Tag Archives: Ohio

Redistricting — Ohio

By tmess2 | Published July 18, 2021

Like Pennsylvania, Ohio is  a midwestern state that has lost a seat in the House and has an open Senate seat.  There are two key differences.  First, in Ohio, the governor is also a Republican.  Ohio voters have adopted some checks on the majority party ability to redistrict at will, but the majority can force through a map that will last for two cycles without any minority support.  Second, Democratic Representative Tim Ryan has already announced that he will be running for Senate.  While that allows the legislature to keep the remaining incumbents in separate districts, it does not mean that changing the maps in a way that keeps incumbents separate will be easy as incumbents do not always live in the center of their district.

Already, Ohio is a very gerrymandered state with some very weird map shapes.  As with the other states that lost a seat, most of the existing districts are short on voters with two exceptions — the Third District (Columbus) and the Twelfth District (the area to the north and east of Columbus in central Ohio).  Other than the Fifteenth District (the area to the south of Columbus) which is only 15,000 people short, the remaining thirteen districts are between 30,000 and 90,000 people short.  In particular, the five districts that adjoin the current Thirteenth District are a combined 330,000 short.  But as the current Thirteenth has just approximately 707,000 people, that will be around 370,000 people that those districts will have to kick to the rest of the state.  More significantly,  as in the rest of the state, the lines were carefully drawn to pack as many Democrats into the Democratic districts as possible.  The Eleventh District which stretches from Cleveland to Akron is carefully drawn so that the Democrat expected votes are around 80%.  While it borders the Thirteenth District, it can’t move too far east into the current Thirteenth without needing to shed Democratic voters into the Republican districts to the west.  And the Fourteenth District (northeastern Ohio) is a lean Republican district that really can’t afford to give Republicans to the Eleventh District or take in the Democrats around Akron, Ravenna, or Youngstown.  In short, once again, the Republicans are going to be very carefully looking precinct by precinct as they carve up the Thirteenth District and make the necessary shifts of the districts toward the eastern part of the state.

Trying to draw a more favorable map for Democrats, I began by doing two things:  First, there are three counties that are large enough to fully contain a district — Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Hamilton County (Cincinnati), and Franklin County (Columbus).  In the current map, only Franklin contain fully contains a district (Third District).  So I kept Cincinnati intact (which would force the two Republican representatives from the First and Second District into a primary) and drew a map that had eastern and central Hamilton County around Cincinnati in the First District and kept the Eleventh District in Cuyahoga County.  That flipped the First District from a toss-up favoring the Republicans to a lean Democratic District.  It did lower the African-American population in the Eleventh District  Overall, African-Americans are still the largest population group but they are only a plurality and among the voting age population, there are slightly more whites than African-Americans.  African-Americans should still have the majority of votes in the Democratic primary, and the district is solidly Democratic; so African-Americans should be able to elect their preferred candidate.  These shifts force the Second District eastward and northward (taking some area from the Fifteenth District). Continue Reading...

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Redistricting 2021 — The Numbers

By tmess2 | Published May 1, 2021

On Monday, four days ahead of its latest target date and almost four months behind the statutory date, the Census Bureau released the national and state-level results from the Census including the apportionment numbers that determine how many representatives each get.  As can be expected, there are multiple different tables summarizing the data in different ways for us number geeks.

The bottom line table shows the apportionment population (both those living in the state and those residing overseas — like military personnel — who call that state home), the number of representatives that each state is getting, and the change in representation.   We will get back to the change in a minute, but the big level number is that the apportionment population is slightly over 331 million.  As such, the average size (mean) of each congressional district is just under 761 thousand.  Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming have fewer people than the average congressional district.  While the apportionment formula does not work for calculating the population needed for the first representative, even Wyoming has enough population to be entitled to three-quarters of a representative.

If, D.C. and Puerto Rico were states, Puerto Rico would be just ahead of Utah (which has four representatives) and just behind Connecticut (which has five representatives) and D.C. would be between Vermont and Alaska.  Given that Puerto Rico is only slightly larger than Utah (which was not close to getting a fifth representative and far enough behind Connecticut, Puerto Rico would be due for four representatives.  If  both were states, the five states that would lose a representative would have been Oregon, Colorado, and Montana (all of which gained a seat), California (which lost a seat), and Minnesota (which barely avoided losing a seat).  The chart of priority values that allows us to consider the impact of adding Puerto Rico and D.C. also shows that Minnesota barely held onto its last seat and New York barely lost its seat.  Apparently, given the formula, Minnesota would have lost that seat if it had 24 fewer people, and New York would have kept its seat if it had 89 more people.  (The disparity in numbers is caused by the fact that the two states have different number of seats. Continue Reading...

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Why Congress has authority over Federal Elections

By tmess2 | Published March 20, 2021

As Republicans in swing states seem to be dedicated to winning elections by keeping Democrats from voting rather than persuading people to vote Republicans, Democrats in Congress are pushing the “For the People Act.”  Some of the provisions in this Act will prevent states from suppressing the vote in federal elections.  The House version has already passed and it seems that Senate version may be the bill that forces a showdown over the future of the filibuster.

One of the critiques that the conservative media establishment has made of this bill is that it involves a takeover of elections by Congress.  This critique, however, ignores the plain language of the Constitution.  Congress has full authority over elections to Congress.  Specifically, Article I, Section 4 permits the states to make laws about congressional elections but it expressly grants authority to Congress to “at any time by law make or alter such regulations” as the states have enacted.  However, Congress has, for the most part, opted against fully using its authority because it hasn’t felt the need to do so.

In explaining the need for this power, the authors of The Federalist Papers noted that, without this Congressional power, state governments would be able to frustrate the federal government by simply failing to hold elections.  And we are currently seeing, in real time, an example of what state control over elections can mean for Congress. Continue Reading...

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2022 Elections — A First Glance

By tmess2 | Published January 30, 2021

The 2020 elections left both the House and the Senate closely divided.  And two years is a long time in politics.  But experience has taught politicians two, somewhat contradictory, things that will impact what can get done during the next two years.

The first, especially for the House of Representatives, is that the President’s party typically loses seats.  But the reason for this normal rule is that a new President has typically helped members of his party to flip seats.  As such, this might be less true for 2022 than in the past.  In 2020, the Democrats only won three new seats, and two were the results of North Carolina having to fix its extreme gerrymander.  And only a handful of Democratic incumbents won close races.  And the rule is less consistent for the Senate, in large part because the Senators up for election are not the ones who ran with the President in the most recent election but the ones who ran with the prior president six years earlier.  In other words, the President’s party tends to be more vulnerable in the Senate in the midterms of the second term than in the midterms of the first term.  But the likelihood that the President’s party will lose seats is an incentive to do as much as possible during the first two years.

The second is that one cause of the swing may be overreach — that voters are trying to check a President who is going further than the voters actually wanted.  This theory assumes that there are enough swing voters who really want centrist policies and that they switch sides frequently to keep either party from passing more “extreme” policies.  Polls do not really support this theory and there is an argument that, at least part of the mid-term problem, could be the failure to follow through on all of the promises leading to less enthusiasm with the base.  But this theory is a reason for taking things slowly and focusing on immediate necessities first and putting the “wish list” on hold until after the mid-terms. Continue Reading...

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Election Night Preview — Part 1 (6 PM to 8 PM EST)

By tmess2 | Published October 27, 2020

Election Night in the U.S. is always different from how things play out in most other countries.  The U.S. is one of a handful of countries that have more than two time zones.  And, in most of those other countries, all areas within the same time zone close at the same time.  Voting hours in these countries are set by federal law.  In the U.S., however, voting hours are set by state law.   And that creates a weird sequence of poll closing times.

In addition, poll closing times are, in some sense, tentative.  While you need to be in line to vote by the time that polls close, anybody in line to vote gets to vote.  For states that close in the early evening, long lines at closing time are nor unusual as there is not much of a window to vote after getting home from work resulting in many people attempting to vote after work still being in line when the polls cloase.  And there is always the possibility of an emergency order permitting certain precincts to stay open late to compensate for problems earlier in the day.  Even after polls close, many jurisdictions use a centralized counting location.   That means that there is a lag time between the polls closing and the ballots getting to the counting location.  In my county, the closest precincts are still only getting to the county seat about thirty minutes after polls close and the far edges of the county are getting there around an hour after the polls close.  As a result, it typically takes ninety minutes for my small (eighteen precinct) county to report all of the results.  Large urban counties can take three to four hours to report all of their election night results.  This delay in reporting (which is pretty much the same in most states) is one thing that traditionally makes it difficult to project result.  If the three largest counties in a state have only reported 10% of the vote while the rest of the state is 80% in, there is still a large number of votes that can change who wins a close race.

The other issue that will impact this election is the number of mail-in votes.  As we have previously discussed, every state has different rules for counting mail-in votes.  In most states, early in-person votes will be released around the same time (if not before) the election day votes, but mail-in votes will be reportedly differently in different states.  As such, with each state, the big questions will be:  1) is the reported vote just the early vote or also the election day vote; 2) if we have full early vote and partial election day vote, how much does the election day vote differ from the early vote; and 3) how much of the mail-in vote has been counted and how much may remain to be counted or still be “in the mail”?  The early count from a state may appear to be lopsided, but — without knowing the answers to these questions — it will be more difficult to determine if we have enough of the vote counted to know who is going to win.  In states that are used to large mail-in vote totals, it is not unusual to not know the winner of the closest race for a day or two after the election as we finally get enough mail-in votes counted. Continue Reading...

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Delegate Math 2020 — March 17

By tmess2 | Published March 15, 2020

After the sprint of twenty-four contests in fifteen days, this week’s four primaries represents a slowing of the pace.  After the March 17 contests, there will be only seven contests over the next three weeks concluding with the Wisconsin primary before there is a three-week break between Wisconsin and the Mid-Atlantic primary on April 28.  (EDIT:  Now six contests, with Georgia’s primary being postponed until May.)

In the last two weeks, in the states that vote by mail, we have seen the early results showing significant number of votes for candidates that are no longer in the race.  As counting has continued, however, the later arriving ballots have swung away from the candidates who have suspended their campaigns and toward Senator Sanders and Vice-President Biden.  There will have been some early voting in the states that are voting on March 17.  As such, the initial release of numbers will probably include some votes for these candidates, but that number should decline over the evening as election day returns are added in.

With the narrowing of the field, delegate math is now a state-by-state struggle.  And this state-by-state battle is different for the Democratic primaries than it is on the Republican side.  The media likes to focus on who wins a state.  And, in the general election (and in many states on the Republican side), the winner-take-all rule makes winning a state very important.  On the Democratic side, the proportional allocation of delegates means that it matters more whether somebody wins a state by a large margin than who wins the state.  As we have seen over the past seven days, a narrow in by Vice-President Biden is currently netting him around seven delegates in a large state, but his big win in Mississippi (less than half the size of Washington) is netting him over thirty delegates. Continue Reading...

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2018 Mid-Term Election Preview — The Great Lakes

By tmess2 | Published October 27, 2018

The Great Lakes region has some opportunities for Democrats, but those opportunities are mostly in races for Governor due to the way that Republicans in the region drew congressional district lines after 2010.

Starting in Kentucky, there is no race for Governor or Senator.  Republicans currently have a five to one advantage in the congressional delegation.  Right now, Democrat Amy McGrath is a slight favorite to pick-up the Sixth District from the Republican incumbent.

In Ohio, it looks like the Democrats are in pretty good shape to hold its Senate seat.  The race for Governor appears to be too close to call.  Ohio is another state where gerrymandering has led to a very distorted congressional delegation.  Republicans currently hold twelve of sixteen seats.  The Democrats have a decent shot (but are still underdogs) in the rematch of the recent special election in the Twelfth District.   The Democrats have outside shots in five districts, but it is almost certain that, even while possibly losing the state-wide vote, Republicans will control the majority of the Ohio seats in the next Congress. Continue Reading...

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Thinking 2021

By tmess2 | Published September 15, 2018

One weakness that the Democratic Party has had over the years is getting loosely attached Democratic voters to think beyond the current election.  But many components of the political system elect members in staggered elections (e,g,, the U.S. Senate); so gaining the ability to pass your legislation requires a multi-year plan.

While in the weeks ahead, posts on this site will undoubtedly focus on the race for power in D.C., this post is about the other offices that will be on the ballot in November — state positions.  In less than nineteen months, residents of the U.S. will receive and then return their census forms for the 2020 census.  In slightly over two years, the Census Bureau will release the numbers from that census to the states which will then begin anew the process of drawing the political maps that will control U.S. House (and state legislative elections) between 2022 and 2031.  And some of the people elected at the state level this November will still be around in 2021 to vote on these new maps.

The big office in most of the states is governor.  There are 36 governor’s offices up for election this cycle with Republicans currently holding 26 of them.  In 34 states, the term of office is four years; so the winner this year will be around in 2021.  (In two states — New Hampshire and Vermont, both held by Republicans — the term of office is two years; so we will get another shot at removing the Republican in 2020 and only New Hampshire is likely to have multiple congressional seats after the 2020 census.)   In some of these states — Arizona, California, and Iowa — the redistricting process minimizes the influence of the governor or legislature; so, while — for other reasons — holding California and picking up Arizona and Iowa would be useful, they will not have a big impact on redistricting in 2021.  There are also some states that currently only have one representative in Congress eliminating the need for Congressional Districts — Alaska (Independent); South Dakota (Republican), and Wyoming (Republican).  Even after eliminating these states, you have twenty states held by Republicans and eight states held by Democrats in which the winner of the 2018 election for governor will be around in 2021 and have the power to veto or sign any proposed congressional map. Continue Reading...

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Every Vote Counts — Spawn of Satan Edition

By tmess2 | Published August 12, 2018

Tuesday night saw two very, very close elections.  In a special election in a deep red U.S. House district in Ohio, the Democrat is currently trailing by about 1,500 votes before provisional and the remaining absentee ballots are counted.  In the Republican primary for Governor, Secretary of State (Spawn of Satan) Kris Kobach is leading current Governor Jeff Colyer (who only recently replaced Sam Brownback as governor) by approximately 110 votes as mistakes in the numbers on the Secretary of State’s website are being corrected.

What comes next in both states is slightly different as the process of counting the votes is governed by state law.  In both states, the current count does not include provisional votes — those cast by voters whose names were not on the precinct roll or who lacked proper ID — and late arriving absentee votes (as long as postmarked before the election).  Kansas has a shorter time-frame for these issues.  In Kansas, all absentee votes must arrive by the Friday after the primary and the counties will begin their official canvass — which includes counting all valid provisional and absentee votes this upcoming week (August 13-16).  In Ohio, those who cast provisional ballots have until seven days after the primary (August 14) to submit supporting documentation (e.g., show up with valid ID) to their local election authority and any absentee ballot received by ten days after the primary (August 17) counts with the canvass beginning on the 18th.

Because Ohio has such a long time for absentee ballots to arrive, we still don’t know how many ballots we are dealing with in Ohio.  We know that there are around 3,000 provisional ballots.  We also know that there are over 5,000 people who applied for absentee ballots who did not return them by election day.  How many of those 5,000 absentee ballots are in the mail is the unanswered question.  Generally speaking, provisional ballots tend to lean Democratic but absentee ballots are more of a mixed bag.  In Kansas, there were approximately 9,000 provisional ballots and current estimates are that around 6,000 of those provisional ballots are for the Republican primary.  (As should not be surprising, about 3,500 of the 9,000 are in Sedgewick County — Wichita — and Johnson County — affluent suburban Kansas City with another 1,400 in Douglas — Lawrence/University of Kansas — and Shawnee — the state capitol of Topeka and Wyandotte — less affluent Kansas City suburbs.  The next largest county has about 200 provisional ballots).  I have not seen any count of absentee ballots. Continue Reading...

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Primary Season — Late Spring

By tmess2 | Published April 29, 2018

Because each state gets to set its own primary date, primary season is a gradual thing.  Putting aside a handful of exceptions (and run-offs), most primaries fall into two clusters.  The first cluster occurs in May and June (starting on May 8 and ending on June 26).  The second cluster occurs in August and September (starting on August 2 and ending on September 13).  During both clusters, most primaries occur on Tuesday, and there is at least one state on each Tuesday (other than May 29).

On May 8, there are primaries in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia.  Key primaries are the Republican Senate primary in Indiana and West Virginia.  Both are states won by Trump in which Democratic Senators are running for re-election.  In Indiana, you have three candidates running for the Republican nomination.  It’s not clear that it really matters who wins or that there is much difference between the candidates.  West Virginia is a different matter.  The Republicans are scared to death that Don Blankenship could get the nomination.  Blankenship is the former CEO of one of the state’s larger coal miner and did time in prison related to miners who died due to unsafe mining practices.  The national GOP has (through super-pacs) been running adds against Blankenship.  In Ohio, the key races are for Governor with both parties having primaries in the race to replace term-limited John Kasich and Ohio’s 12th District in which there is both a regular primary and a special election primary (most of the candidates are the same in both, so both parties should have the same winner for both primaries, but there is always the chance in a close race that there could be a split result).

On May 15, there are primaries in Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.  The big story is likely to be the new congressional districts in Pennsylvania.   Amazingly, there are no incumbent against incumbent primaries although there could be an incumbent against incumbent general election.  Given the newness of the lines, it will be interesting to see how the local interests will influence the candidates chosen. Continue Reading...

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