by the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center
In the November 2024 elections, Ohio voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have created a citizen-led redistricting commission aimed at reducing gerrymandering. The proposal would have replaced the current Ohio Redistricting Commission on which elected officials serve as members.
Our recently published article examining public satisfaction with redistricting methods and outcomes provides some clues as to why voters chose to stick with a politician-run commission dominated by Ohio’s Republican majority. We analyze questions and answers from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study and find that while some voters care about procedural fairness, they also care just as much or more about winning.
Ends vs. Means and an Uninformed Public
Our survey results indicated that just over a third of respondents could correctly identify who drew the district maps in their state. This proportion is notably low, since we even also gave respondents credit for naming either the primary redistricting method or the backup institution if the latter had to step in to create districts.
We next asked respondents about their satisfaction with redistricting to determine whether people were more satisfied with the process if they lived in states where commissions rather than other entities drew political boundaries. Our scale ranged from 1 (Very dissatisfied) to 5 (Very satisfied) with a score of 3 being neutral about the process.
While the full sample shows that voters were not satisfied with the process no matter who drew the lines, when we look only at respondents who correctly identified the redistricting process in their state, these knowledgeable voters living in states where commissions drew district boundaries reported a mean satisfaction score of 3.2. This means they were generally satisfied with redistricting. Meanwhile, knowledgeable respondents in states with a legislature-controlled redistricting process reported an average satisfaction score of only 2.5 (where a score of 2 is “Somewhat dissatisfied”). This difference is both statistically and substantively meaningful since one group was on average satisfied while the other was not.
If we divide commissions into different types, knowledgeable respondents living in independent, rather than political, commission states reported the most satisfaction with the process with a mean score of 3.29 out of 5. Knowledgeable respondents living in political commission states returned scores that were not distinguishable from voters living in states where the state legislature oversaw redistricting.
Although knowledgeable respondents appear to prefer commissions over legislature-drawn systems, our results do not consider how election outcomes influence support for the redistricting process. Since we know our survey respondents’ partisanship and where they live, we can determine if their newly elected member of congress shared their partisanship. We suspect that all else equal, voters will be more satisfied if they live in a district represented by a member of the same party. And indeed, we find that respondents represented by a co-partisan after the 2022 election reported roughly neutral satisfaction with redistricting, while voters represented by the opposite party were much closer to the somewhat-dissatisfied level. The difference is large at nearly 0.7 points on a five-point scale. This begins to add some evidence that views on redistricting are conditioned on outcomes and not just the process.
In our final analysis, we examine whether the partisanship of the process, rather than the outcome, influenced satisfaction with redistricting. Of course, process and outcomes are highly correlated. Here, we placed respondents into categories based on who ultimately drew their state’s 2022 congressional district map: state legislature controlled by the respondent’s party, state legislature controlled by the opposition, state legislature for independent respondents, redistricting commission, or the courts. Our results show that respondents living in states where their party drew districts were the most satisfied with redistricting while those living in states where the opposition was in charge were the least satisfied. Voters living in commissions and court states were somewhere in between the two types of partisan systems.
On the whole, our survey results indicate that knowledgeable voters living in states where commissions are in charge show higher satisfaction with redistricting compared to respondents who live in states where the legislature is in control. However, when outcomes are part of the equation, voters seem to be more satisfied when they win and/or their team is in charge. Although they might prefer commissions, that may apply more when the opposition controls the system.
Returning to the results for the Ohio constitutional amendment, it should not be surprising that the now solidly Republican majority in the state voted down the change. Even if voters typically favor commissions in general, they might be worried about ending up on the losing side more often when an independent commission runs the show.