TALLAHASSEE – Gov. Ron DeSantis won the redistricting fight he started years ago.
Despite that, he’s eyeing another battle – hinting that he would be in favor of redrawing Florida’s Congressional map, which already favors Republican lawmakers.
DeSantis hasn’t officially committed to making the change, but said he would look “favorably” on lawmakers if they did recut Florida’s districts.
“I haven’t done it yet, I think that I will when I need to,” DeSantis said last week during a news conference. “But this is obviously something that we’re looking at very seriously.”
Both the Florida Senate President Ben Albritton and House Speaker Daniel Perez declined to comment about whether they were considering redistricting.
The possible change comes as President Donald Trump has pushed for redrawn maps to ensure that Republicans keep control of the U.S. House in the upcoming midterm elections.
Here’s what to know about redistricting in Florida, and what could happen next.
Why are we talking about redistricting now?
Trump and his team have put pressure on Texas and other red states to redraw their Congressional maps in order to protect the Republican majority in Congress.
Currently, Republicans control the House and Senate, but the margins are narrow.
Mid-decade redistricting is rare, experts say. Each state must redistrict every decade, based on the census.
But states hoping to redraw sooner than required are noting there’s nothing in the Constitution forbidding extra redistricting.
It may not be only the red states looking to recut maps. In response to Trump, some Democratic lawmakers have said they plan to fight back with redrawn maps of their own, despite their limited options.
“Redistricting, which is supposed to translate votes into representation, is becoming just a game for politicians to play hardball with,” said Douglas Spencer, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Colorado.
If states redraw their maps with a partisan advantage, the courts could strike them down. But even if the courts strike the maps down, it could come after election season.
“Trump gets the benefit of having a midterm election where Republicans maintain control for his term and after he’s gone I don’t think he cares,” Spencer said.
Florida’s current map
DeSantis hasn’t promised Florida will redistrict, but he said to “stay tuned.”
Amy Keith, the executive director of voting rights group Common Cause Florida, said if DeSantis were to redraw Florida’s maps, it would be hypocritical.
In July, the Florida Supreme Court upheld Florida’s Congressional map, which was drafted – atypically – by DeSantis’ office.
“The governor just got the map that he drew,” Keith said. “The map that the governor wanted is the map that was just upheld. And now the governor’s saying he wants to change that map.”
The governor’s map favored Republicans winning 20 of Florida’s 28 Congressional Districts – which is exactly how the results shook out on Election Day in 2022.
Plaintiffs who challenged the map said it reduced Black voting power by dismantling a North Florida seat held by former U.S. Rep. Al Lawson. DeSantis said the long district, which stretched across the panhandle, relied too much on race.
The Florida Supreme Court sided with DeSantis’ argument, saying that the district was likely an illegal race-based gerrymander. After that ruling, DeSantis on social media said Florida’s map his office drafted was “always the constitutionally correct map.”
But as of last week, DeSantis said his office was looking at some other areas where “there may be problems with the map,” including in South Florida.
What are Florida’s rules?
In 2010, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment from Fair Districts Florida.
That amendment says that no plan can be drawn to favor or disfavor a political party, along with requiring that districts cannot be drawn to deny equal opportunity to racial minorities.
In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court said that partisan gerrymandering couldn’t be ruled on by federal courts – meaning its exclusively state court that can decide if a redistricting plan violates the rules, Spencer said.
As DeSantis has talked about the possibility of redrawing Florida’s Congressional seats, he’s avoided talking about a political motivation for it.
But if Florida were to redraw the maps, groups could still challenge it as a gerrymander even if DeSantis never explicitly mentions the political advantage.
Dan Vicuña, a senior policy director at Common Cause, said “we don’t have to rely on the pretext that the governor is giving.”
Instead, groups can rely on tools like random computer generation to see the odds of a government coming to a map with a specific partisan tilt, he said.
What’s the deal about the Census?
As DeSantis has talked about redistricting, he’s also raised concern about the 2020 census.
Florida got one extra congressional seat because of population growth. But the U.S. Census Bureau later released a report showing that Florida was undercounted.
DeSantis said the Trump administration has considered a mid-decade census, which would be unusual.
Whenever the next census does come, whether it’s early or not, DeSantis said he would want it to exclude foreign nationals.
The Trump administration in 2020 considered adding a question about citizenship to the census but the U.S. Supreme Court blocked it.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who was working in the Trump administration at that time, played a key role in adding that question.
Jeff Kottkamp, the executive vice president of the group Florida TaxWatch, said the census undercount affects leads to a loss of billions of dollars over the decade that could have come into the state.
When it comes to whether or not to count people without citizenship, Kottkamp, the former Lieutenant Governor of Florida, said that’s a debate politicians can have.
“All we care about is that every state counts the same way, and that clearly didn’t happen last time,” he said.
The U.S. Constitution says that the census will count “the whole number of persons” in each state.
Kottkamp said some blue states put extra time and effort toward making sure foreign nationals are counted, while red states don’t – to their own detriment.
“We’re playing the game with two different sets of rules, and that’s not good for Florida when it comes to funding and political power,” he said.
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