New Florida Redistricting Map Could Deliver 4 New House Seats to GOP in Midterms |
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The Florida Legislature has approved a new congressional map sent to them just two days earlier by Gov. Ron DeSantis that could give Florida Republicans up to four new congressional seats in the November midterm elections.
The Florida Senate voted, 21-17, Wednesday afternoon to approve the map. Four Republicans – Jennifer Bradley, Alexis Calatayud, Ileana Garcia, and Erin Grall — joined independent Sen. Jason Pizzo and all 12 of the Democrats in opposing the map.
Their vote came several hours after the Florida House passed the map on an 83-28 vote, with only one Republican — former Democratic Rep. Hillary Cassel from Dania Beach — joining all Democrats in that chamber to oppose the map.
Republicans now hold 20 of the state’s 28 congressional districts.
The House vote took place just an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal Voting Rights Act alone does not justify race-based redistricting. The governor had predicted for months that the state would have to conduct mid-decade redistricting because of how the high court would rule in that case — and not, he insisted, because President Donald Trump had called on red states last summer to redistrict to help maintain GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
DeSantis Signals Florida Will Gerrymander Its Maps in the Spring
Instead, attorneys for DeSantis said this week that the state had to redraw its map to ensure it was “race neutral” and to account for the population growth in Florida since the 2020 U.S. Census.
Democrats and voting rights groups called the DeSantis drawn map a blatant violation of a provision in the Fair Districts Amendments passed by more than 60% of voters in 2010 that says “no district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party on an incumbent.”
However, attorneys for DeSantis this week pushed a legal theory that Fair Districts is unconstitutional because of another provision in it stating that districts “shall not be drawn with the result or intent of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect........