With Republicans set to put scalpel to map this year to redistrict the Buckeye State, more data from the 2010 Census continues to emerge that paints a cloudy picture for Democrats.
Cleveland lost a chunk of residents in the last ten years, and it looks like Dennis! Kucinich will be without a district as the GOP divvy up land to Marcia Fudge and Betty Sutton. But as the Dayton Daily News points out, it’s not just where those residents departed from that’s important, it’s also key to see where they went.
According to an analysis of the 2010 Census by the Dayton Daily News, the five districts currently held by Democrats lost a staggering 145,790 people since 2000 while the 13 Republicans districts gained 329,154.
Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Cleveland, lost 90,298 people to reduce her district’s population to just over 540,000. Because the 16 new districts will each have an average of 721,032 people, GOP officials will have to radically change her district to add more than 180,000 people.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2011.
It’s more complicated than that. The populaion itself has not shifted GOP; it’s just shifted into GOP districts, conversely (and unfortunately for certain Republicans) making those districts less Republican. It’s not likely that the political balance of the state has been much altered, based on Kasich barely scraping into office with 49 percent of the vote in a year when Republicans were more energized than Democrats. This makes it dicier for some Republicans in borderline districts.
With the map in front of me, I can’t see how they can fold Sutton and Kucinich into the same disitrct. If there has been any population loss in the Mahoning Valley, they will fold Sutton into Tim Ryan’s district, since Ryan already has half of Summit County and Sutton lives in the other half. They will probably expand Kucinich’s district into Sutton’s current district — Lorain County, maybe the bits of southern Cuyahoga she now represents. But she doesn’t live in those sections of the district so she won’t be pitted against Kucinich but rather against Ryan.