Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature has approved new congressional maps, the latest salvo in an unprecedented nationwide battle for redistricting ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Wednesday’s votes in the Florida House and Senate came days after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced new maps that heavily favor Republicans.
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The state is currently represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by 20 Republicans and 8 Democrats. The new map puts Republicans on track to gain 24 seats in the midterm elections, with four of those seats expected to go to Democrats.
This is a major shift for the resulting elections, with Democrats seen as favored to retake the majority in the US House of Representatives and, in a longer-term bid, to gain a majority in the Senate.
If Democrats gain a majority in both houses of Congress, it would be a major stop in the final two years of US President Donald Trump’s second term.
Questions remain as to whether the new map is legal under the Florida Constitution, and legal challenges are expected.
And with President Donald Trump’s approval ratings at an all-time low amid the economic fallout from the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, some argue that redrawing the map could actually backfire on the Republican Party, weakening its stronghold and narrowing the gap.
Some see Democrat Emily Gregory’s victory in the state House race representing Palm Beach, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, as an early sign of the electoral troubles looming for Republicans.
Several Democrats in the state Legislature denounced the new maps ahead of their passage Wednesday.
“You’re doing this because your dad in the White House is injecting national political goals into a process that should be national,” state Rep. Michelle Reiner told Republicans before the vote, referring to Trump.
redistricting game
The map is the latest attack in the redistricting battle that has swept the nation, starting last year when President Trump pressured Texas to redraw its congressional maps in favor of Republicans.
Several other states followed suit, including Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, California, Utah and, most recently, Virginia, after the Republican-controlled Legislature approved new maps that are expected to give Republicans five more seats.
During this process, the issue of gerrymandering, where legislative maps are drawn to favor one political party over another, came to the forefront of American politics. Voting advocates have long called for a series of reforms to prevent gerrymandering, including creating a bipartisan commission to oversee redistricting.
President Trump’s early push for Texas, and the domino effect of redistricting, represented a departure from the long-standing norm of redrawing maps every 10 years after the U.S. Census counts the population.
Last week’s vote in Virginia projected Democrats to win four seats, all but neutralizing Republican gains in redistricting. Florida’s new map once again gives Republicans an advantage in seats won in redistricting chaos.
Still, despite the narrowing gap, Democrats are expected to have an advantage over Republicans in November’s congressional elections.
Florida’s vote came after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map, which was previously redrawn to include two majority-black districts, was unconstitutional.
The ruling by the conservative-majority panel was a major blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, reinterpreting a provision intended to prevent officials from drawing congressional maps to weaken the electoral power of minorities.
Section 2 of the law has long been interpreted to prohibit the creation of electoral maps that result in diminishing the electoral power of minority voters, even without direct evidence that they were drawn with racist intent.
The Supreme Court’s ruling said challengers must prove racist intent to challenge such maps.
The ruling is relevant to Florida because the state’s new maps effectively eliminate the majority-black southern Florida district represented in the House by Democrat Sheila Cherfils McCormick, who resigned earlier this month.
Black voters have historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party.
The Supreme Court’s decision could pave the way for more states to reconsider their congressional maps, but with midterm primary season already well underway, it remains unclear which states will do so.
