Ohio congressional map stalls as 'unholy alliance' falters

By Josh Lederman - 11/03/11 06:49 PM ET

Republicans in Ohio fell eight votes short of fast-tracking a new congressional map through the state House on Thursday, leaving the future of redistricting efforts in limbo.

The new map will instead go through the committee process, the Columbus Dispatch reported, and Democrats have already been working to overturn a previous GOP map passed earlier in the year through a voter referendum.

Republicans had hoped to avoid the referendum by offering a new map that could muster more Democratic support. But the Democratic leader in Ohio's Republican-controlled House called the changes offered "generally not significant.”

The inability for Republicans to get the map to the House floor also represented a failure of the so-called "unholy alliance" between the GOP and African-American Democrats, whereby Republicans tried to pick off votes from black Democrats by offering them majority-minority districts in a map that was a net negative for Democrats statewide.

One unlikely advocate who was supporting the initial Republican-drawn map was Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who shocked Democrats by launching robo-calls over the weekend to urge state lawmakers to back the map, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

"Yes, the Republicans drew a Democratic district, using most of my present district and creating a seat which is based in the Cleveland area," Kucinich said in a fundraising letter on Thursday. "Some statehouse Democrats want to repeal this map. I don't."

Earlier in the year, Kucinich toyed with the idea of moving to Washington state to run for the House there, amid concerns that Republicans would dismantle his district during the once-per-decade map redistricting process. Instead, Republicans drew a seat that included about half of his old district and half of the district currently represented by Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio).

That pits Kaptur and Kucinich into a likely Democratic primary between two incumbents. While the Republican-drawn map makes it likely that the winner of that primary will also win the general election, it doesn't guarantee that Kucinich will make it past Kaptur. She won her 2010 reelection by 18 points and has been serving in the House for almost 30 years.