s presidential election.
There was some talk of carving up Cincinnati Democrat Greg Landsman's 1st Congressional District. But that seems highly unlikely now, given that it would almost certainly adversely affect two Republican congressmen in nearby districts, Mike Turner of Dayton and Mike Carey of Columbus.
Ohio has 15 members of the U.S. House. The current partisan breakdown is 10 Republicans and five Democrats.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Republican, said he thinks the split should be 12 Republicans and three Democrats. Each of the “three C” cities — Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland — would have their own self-contained and heavily Democratic districts.
Moreno has no official role to play in this, but his 12-3 split mirrors what Ohio’s GOP state legislative leaders have been saying.
The fact that the Ohio General Assembly is taking this up at all is serendipitous for Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly who won’t have to create new laws to allow them to do this redrawing without new census numbers.
“This is an inadvertent bonus for Ohio Republicans,” said David Niven, political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. “How sweet it is for them to be able to do this legally in the middle of a seat-stealing ring.”
The good news, Niven said, is that “this time, it won’t done in the darkness, there will be a lot more eyes on it.”
Many of those eyes will belong to the Fair Districts Coalition, made up of Ohio voting rights groups like Common Cause Ohio and the Ohio League of Women Voters.
The coalition will be monitoring the process every step of the way, said Mia Lewis, assistant director of Common Cause Ohio.
“Ours is essentially a nonpartisan activity,” Lewis said. “We are working for a better system.”
Lewis said that Ohio voters had a chance to adopt a far less partisan redistricting system last November in Issue 1, a constitutional amendment that was rejected by 54% of Ohio voters.
Voting rights activists blame Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose for using the Ohio Ballot Board he controls to re-write ballot language, making it more confusing for voters.
“People saw the word ‘gerrymandering’ in the title and thought it was an anti-gerrymandering issue,” Lewis said. “The Republicans were saying, ‘We know that everybody hates gerrymandering, so let’s pretend this issue is pro-gerrymandering.’ Very deceptive.”
When the legislature comes back after Labor Day, how this will all roll out is essentially a three-tiered process:
- The state legislature has until the end of September to pass a map. If they can put together a map with 60% support in both the House and Senate, that’s the map that will be used next year. The problem, though, is that to get to 60%, Republicans would need some Democratic votes and that seems unlikely.
- If that doesn’t work, the Ohio Redistricting Commission gets a turn. There are seven members in the commission, and to approve a map, they need two members from both major parties to vote yes. Five of the commission’s seven members are Republicans. They’ve got until the end of October. Also unlikely. Democrats are not going to be in the mood to go along.
- In that case, the mapmaking returns to the legislature. But this time, they only need a simple majority of support to approve a map. But there are rules — the map would not be allowed to favor a candidate or party, and splitting communities would be limited. They have to finish their work by Nov. 30.
Let’s say the Republicans in the legislature pass a map in November. Voting rights groups would be likely to challenge it in the Ohio Supreme Court.
But, three years ago, the voting rights groups had a 5-4 majority on the court to have GOP maps rejected five times. This time around, the court is 6-1 Republican and is unlikely to be much help.
The Fair District Coalition and its allies could mount a petition campaign to place an up-or-down vote on the GOP map on the November 2026 ballot. They would have to go out and gather the valid signatures of 248,092 registered Ohio voters to make the ballot.
But Lewis said the coalition has thousands of trained volunteers to gather signatures in every corner of the state.
“There is a lot of eagerness among our volunteers for this cause,’’ Lewis said. “They are not going to quit.”
And, there are plenty of deep-pocketed national voter rights groups and others with ties to the Democratic Party who would be willing to finance a multi-million dollar petition campaign.
“Outside money could come in,” Lewis said. “We would not be against that.”
But all of this will push the process well beyond the Feb. 4 candidate filing deadline for the May 2026 Ohio primary.
There is a distinct possibility, Niven said, that the present district boundaries could still be in effect in February.
“We could be headed for that situation of people campaigning for Congress in districts that don’t really exist,” he said.
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