Dec 28, 2015 3 min read

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio has both executive and legislative experience, is a plain-spoken moderate with appeal across party lines, and he hails from perhaps the most crucial of all swing states in presidential elections. Yet Kasich’s bid to lead the 2016 Republican ticket is foundering, as a plurality of the GOP’s voters remain beguiled by a clearly unqualified, oddly coiffed, far-right blowhard who is guaranteed to repel all but the most ardent partisans.

Go figure.

But even as the likelihood of a President John Kasich taking residence in the White House on Jan. 20, 2017, grows ever dimmer, Ohio’s governor is continuing to offer useful ideas that his fellow Republicans – and many Democrats – should listen to. Just before Christmas, Kasich told a chamber of commerce gathering in Westerville, Ohio, that the Buckeye State should end the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, which would make elections to the U.S. House of Representatives more competitive and drive candidates back toward the center of the political spectrum.

“I support redistricting reform dramatically,” Kasich said. “This will be something I’m going to do whether I’m elected president or whether I’m here. We carve these safe districts, and then when you’re in a safe district you have to watch your extremes, and you keep moving to the extremes.”

Indeed, of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that were up for grabs in the 2014 election, only 14 of those races were truly competitive, according to the Cook Political Report. That works out to 3.2 percent of all seats.

Granted, some representatives haven’t been evicted from their Capitol Hill offices because voters believe they’ve done a decent job of serving their districts. Thoughtful and diligent members of Congress do exist. Some also possess ample war chests that effectively scare off challengers, and some benefit from name recognition and inertia. But many take advantage of district boundaries that are meticulously drawn by sympathetic state legislators to maximize partisan advantage. This means that, frequently, a member of Congress doesn’t so much have to fear a vigorous general election challenge, but a bruising primary battle from a member of his or her own party who promises to compromise less with the opposition and serve up a more pungent mixture of ideological purity. This is one of the factors, along with the echo chamber of talk radio and the Fox News Channel, that has helped propel the GOP further and further to the right since the 1990s.

Ohio already made a step toward ending partisan gerrymandering when its voters overwhelmingly approved a measure in November that would have state legislative lines drawn up by a bipartisan commission.

However, some lawmakers in Ohio are saying they want to move more cautiously on congressional lines, putting that off until the 2030s. They shouldn’t wait that long.

Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states received a green light from the U.S. Supreme Court in June to proceed with bipartisan commissions of their own when, by a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that an independent panel that had been established in Arizona to handle redistricting was constitutional, rejecting a challenge from legislators who said they should continue to wield that power.

California, Washington, Idaho, Hawaii, New Jersey and Montana have also established similar commissions.

It appears very unlikely that championing redistricting reform will do Kasich many favors with Republican voters in Iowa or New Hampshire. But if it helps push the idea onto the agenda in other states, then American democracy will come out the winner.