The Looming, Lawless Ohio Gerrymander

A Rigged Map, Only Possible Due to Serial Lawbreaking and Gaslighting

As the national press (and Trump himself) begin to focus on GOP gerrymandering under way in Texas and Ohio to protect a thin GOP House majority…

…the reality rarely gets mentioned: the forthcoming Ohio Congressional map (like the current map) will egregiously violate plain words of the Constitution of Ohio—but a continuous, relentless attack on Ohio’s judiciary and democracy will mean that such lawlessness will prevail.

Just like it’s prevailed for the last four years.

Which is why what is about to happen in Ohio is a true symbol of how intensely (and illegally) the GOP fights to rig maps—and how they have gained state and federal power by repeatedly breaking the law and violating the will of their own voters back in states like Ohio.

And if, in 2026, control of the U.S. House majority comes down to a few seats, the result could very well be determined by the fact that Ohio Republicans have gotten away with destroying the rule of law here—violating both the Constitution and multiple court orders—along with blatant ballot manipulation.

Sound dramatic?

Must be exaggeration, right?

If only.

If what I’m about to describe happened in another country, we would conclude that they no longer had a rule of law. It should alarm us even more that it happened in an American state, but too often we look the other way.

And when the press doesn’t mention any of the ugly details, they further normalize and sanitize five years of lawlessness and illegitimacy.

So here’s a primer on just how bad it’s been…

The Backdrop

In 2008 (when Obama won Ohio), Ohio Democrats won 10 House seat and Republicans won 8 seats. That ratio approximated Obama’s margin of victory.

In 2012 (when Obama won Ohio by about the same margin), Ohio Democrats won 4 House seats, and Republicans won 12.

Why the dramatic difference, when the statewide result was nearly identical?

The 2011, closed-door GOP gerrymandering of Ohio was the most intense in Ohio history—cracking and packing Ohio Democratic communities such that they had no chance but to win in only those four seats, even in years (like 2012) when Ohio was blue.

And for the rest of the decade, that 12-4 split held firm. Not only did no seat ever change hands (first decade ever), but the races were never close.

Over the decade, Ohio voters figured out that they’d been rigged out of their own democracy.

And they were sufficiently turned off that in 2018, by a vote of almost 75%-25%, they amended the Ohio Constitution to keep it from ever happening again.

The Ohio Constitution

So, while you’d never now it, Ohio’s current Constitution contains a clear prohibition of hyper-partisan gerrymandering.

It specifically states that the legislature shall not draw a map that “unduly favors or disfavors a political party or its incumbents,” and one that “shall not unduly split governmental units, giving preference to keeping whole, in the order named, counties, then townships and municipal corporations.”

You know, like a 12-4 guaranteed map no matter what the voters do.

Ohio GOP Violates the New Constitution

You’d also never know it, but the last time the Ohio Supreme Court analyzed and ruled on the current Congressional map of Ohio, it ruled that the map violated that constitutional and voter-approved prohibition.

You see, out of their addiction to gerrymandering (it’s all they’ve ever known), Ohio’s lawless politicians broke these new rules when they first drew the new lines in 2021. With all sorts of absurd tricks and splits, the first map they came up with would most likely have led to a 12 (GOP) to 3 (Dem) allocation of Ohio’s House districts.

The Court’s First Decision

But the bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court at the time stopped them in a decision that rocked the state.

Specifically, the Court found that “[t]he evidence overwhelmingly shows that the enacted plan favors the Republican Party and disfavors the Democratic Party to a degree far exceeding what is warranted by [the Constitution]’s line-drawing requirements and Ohio’s political geography.” [more details below for those interested]

The Court concluded: we “see no recourse but to invalidate the entire congressional-district plan.”

Ohio’s GOP Violates the Constitution, Again

In a preview of Trump administration behavior today, Ohio’s GOP-controlled legislature and districting commission openly defied the Court’s ruling as it drew the second map.

Just as bad (but true to form), Ohio’s GOP also slow walked the process of creating this modified map…taking so long that this “corrected” map of districts appeared on Ohio’s primary ballot before the Court could rule it unconstitutional.

The Court’s Second Decision

Nevertheless, the Court ruled in July 2022 that this new map, too, violated Ohio’s Constitution for again being illegally biased in the GOP’s favor: “Petitioners have satisfied their burden by showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the March 2 plan unduly favors the Republican Party in violation of …the Ohio Constitution. Comparative analyses and other metrics show that the March 2 plan allocates voters in ways that unnecessarily favor the Republican Party by packing Democratic voters into a few dense Democratic-leaning districts, thereby increasing the Republican vote share of the remaining districts.”

The Court once again ordered the “General Assembly [to] pass a plan that complies with the Constitution.”

But having succeeded in getting this illegal map placed and voted on in the 2022 primary, the General Assembly never returned to pass a legal plan.

Instead, those illegal Congressional districts are what voters encountered on their general election ballot in 2022.

And again in 2024.

That’s right…the members of the Ohio’s Congressional delegation are sitting in Congress today via a set of districts that violate the clear words of the foundational document of Ohio.

It’s all illegal. Illegitimate.

And that’s not me saying that. It’s the state’s highest court.

Again, if we saw this happening in another country, what would we say?

But…it’s about to get worse.

Democratic Overperformance…

In both 2022 and 2024, even though that second map still violated the Ohio Constitution, some strong Democratic candidates stepped up to win seats in surprising fashion.

Greg Landsman was able to win and hold the Cincinnati-based First District (which was less split thanks to the first ruling, but still gerrymandered to help Republicans as much as they could get away with); the long-serving and deeply respected Marcy Kaptur was able to get reelected in a tough district anchored in Toledo; and, most impressively, former Ohio House minority leader Emilia Sykes was able to eke out a win in the Akron/Summit County region even though that district had been rigged to favor Republicans. So these three current House members won even in districts that were illegally gerrymandered to favor the GOP.

Even with these over performances in tough districts, the 10 Republican-5 Democrat delegation still leans well to the right of what a fair map would generate. As the Court made clear, a map that complies with the Ohio Constitutional language should provide one or two additional seats in Ohio that Democrats have an opportunity to win—but due to the illegal map, they simply don’t exist.

But it’s also safe to say that the national and state GOP—which had its eyes initially set on that egregious 12-3 map—is deeply frustrated that five Democrats are in the House from Ohio.

So they would love to claw things back to the first set of maps they created, or even more in their favor.

And that is why they are talking about districting again, and what they are scheming about behind the scenes as I write this.

They don’t want 10-5. They don’t want 11-4.

They want 12-3. Or even 11-2 if they can figure out how to get there.

But, you ask, how can they get away with such an egregiously unconstitutional map when the Ohio Supreme Court already found that even the current 10-5 map violates the a Constitution?

Just wait….

Attacking the Court Itself

The bipartisan court that struck down the illegally gerrymandered maps came as a result of hard work by Democrats to flip the court (a la Wisconsin) between the 2016 and 2020 cycles. I know, because I chaired the Ohio Democratic Party over that time. We came up with a plan, and executed on it for years.

And in 2018 and 2020, candidates that we endorsed flipped three of the seven Court seats (taking a 7-0 Republican-endorsed court and turning it to 3-4). Those three new Justices joined a rule-of-law, independent-minded Chief Justice, and they together created the bipartisan 4-3 majority that struck down those illegal maps.

Shocked when we flipped that final seat in 2020, the lawless Ohio GOP didn’t simply ignore the new court’s rulings—it got to work attacking the makeup of the court itself. Not by figuring out how to fare better in elections, as we had done. That would be too much work for them.

Instead, smarting from those court losses, the same GOP leaders that drew those illegal maps also rigged the rules of how Ohioans elect Supreme Court justices going forward. They did so by adding judicial candidates’ party labels to the ballot, and by moving the judicial races up the top of the ballot to make them as partisan as all the other statewide offices (instead of in the non-partisan section of the ballot where they had always been). Their goal was to boost their lackluster, losing candidates to victory via pure party line voting (and avoid results like 2020, where our endorsed candidate won by 10 even when Trump won by 8). And their goal was to create a Court as nakedly partisan as the gerrymandered statehouse is.

And they clearly did this with a near-term goal in mind: that a “new” partisan Court would, after the election of November 2022 under their new ballot rules, deem legal the maps that the prior independent court had found to be unconstitutional. And of course, that upcoming change to the Court election rules is a major reason they were willing to break the law throughout 2022—they were simply running out the clock, banking on a new, friendly Court retroactively upholding their lawless actions.

(To return to my theme: just imagine if we saw such a direct attack on an independent court in another country, where those in power defied the highest court’s orders about their own illegality while changing its makeup so it was no longer independent. We’d no doubt recognize that as an alarming attack on the rule of law itself.)

One other key element in all this is that one of the Justices on the Court is named Justice Pat DeWine. If you link to the first case above, you’ll see that it is called Adams v. DeWine. The justice turns out to be the son of the Governor who was part of all this illegal mapmaking, and was the named defendant in the case. But since this is lawless Ohio, Justice DeWine refused to recuse himself even in these cases, and was one of the votes Dad could count on to allow illegal maps. For several years, he was the swing vote on a 4-3 court.

So we not only have an attack on a sitting Supreme Court by a lawless legislature, we have a Court itself acting in clearly unethical ways.

And…tragically…it all worked.

Under the new ballot rules for court races, they succeeded in electing a Court that has fallen into line in every way. The GOP candidates now run on openly partisan platforms, promising to defer to the legislature as opposed to being an independent check and balance. And the justices who wrote the above opinions (some of the finest public servants I’ve ever encountered) could not survive the far more partisan voting patterns that were created by these ballot changes.

The Court is now 6 partisan Republicans out of 7. And the results are exactly what you’d expect, and what they intended with the new rules. (This is the infamous Court that held that “boneless” can mean “with bones,” and that fatal levels of nitrogen are not “toxic.”)

Presto Chango: An Illegal Map Becomes…Legal

And that is why the Ohio GOP can now get away with putting forward whatever map they want in the coming months.

Not because the maps are any more “legal” or constitutional than the current illegal one. The maps will be decidedly worse than today’s—even though today’s violates the plain text of the Ohio Constitution.

But thanks to the GOP’s defiance of those initial rulings, and their destruction of an independent court by rigging the rules, they know that this new, partisan court will simply ignore maps that remain in violation of clear prohibitions.

But to add to your horror, there’s one other element to how lawless this all is…

Another Referendum, and More Ballot Manipulation

Seeing this writing on the wall—that this new partisan Ohio Supreme Court would essentially uphold any gerrymandered map, no matter how much it violates the plain words of the Ohio Constitution—a pro-democracy coalition came together last year for one more effort to stop gerrymandering.

Signatures were gathered to place a new referendum on the ballot—which would this time remove the lawless politicians from the process entirely. It appeared on last November’s ballot as Issue 1.

All year long, it was decisively ahead in the polls. Because just as they felt in 2018, Ohioans remain sick and tired of partisan gerrymandering and its corrosive effects.

Understanding that clear public sentiment, our lawless GOP wielded another lever of power to once again undermine the will of the voters. The GOP majority of the state’s “ballot board,” led by the Secretary of State who was one of the main culprits in all this illegal gerrymandering, wrote ballot language that led to the impression that voting “No” on Issue 1 would “stop” gerrymandering. (When a “Yes” vote would’ve done so).

Specifically, the ballot language stated that passage of “Issue 1” would:

• “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors [in] 2015 and 2018”; and

• “establish a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and Congressional districts to favor either of the two largest political parties….”

Insiders, of course, saw the chutzpah in all of this:

• The very politicians who neutered the 2018 amendment were now using popular support for that amendment to undermine the 2024 amendment

• The politicians that Issue 1 would have fired from the process because of their blatant gerrymandering left the false impression that Issue 1 required gerrymandering.

But if you’re an Ohio voter not paying that much attention—and you are against gerrymandering, and voted to reform it in 2018—how are you going to vote on this Issue based on this language?

Especially when yardsigns immediately appeared across Ohio declaring: “Vote No Issue 1. Stop Gerrymandering?”

By the way, this language was challenged and ended up in front of that new, partisan Supreme Court I told you about…and to no one’s surprise, the Court allowed that Orwellian language to remain on the ballot.

In its infinite and highly partisan wisdom, the Court declared that because efforts to end gerrymandering have been referred to in other contexts as “reverse gerrymandering,” that it was not inaccurate to say that this amendment “require[d] gerrymandering.” (As with the “boneless" chicken case, this court struggles with opposites).

I’m not kidding…that’s what they said. You can read it HERE.

So the dishonest “Yes” means “required gerrymandering” language did appear on the Ohio ballot.

And, with Mike Johnson himself coming to Ohio to cheer on the “No on Issue 1” campaign, an Ohio electorate that has opposed gerrymandering for the past decade of course voted No.

So the effort to stop what is happening as we speak failed.

Now…

And that, my dear reader, is why today’s Ohio GOP has the opportunity to gerrymander Ohio once again—with Donald Trump and Mike Johnson cheering them on.

Yes, the Ohio Constitution still bans partisan gerrymandering.

And have no doubt, the map they come up with will most definitely “unduly favor[]” the GOP and their incumbents and “disfavor[]” Democrats and Democratic incumbents (more than the current illegal map does).

And it will most certainly “unduly split governmental units” (more than the current illegal map does).

And despite those absolute certainties, their map will also be upheld.

And for those keeping count, that outrageous result is only possible because the Ohio GOP:

• violated the Ohio Constitution seven times (they violated it five times to re-gerrymander their own statehouse districts, which is why they remain in power to do all this)

• defied Ohio Supreme Court orders seven times

• held consecutive elections on maps that, at the time of those elections, violated the Ohio Constitution per the most recent opinion of the highest court in the state

• altered long-standing rules of judicial elections to convert an independent court into a partisan Court to uphold their illegal maps in future

• manipulated the ballot for judicial races so that court races now appear at the top of the ballot

• have one Justice who refused to recuse himself in cases involving his own father, and ruled in dad’s favor every time

• abused the ballot board process to manipulate the ballot for a referendum to end gerrymandering, intentionally subverting the clear will of the people of Ohio

• despite writing ballot language and running an entire campaign stating that voting “No” on Issue 1 would “Stop” gerrymandering, is currently engaging in egregious gerrymandering.

If you ever wanted a case study that these people have a long, methodical game— anchored in statehouse power and openly lawless acts—to upend democracy, this is it. (It’s what fueled me to write my book “Laboratories of Autocracy” in the first place.)

And as I said up top, if the 2026 House majority comes down to a few seats, their success in this lawless long game could very well make all the difference.

What You Can Do….

One caveat: Marcy Kaptur, Emilia Sykes and Greg Landsman have already overcome districts that are gerrymandered against them.

They are very strong members of the House, very strong candidates, and have overcome two election cycles (both very “red” ones in Ohio) to win their seats.

So, yes, the GOP here will be doing whatever they can to make their districts harder.

But…know that these three have already overcome that for two cycles, and with our help, will like fight hell to do it again, whatever district is thrown their way.

So if this entire saga angers you, one of the best responses is to help each of them out. Here’s a link to each of their websites where you can give:

Marcy Kaptur

Emilia Sykes

Greg Landsman

Please tell others to do the same.

And beyond that, whenever you hear me:

• plead for people to focus on what’s happening at the statehouse level, and engage there, and not only focus on a few swing seats for federal office;

• pay attention to court races in states across the country;

• plead for courts to hold those who break the laws personally accountable for doing so (through contempt of court rulings), or they will just keep breaking the law…

…this saga is a prime example why.

They are destroying democracy at all levels through lawless statehouse shenanigans like this. If we don’t engage far more intensely at this level, we won’t ever stop it.

More details from the two Court decisions

The first decision:

• Expert testimony established that “that Republicans are likely to win 80 percent of the congressional seats (12 out of 15) under the enacted plan, even though Republicans have received about 53 percent of the vote in recent statewide elections.”

• One expert ran simulations creating that thousands of plans that were compliant with the new rules would lead to a close balance of seats statewide, and none led to a 12-3 split (or even an 11-4 split). This meant that “[t]he enacted plan..is “a clear statistical outlier,” which means [t]he presence of “systemic partisan bias”” is what created the 12-3 split.

• In sum, the Court concluded: “the enacted plan excessively and unwarrantedly favors the Republican Party and disfavors the Democratic Party.”

• But the Court wasn’t done —it also concluded that the treatment of several large urban counties (Hamilton (Cincinnati), Franklin (Columbus), Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Summit (Akron)) also violated the Ohio Constitution: “the enacted plan packs a disproportionately large number of Democratic voters into some districts while cracking Democratic voters in other districts to create Republican-leaning seats.”

• The Court: “This expert analysis demonstrates that in each of Ohio’s three largest metropolitan areas, the enacted plan contains districts that are not shaped according to Article XIX’s neutral districting criteria or Ohio’s political geography; instead, the inescapable conclusion is that they are the product of an effort to pack and crack Democratic voters, which results in more safe Republican districts or competitive districts favoring the Republican Party’s candidates.”

• Looking at even more modes of analysis, one expert found that “‘the enacted map has an extreme level of bias in favor of the Republican [P]arty.’” For example, using the election results from all statewide elections from 2012 to 2020, Dr. Warshaw found that the enacted plan is more extremely biased than 70 percent of previous plans and “more pro-Republican” than 85 percent of previous plans.

• How biased? This expert conducted 5,000 simulations under the required criteria...and “the enacted plan…is more biased than any of the 5,000 simulated plans.”

• Finally, the Court also ruled that the map “unduly” split three different counties (Hamilton (into three districts), Summit (two districts), and Cuyahoga (three districts)) to achieve unconstitutional partisan bias.

The second decision —

• The March 2 plan creates just three seats with Democratic vote shares over 52 percent (and one of those is at 52.15 percent). By contrast, all the Republican-leaning seats comfortably favor Republican candidates.”

• “In [the first case], we held that the original plan contained oddly shaped districts in each of Ohio’s three largest metropolitan areas and that the “inescapable conclusion” was that those districts were “the product of an effort to pack and crack Democratic voters.” As the above expert analyses demonstrate, those problems persist in the March 2 plan.”

• “an effort to favor the Republican Party by packing Democratic voters into a small number of districts that very heavily favor the Democratic party.” Dr. Chen concludes that by allocating more Democratic voters to the most partisan districts, the March 2 plan allocates fewer Democratic voters to other districts, making them more Republican.”

• “the March 2 plan is nearly as biased as last decade’s plan and the invalidated plan. This evidence supports the conclusion that the March 2 plan unduly favors the Republican Party.”