{"id":81,"date":"2019-11-14T13:30:13","date_gmt":"2019-11-14T13:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/?p=81"},"modified":"2019-12-30T11:41:55","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T16:41:55","slug":"2020-ohio-elections-the-ohio-senate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/2019\/11\/14\/2020-ohio-elections-the-ohio-senate\/","title":{"rendered":"2020 Ohio Elections: The 2016 and 2018 Ohio Senate races"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Welcome to part 2 of my little exploration of 2020 Ohio Elections. If you’re looking for part 1, which covers Ohio House races, you can find it here<\/a>. Today, we’ll dig into Ohio’s 2016 and 2018 Senate races, and explore whether democrats will be able to win some seats in the upcoming 2020 races.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The map below displays Senate races for the last two Ohio Senate elections. Since Senators in Ohio have 4-year terms, half of the Senate is elected every 2 years. In 2020, 16 Senate seats<\/a> are up for grabs and the Democrats hold 2, so the good news is that there are 14 seats that Democrats could potentially go after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Democrats haven’t fared so well because gerrymandering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other than the theoretical 14 seats that democrats could<\/em> pick up, there’s not a lot of other good news. The two seats in the map above that democrats came close in (Districts 19 and 33) aren’t up again until 2022. A quick look at how close the 2016 races were in the histogram below shows that are not a lot of swing seats in the Senate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Only one race in 2016 was close (ie: won by less than 10%) \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 11 seats that republicans won in 2016 are pretty much locked down. In three of those districts, a democrat didn’t even run (that’s why there are those big empty white spaces in the map above), and in the other seven democrats lost by >15%).The one district that democrats came closest to winning in 2016 is district 30, where Lou Gentile lost by 5.8% to Frank Hoagland. Hoagland will likely run again in 2020 as an incumbent, which can will make it a tough race to win, but Democrats may have a shot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One more potential bright spot is that 9 Republicans will be term-limited in 2020, meaning there will be opportunities for democrats to run against a new name\/face. The best shot for one of those term-limited seats is probably district 16, where democrat Cathy Johnson lost by 18 points (okay, maybe not such a bright spot after all).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, the Ohio Senate is another example of how well the Ohio GOP gerrymandered the state after the 2010 census. We’re unlikely to have very many competitive Assembly races until we have more competitive districts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ohioans are probably in for a legislature that disproportionately represents conservative views until at least 2022. In coming posts, I’ll explore what the fight for more competitive districts might look like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to part 2 of my little exploration of 2020 Ohio Elections. If you’re looking for part 1, which covers Ohio House races, you can find it here. Today, we’ll dig into Ohio’s 2016 and 2018 Senate races, and explore whether democrats will be able to win some seats in the upcoming 2020 races. The… <\/p>\n

Read the full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[14,11,10,22,12,24,15,13],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data","category-ohio-politics","tag-bokeh","tag-elections","tag-general-assembly","tag-gerrymandering","tag-maps","tag-ohio","tag-pandas","tag-python"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinverhoff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}