Could Gerrymandering Lead House Dems to Run for Senate?

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH)

This week we've written a couple of articles about politics, and specifically about the 2022 elections.  I promised yesterday that we would take a bit of a break from elections prognosticating soon, and that's probably going to happen immediately after inauguration, as I think pundits focus too much on the next election, and not enough on the actual job of legislating, and with the Democrats fully in charge for the first time in years, I will focus either on what's happening in Washington (and hopefully some bills passing) or on some of our looks back at elections past (lists!) unless we get major announcements or changes in the races.

But until then we'll have a couple of articles, and today I wanna focus on a weird phenomenon that happened roughly nine years ago.  Every ten years in American politics, we redraw districts based on population, and sometimes that means that candidates are drawn into seats that they would normally not be able to hold.  This happened that year for then-Rep. Joe Donnelly, who was a moderate three-term Democrat who had barely survived the 2010 midterms, and seemed like he'd lose his election to Jackie Walorski, as his district had gotten too red for him to hold.

Donnelly, though, wasn't done in Congress & decided to throw a "Hail Mary" pass in 2012 by skipping the House race, and instead running for the US Senate.  This was a long-shot, as Indiana had six-term incumbent Richard Lugar, generally one of the most respected men in American politics at the time, running for a seventh term...but Donnelly had seen what happened in the 2010 elections where respected men fell to candidates from the hard right as a part of the Tea Party movement.  Donnelly ended up being correct in this assessment-Lugar lost the primary despite his storied career to State Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R), and Mourdock turned out to be a terrible candidate, at one point stating that pregnancy from rape was "something God intended" which Donnelly was able to use against Mourdock in the general, and win a Senate seat.  Had the Republicans just drawn a district that Donnelly could win, they probably would've held the seat even with Mourdock in charge.  Instead, Donnelly turned Indiana blue for six years.

We don't know how redistricting is going to go, but it is worth asking the question: could history repeat itself?  There are already rumors in Kansas, New Mexico, and Maryland of gerrymandering enough so that incumbents have no shot of winning again, but these are safe blue/red states-they aren't states that normally would switch at the top of the ticket.  But there are at least two spots on that map that Republicans are probably going to target (or where demographics are shifting enough) that the longtime incumbent House Democrats might take a run statewide.

The first of these is in Ohio.  Ohio is, based on some estimates, likely to lose a seat in 2022 as a result of population loss.  Despite the state being disproportionately Republican (12R-4D in the House delegation, which doesn't match a state Trump won by less-than ten points), the Republicans are unlikely to give up one of their seats if they can help it, and with a GOP trifecta, I would guess that they're going to attempt to draw one of the incumbents into an impossible district.  And of the incumbents, the most probable will be Rep. Tim Ryan.

Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI)

If Ryan's name sounds familiar to you, it's because he briefly ran for president last year, dropping out before any votes were cast, and challenged Nancy Pelosi for Democratic Leader in 2016 (which made him something of a pariah for a while with progressives).  Ryan represents a blue district, but a light blue district (it went for Clinton by 7 points and to Biden by 3 points), and would be the easiest district to make marginal.  But Ryan, at age 47, is similar to Donnelly in that he seems ambitious & wouldn't want to (voluntarily) be done with politics.  So, if his seat becomes untenable due to gerrymandering, it's not out-of-the-question that he would run for either Senate or Governor in 2022.

Rep. Ron Kind (D) is in a similar situation, though gerrymandering may not play as big of a part for him.  Unlike Ryan, Kind is not known at all nationally; you likely only know who he is if you're a political junkie or come from his state of Wisconsin.  But Kind is a rarity right now-he represents a district that went for Donald Trump despite he himself being a Democrat.  Trump took the district by five points, and while Kind won, it was an unimpressive 3-point win against a nobody candidate-unless the district gets some help (which is unlikely given the Republicans control of the state legislature), Kind is unlikely to hold this seat much longer.  He will surely end up in the same position as his former colleague Collin Peterson, who watched his seat get too red, even if his politics were moderate.  But Wisconsin has a Senate seat up in 2022, and Kind could make a run statewide to win it.

Ryan & Kind are historically cautious about running statewide.  Kind has been in the House since he was 33, Ryan since he was 30, and both men have repeatedly turned down opportunities to seek Senate seats or the governorship in their states. And yet, if they are going to stay in politics they may have to copy Joe Donnelly, and finally run for higher office.  Ryan, obviously, has national ambitions but has been too cautious in increasingly red Ohio to cash them in; Kind is a quintessential purple state Democrat that could have trouble beating back other Democrats who might also want to run for the Senate (though he'd be a top tier candidate if he went for it).  There are lots of tales of candidates who ran too early or gave up their House seat to flail at higher office.  But with the census looming, I think this could be the last time we see Kind or Ryan, who have "played Hamlet" for decades, decide if this is to be the year where they finally attempt higher office...or if they might let decades of promise wither by staying in districts they can no longer win.