If I were Tim Ryan, I’d be very concerned that the OH GOP leg could shift the CD lines and would be out of a job. That district should be sending a populist, blue-collar Republican now. If Traficant were still alive and holding the district, this might’ve been the year he switched parties. Ryan is a hard-core leftist, the antithesis of Traficant.
A month ago, I would have argued strongly against unpacking Tim Ryan’s CD, which gave Obama 63% and is surrounded by GOP-held districts that gave Romney narrow margins (50.9% in David Joyce’s CD, 53.4% in Renacci’s CD, 53.7% in Gibbs’s CD, and 55.2% in Johnson’s CD). However, given that the black-majority OH-11 will need to expand into more of Akron after the 2020 Census, and that Mahoning County (Youngstown) and Trumbull County (Warren) were so competitive for Trump (plus he won big in Ashtabula, etc. to the north, Jefferson, etc. to the south and Stark to the west), I think that Tim Ryan’s CD can be portioned off among its neighbors.
OH will lose a congressional district after the 2020 Census, and Northeast OH is one of the areas with the biggest population losses in the state, so extending Joyce’s OH-14 south to take on all of Trumbull and the northern half of Portage, extending Johnson’s OH-06 north to grab all of Mahoning, moving the OH-07 north to take on the southern half of Portage, having the OH-16 grab some of the less Democrat parts of Akron’s Summit County, and putting Ryan’s district’s more heavily Democrat parts of Akron in Fudge’s black-majority OH-11. That way, all of those socially conservative blue-collar voters in Ryan’s CD will get a new Republican congressman, and the Democrats would be down to only three U.S. Representatives from Ohio.
Of course, Ohio Republicans have to prove that Trump’s gains in OH were not a one-time-only deal. 2018 will be a key test, as populist liberal Democrat Sherrod Brown runs for reelection to the Senate, and whomever we run (I think that Congressman Steve Chabot of Cincinnati or maybe State Treasurer Josh Mandel (who is from Cleveland, and ran a competitive race against Brown in 2012) would be best, but there are several other good candidates in the state, none of whom are named “Kasich”), who could win back the state’s other Senate seat.