Allison Russo, a Democrat from suburban Columbus, launched her campaign for Secretary of State last week while touting her experience negotiating with Republicans over redistricting earlier this decade.
Her decision to highlight redistricting reflects the national attention on the issue that has followed President Donald Trump’s pressure on Texas and other Republican-controlled states to gerrymander their congressional district maps to help the GOP keep its control of Congress.
But some Democrats think Russo has little to brag about, pointing out that she sided with Republicans on votes that led to Ohio’s current state legislative district maps that they view as unfair to Democrats.
The issue dates back to September 2023, when the Ohio Redistricting Commission, a panel of elected officials, unanimously approved those maps. The “yes” votes included the commission’s five Republicans and its two Democrats, including Russo. At the time, she was the top Democrat in the Ohio House.
The maps fell far short of what Democrats wanted. They argued in court for the previous two years that the maps Republicans promoted favored them to win more legislative districts than the GOP’s share of the statewide vote.
The vote from Russo also may be at odds with where Democratic voters are today. Recent polling shows they are more likely to say they want their leaders to take aggressive, principled stands against Trump and other Republicans, rather than seek compromise.
On social media, some Democrats also have criticized Russo for the vote since she declared her candidacy last week. Among them is Michaela Burriss, a former city council member in Upper Arlington, where Russo also lives.
“I think it’s weak to vote for gerrymandering,” Burris, who’s also had a personal falling out with Russo, said in an interview. “I want a Democrat to win in November. So if you’re too weak to stand up for what’s morally right and what’s fair and what makes the government the strongest it can be, I don’t trust you to run the kind of statewide race we need to win.”
Paul Demarco, a Democratic lawyer in Cincinnati who helped write the redistricting reform amendment that voters rejected last year, said in an interview that Russo shares blame for the measure’s failure. In their ads, state Republicans used the bipartisan vote as evidence the state’s current system worked. Demarco said the argument contributed to the measure’s defeat.
“I find it very cynical that she thinks Democratic voters will have such a short memory,” Demarco said.
Russo has defended her votes as the best of two bad options. Russo and people close to her said in interviews with Signal that Republicans signaled that without Democratic votes, they might have passed a more Republican-leaning map.
“I’ve described it as probably the toughest vote I’ve had to take as an elected official,” Russo said, making a case similar to the one she made in an op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch and a podcast interview with Chris Redfern, a former Ohio Democratic Party chair.
“But I believed then and I believe now that it was absolutely the right decision to make,” she said.
Russo’s opponent in the May 2025 Democratic primary, Cincinnati doctor Bryan Hambley, isn’t among those criticizing Russo directly over the vote.
“Our campaign is focused on the issues, how we can end gerrymandering in Ohio, and restoring power to Ohio’s voters,” campaign spokesperson Alissa Riessinger said in a statement.
‘It almost felt like a hostage situation’
The votes for the current state legislative maps capped a two-year political and legal fight over redistricting that saw the Ohio Supreme Court reject seven sets of political maps as illegally slanted in favor of Republicans.
But after the 2022 elections, new justices joined the court, creating a new majority that was widely seen as more favorable toward Republicans when it comes to redistricting.
Against that backdrop, Republicans presented Democrats on the Ohio Redistricting Commission with a deal. The maps they proposed favored Republicans to win 62 of 99 House Districts and 20 or 33 Senate districts – about 65% of the legislative seats, compared to Republicans’ 55% share of the statewide vote in recent elections.
Before voting for the maps, Russo and the other Democratic legislative leader on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, Senate Minority Leader Nicki Antonio, ran the deal by legislative Democrats and outside allies.
Among those who got a call from Russo was Scott DiMauro, the then-president of the Ohio Education Association, a large teacher’s union.
“It almost felt like a hostage situation,” DiMauro said. “They could sign off on maps that were certainly not great, but better than what had previously been on the table, and way better than what majority Republicans were threatening.”
Jessica Miranda, a former state legislator who served on Russo’s leadership team, said Russo laid out the map to House Democrats in a closed-door meeting. She described it as a “tough conversation.”
“She did what I would expect any good leader to do, which is give the caucus the entire situation, lay out what the options were and then make sure everyone was on the same page before moving forward,” Miranda said.
What Russo said she negotiated for
Russo told Signal the new maps incorporated Democratic tweaks to district lines in the Youngstown area, in Franklin County and in Lorain County that either helped protect incumbent Democrats or gave the party a path to pick up additional seats.
In the 2024 election, Democrats won two extra seats in the House, dropping Republicans’ majority from 67 to 65 of 99 seats, even as Trump won the state by 11 percentage points.
Russo said the maps also present a chance for Democrats with a realistic chance to win 59 House seats, which would break the Republican supermajority in the chamber and end their ability to override vetoes by the governor.
The vote also locked in the maps in until 2031, meaning Republicans won’t get a chance to redraw them this year, unlike the congressional district maps, which are developed under a separate process under state law.
Russo said she’s aware of criticism of her decision, but thinks most Democrats understand the strategic reasons why she did what she did. She said she feels better about her decision seeing how Republicans are taking the chance to redraw congressional districts this year.
“To me, the principled vote was ensuring that we got the best for Ohio that we possibly could under extremely difficult and unfavorable circumstances,” Russo said.
David Niven, a University of Cincinnati political scientist and former Democratic speechwriter, said Russo has a compelling case to make why she voted for the maps. He also said he thinks it was Republican-drawn ballot language and Trump’s opposition that doomed last year’s redistricting reform amendment.
But, Niven said Russo’s vote may have been a bad political decision.
“It’s not easy to sit back and say, I voted for something that’s unfair because there was no path for a fair outcome,” Niven said. “The details of this would be dizzying, and that makes for very tough politics.”
Ohio’s next redistricting steps
Redistricting is having a national moment. Pushed by Trump, Texas Republicans set off a political arms race this year when they announced they would redraw the state’s congressional map to add as many as five Republican leaning seats.
White House officials also are pressuring Republicans in Indiana to do something similar. Democratic governors in California and New York meanwhile have announced plans to retaliate by pushing through off-schedule gerrymandering plans of their own.
In contrast, Ohio is the only state in the country that’s actually supposed to be redrawing its congressional districts this year. Generally, redistricting occurs every 10 years, but Ohio is doing it early because of its unique rules, which only allow maps with bipartisan support go into effect for a full decade.
The state is scheduled to approve a new congressional map later this year that could make it easier for Republicans to win as many as three extra U.S. House seats by redesigning districts in Akron, Cincinnati and Toledo.
As they prepare for their redistricting fight here, Russo and Ohio Democrats also have tried to seize on the national interest by holding events with Texas Democrats.