Ohio Democrat lobbies for GOP’s redistricting plan

THOMAS J. SHEERAN

Asso­ci­ated Press

CLEVELAND — An Ohio con­gress­man fac­ing a pri­mary fight against a fel­low Demo­c­rat is lob­by­ing for an embat­tled GOP redis­trict­ing plan, ask­ing vot­ers to call state law­mak­ers on his behalf.

One Demo­c­rat tar­geted by the robo-calls, state Rep. Tim­o­thy DeGeeter of Parma, said Wednes­day that he received such a call at his home and fewer than a dozen phone calls from res­i­dents who con­tacted him in response to U.S. Rep. Den­nis Kucinich’s overture.

Kucinich, a for­mer Cleve­land mayor and two-time long-shot pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, thinks he can win in the dis­trict pro­posed by Repub­li­cans, a plan that would pit him against U.S. Rep. Marcy Kap­tur of Toledo.

Kucinich has said that more than half the reg­is­tered Democ­rats in the new, GOP-drawn dis­trict will come from his old dis­trict. The new dis­trict would stretch along Lake Erie from Cleve­land to Toledo.

Kucinich’s cam­paign has made auto­mated calls to vot­ers ask­ing them to press state law­mak­ers to back the GOP plan, which is the sub­ject of an intense review with a Repub­li­can goal of avoid­ing a Democratic-led bal­lot challenge.

DeGeeter, who is run­ning unop­posed for Parma mayor in Tuesday’s elec­tion, said he opposed the redis­trict­ing plan, in part, because it splits Ohio’s sev­enth largest city into two dis­tricts, with a city-owned golf course strad­dling the line.

DeGeeter told callers moti­vated by Kucinich’s appeal that “things are fluid here (in Colum­bus). Obvi­ously we want to have a Cuya­hoga County west side district.”

DeGeeter said he wasn’t both­ered by the sec­ond­hand lob­by­ing by Kucinich. “That was Con­gress­man Kucinich’s deci­sion. I’ll talk to res­i­dents, con­stituents any time,” he said.

Kucinich hasn’t com­mented. A mes­sage was left Wednes­day at his cam­paign office.

State Sen. Michael Skindell, a Lake­wood Demo­c­rat, said Kucinich was angling amid the Colum­bus nego­ti­a­tions for a dis­trict con­cen­trated on parts of Cleve­land and its west­ern sub­urbs. Repub­li­cans might be will­ing to deal on that but would oppose cre­at­ing a fifth safe Demo­c­ra­tic seat, Skindell said.

Accord­ing to The Plain Dealer (http://bit.ly/sMVDwi ), Kucinich’s cam­paign also placed robo-calls tar­get­ing Demo­c­ra­tic state Reps. Nickie Anto­nio of Lake­wood and Mike Foley of Cleve­land. The two, both of whom opposed the GOP plan, said they also got per­sonal calls from Kucinich.

An analy­sis by voter groups of the map passed in Sep­tem­ber sug­gests that 12 of the 16 con­gres­sional dis­tricts favor Repub­li­cans while the other four lean Democratic.

Ohio is los­ing two con­gres­sional dis­tricts because of slow pop­u­la­tion growth; both par­ties stand to lose one seat each.

Ohio Demo­c­ra­tic Party Chair­man Chris Red­fern has vowed to move for­ward with a cam­paign to get the Republican-favoring map thrown out by voters.

Posted by AP News on Nov 2 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.