Nice Florida Redistricting Scheme You Got Here, Shame If Democracy Were To Happen To It
Sure would be funny if this scheme backfires.
The Florida state Legislature has started a weeklong special session so it can pass a new gerrymandered voting map that gives Republicans an even bigger advantage in congressional representation than the already outrageous 20-8 GOP majority Ron DeSantis demanded in 2022. The new map, which DeSantis sent to Fox News Monday before he actually delivered it to Republicans in the Lege, would reduce the number of Democratic-leaning districts to just four out of 28. That would give Republicans 85 percent of the congressional districts, in a state where in 2024 (for the presidential election) it was a 56/43 Republican-to-Democrat split. You can plainly see, in this comparison from Decision Desk, how DeSantis’s new map eliminates four blue patches from the map altogether and shrinks the ones that remain, carving off parts of them into new GOP districts.
Among other changes, the new map would eliminate D-leaning seats in the Tampa and Orlando areas, and would smoosh together the current four Democratic-leaning districts in Palm Beach and Broward counties into just two districts. The area is currently represented by Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jared Moskowitz, and Lois Frankel; the other current D seat was vacated just last week when Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick resigned before the House Ethics Committee could move to expel her for alleged griftiness and been caught stealing.
Florida is likely to be the final big red state to redraw its maps to try to hold on to Republicans’ tiny majority in Congress, a gerrymandering fight that Donald Trump started in Texas last summer (and which the US Supreme Court just this week blessed). Claiming Republicans were “entitled” to five more congressional seats in Texas, Trump ordered its Lege to rig voting maps, although he’s been very open in saying he’s mainly interested in escaping impeachment if Democrats win the House. In Texas in 2024, the presidential race, almost identically to Florida’s, had a 56/42 Republican-to-Democrat split. The Texas congressional maps now, with the Supreme Court’s thumbs way up, favor Republicans over Democrats in 30 out of 38 districts — that’s 78 percent of the districts! — instead of the already gerrymandered 25 of 38 (65 percent).
Voters in California and Virginia have largely counteracted Trump’s attempted power grab with new referendum-approved maps of their own. That’s a big contrast to the Trump gerrymanders, which were passed by GOP-dominated legislatures in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina, and next, Florida, regardless of what voters might want. Needless to say, those legislatures are themselves generally the result of gerrymandered state legislative maps. Funny how gerrymandered state legislatures would go and engineer a Republican advantage in Congress, without letting voters have a say.
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If/when Florida’s Lege passes DeSantis’s map, it will be going against what most voters want: An Emerson College poll earlier this month showed that 56 percent of voters think mid-decade redistricting is a “bad idea.” That close-ish margin has its own partisan skew: Nearly two-thirds of Democrats and independents said it was a “bad idea,” while just 43 percent of Republicans agreed.
Let The Lawsuits Begin!
National and state Democrats are already prepared to challenge the new map in court as a violation of Florida’s constitution. Unlike the four other states that have passed Trump gerrymanders, Florida law explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering. But hey, laws are made for Republican governors to ignore.
In 2010, voters approved — with just under 63 percent of the vote — a “Fair Districts Amendment” prohibiting the Lege from drawing voting maps that provide partisan advantage, or which are designed to help (or to hurt) incumbents. The map released to Fox by DeSantis’s office Monday is openly partisan, with likely Republican districts in red and Democratic ones in blue, instead of a plain old one-color map showing only the proposed district boundaries.
Even one anonymous Florida GOP consultant, a veteran of previous redistricting fights, was incredulous that DeSantis’s office would so openly provide fodder for a lawsuit, telling NBC News, “This is wild. […] I don’t know how you can argue a red and blue map released from the governor’s office doesn’t show some form of partisan intent.”
For that matter, state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D) said on social media that even the decision to announce the new map to Fox the night before the special session, before even sharing it with the Lege, “shows how partisan and illegitimate this process is.”
Supreme Idiocy
Just as we went to publish this thing, the US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial gerrymanders, which was a key part of Florida’s rationale for insisting that the Fair Districts Amendment was completely unconstitutional, even the part banning partisan gerrymanders, because reasons.
Whether today’s shitcanning of yet another section of the federal VRA actually erases Florida’s 2010 ban on partisan redistricting will ultimately be decided by the Florida Supreme Court, but DeSantis doesn’t appear to consider that issue anything more than a speed bump on the way to doing whatever the hell he wants.
Six of the current members of the Florida Supremes were appointed by DeSantis, and DeSantis boasted on April 1 that he’s confident they’ll remain safely in his pocket. “When I got elected, we had probably the most liberal supreme court in the country,” DeSantis bragged. “Now I’ve put six on and we have the most conservative supreme court in the country.” He pointedly did not follow this with “April fool!”
What’s Next?
In the first day of the special session Tuesday, the Lege didn’t take up the redistricting plan. But part of DeSantis’s agenda was already gummed up when state House Speaker Daniel Perez (R) declared two other DeSantis proposals dead on arrival. That appears to mean DeSantis won’t get a bill regulating AI (which we would have liked actually, surprise!), or his insane proposal to eliminate vaccine requirements for schoolchildren, either.
As for the gerrymander, it’s still likely to be passed by the GOP supermajorities in both houses, although some Republicans are expressing doubts about the governor’s dubious “legal theory” that the 2010 amendment is already invalid. And even as they vote for the new districts, several Republicans are fretting that the new districts will have such narrow GOP margins that actually holding them could be difficult — the “dummymander” for which we’re all waiting! — especially if voter disgust at Trump (and DeSantis, for that matter) results in a Blue Wave election.
Gosh, that would be a shame.
[NBC News / CNN / Politico / WLRN / Democracy Docket / Tallahassee Democrat / Emerson College poll / Democracy Docket]
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8647 - people are really having fun with this and I'm laughing.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/18926142f8cc48a24324a29c31bd00db9bd8b500132589c1e29b278d12813d9f.jpg
The way things are going the only way Florida will ever turn blue is when it sinks into the ocean.