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I am so glad to hear that—I was afraid that they’d be slicing Cuyahoga County too thin and that a Democrat might get elected in the Cleveland suburbs. Akron is the only source of black voters for Fudge’s CD, but from what I had read earlier it seemed as if OH Republicans were insisting on giving Fudge all of Cleveland (which would mean that the CD would likely be just under 50% black and could lead to a judge throwing out the map and redrawing it himself). Kucinich would still have a heavily Dem CD in white partes of Cleveland and its Dem suburbs, and should be extended east through a narrow lakeside strip (which wouldn’t cost Fudge too many black voters) to take in Dem parts of NW Lake County.

The biggest problem with extending Fudge’s CD south through Twinsburg to inner-city Akron is what to do with LaTourette’s OH-14, which is stuck in a corner and could be forced to take on Dem precincts in Trumbull County if Ryan’s Youngstown-Warren CD still connected to Akron through Portage County. I was playing around with maps a couple of months ago, and found that the best way around the problem would be for LaTourette’s CD to scoot south from eastern Cuyahoga and Geauga through northern Portage and a land bridge in eastern Summit down to northern Stark County; Ryan’s CD would then connect to Akron through Alliance, Canton and Massillon. It would be ugly as hell, but effective.

Another way to get around this problem would be not to give Ryan any part of Akron at all, and have his district snake south along the PA border to take in Poland, East Palestine, East Liverpool, Toronto (boy, there sure are a lot of foreign-sounding city names in eastern OH!), Steubenville, Martin’s Ferry, St, Clairsville and Bellaire—unfortunately, it might take in more Republicans than I would like. That would also leave all of Canton, Massillon and Alliance in a GOP district, and the cities now vote Dem enough that it would be hard to draw safe Republicans all around. White parts of Akron would then need to be placed in Kucinich’s CD so as to avoid them ruining otherwise GOP districts, which means that not one but two narrow tentacles (Fudge’s from Glen Willow and Kucinich’s from Walton Hills?) would have to stretch from Cuyahoga to Summit County.

As for which GOP district in the rest of OH to eliminate (there are no current Dem CDs outside of NE OH and Toledo), that will be tough. The marginal OH-06 (Johnson) would make most sense if Ryan’s CD goes down to Belmont County, and maybe it can be combined with Schmidt’s OH-02 (which will likely need to give up her Hamilton County precincts to shore up Chabot in OH-01). That would still make it difficult to draw a map around Columbus with nothing but GOP CDs, since the two Columbus CDs (held by Tiberi and Stivers) are extremely marginal and the third GOP CD that dips into Columbus (held by Austria) can’t take in too many more Dems. Maybe give Jordan part of Columbus could solve the problem; if Jordan was running for the Senate (which he isn’t, and we already have a fine candidate in Josh Mandel), it would be a no-brainer to break up his heavily GOP CD and split up his counties among Tiberi, Stivers, Austria, Dayton’s Turner and Bowling Green’s Latta.

Frankly, I think that it would be nearly impossible for Republicans to hold every CD south and west of the imaginary line from Toledo to Youngstown for the next decade, and Republicans should consider drawing an über-Democrat, black-majority district that goes from Cincinnati to Dayton to Columbus, which would make every surrounding CD comfortably Republican. That would likely resuly in Turner’s CD being eliminated and Schmidt and Johnson being placed in the same CD, but it would pretty much guarantee an 11-5 GOP congressional delegation for the next decade (which is not bad at all for a state that leans only slightly Republican). I know that OH’s current delegation is 13-5 Republican, but our hold in 7 of those 13 CDs is rather tenuous and trying to draw a map with 12 GOP CDs out of 16 could result in the *Dems* getting an 11-5 majority in the delegation.