Poll Shows Dems Flipping Deep Red GOP Congressional Seat

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A new Impact Research survey conducted for the campaign of Democratic Congressional candidate Greg Landsman, who is running in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District against incumbent Republican Steve Chabot, shows the Democratic contender winning in November by three percent, with 49 percent of the vote to Chabot’s 46 percent.

Chabot’s career in the House stretches across some 25 years, although that isn’t an unbroken length of time, as he was temporarily ousted for a two-year period at the beginning of Barack Obama’s first term, but he ran — and won — again. Chabot is now facing the consequences of redistricting, with an article from Roll Call published after the implementation of the currently active Congressional maps identifying his newly redrawn district as one in which Biden would have won by nine percentage points. (Impact Research, in introducing its polling, shared similar numbers.) The Congressional and state legislative maps in Ohio remain under court dispute, but at this point, challenges in court are largely focused on implementing new maps for the next elections, happening in two years.

A July ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court decried the current Congressional map as illegally favoring Republicans (obviously in locales other than where Chabot is running), but the court pushed for a new map for 2024. When issuing that ruling, the state’s primaries already took place under the old maps, presumably constraining options for changing the layout ahead of November’s elections. According to an article from Cincinnati Magazine, Chabot’s district, as it currently stands, includes the entirety of the city of Cincinnati, which is a Democratic-leaning area in Ohio’s southern regions. Around one-third of the newly drawn 1st District includes areas that Chabot didn’t previously represent.

Notably, the new polling from the 1st District isn’t simply uniformly favorable for Democrats. It shows Mike DeWine, the Republican running for re-election as Ohio governor, up by seven percent over his Democratic opponent, although the survey also found Tim Ryan — the Democratic candidate for Senate — in the lead against Trump-backed Republican challenger J.D. Vance. As for the Congressional race, Chabot sponsored “a bill that criminalized abortion after six weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest” according to Democrats. He was also among the numerous Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying Biden’s electoral votes from Pennsylvania, despite the lack of real-world evidence for any kind of systematic issue with the state’s results. The Republican Accountability Project also says that Chabot “did not make public statements acknowledging that there was no widespread voter fraud or voter irregularities found.”

As for redistricting in Ohio, the Congressional map in force in the state for November’s elections is a follow-up iteration of the lines after an earlier version was struck down by the Ohio state Supreme Court, according to Democracy Docket. Redistricting reforms put into place in recent years didn’t work in terms of stopping this kind of situation from unfolding. At the federal level, polling and forecasts suggest the race for control of the House will be close, with CBS forecasting giving the Republicans a slight edge but putting the two parties in a virtual tie in estimates of which party will control more seats.