FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday threatened to veto any congressional map coming out of the Legislature that doesn’t eliminate a Black district in North Florida.
But the compromise congressional map released late Thursday by the Republican-led state House, while less extreme than DeSantis’ proposal, would still dramatically alter Central Florida’s congressional districts, experts said.
“This is a mess at the moment,” said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida. “This is a train wreck that’s in motion, and we’re going to have to see if they can somehow avoid derailing the whole process.”
Both DeSantis’ map and the House map would turn Democrat Stephanie Murphy’s district into a Republican-leaning one and create a plurality-white Democratic primary in the district held by Val Demings, now a candidate for U.S. Senate. That could greatly reduce the odds that a Black candidate will succeed her.
The House map also sets up a showdown with the GOP-controlled state Senate, which passed its own plan and considers Demings’ District 10 in west Orange County as designed to give African Americans representation under state and federal law.
And both chambers could soon face the wrath of DeSantis.
“We will not be signing any congressional map that has an unconstitutional gerrymander in it,” DeSantis said Friday of District 5 in North Florida, historically an African American seat. “And that is going to be the position that we stick to, so just take that to the bank.”
DeSantis’ campaign to eliminate District 5 came after he faced pressure from a key figure in former President Donald Trump’s orbit.
According to The Washington Post, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon began publicly pressuring DeSantis and state legislators to draw more districts that would have voted for Trump.
Just days before DeSantis dropped his surprise map on Martin Luther King Day weekend, Bannon’s podcast’s account on Gettr, a right-wing social media site, asked followers to contact DeSantis “and tell him to (stay) focused on redistricting in his state to be sure MAGA gets these seats,” the Post reported.
DeSantis was dealt a setback Thursday in his attempt to eliminate District 5, a historically Black seat in North Florida, when the state Supreme Court refused to issue an advisory opinion on whether the district’s majority-minority status was required under the law.
The House’s release of its own map hours later came after Speaker Chris Sprowls defied DeSantis and announced District 5 would remain intact despite DeSantis’ wishes.
The House map, which has yet to come up for a vote, would give Republicans an 18-10 advantage in congressional seats compared to a 16-12 GOP advantage in the Senate map.
The DeSantis map has a similar 18-10 GOP advantage to the House map, according to the last presidential results. But with tighter margins in some districts, it’s “realistic” the GOP could have as much as a 20-8 advantage, said Matt Isbell, an elections expert who runs the MCIMaps website.
“Compared to the DeSantis plan, it looks like a compromise,” Isbell said of the House map. “But it’s actually still a plan that was pretty bad when it came out. It was just DeSantis somehow made it worse.”
In attempting to win back U.S. Rep. Murphy’s District 7 in Seminole and parts of Orange counties, Isbell said, the Republican-drawn House map removes Orange and adds much of GOP-leaning Volusia County.
But in doing so, Isbell said, the map also splits up Orange County’s Black voters, most of which are currently in District 10, and disperses them among three districts, one of which strongly leans Republican and none of which would automatically favor a Black candidate.
“It’d be so easy to grab basically every African American voter in western Orange,” Isbell said. “It’s a nice, compact community. ... You have this split of the African American community that is so easy to avoid.”
In a seat such as District 10 in which Democrats would be overwhelmingly expected to win, the Democratic primary is the de facto election and African Americans currently have a 70% majority there among Democratic primary voters.
The House map, however, would create a district in which whites would become the plurality Democratic primary voters, with 41% of voters compared with African Americans’ 37% of the vote.
“The Senate has staked out a legal position that the district in Orlando, the 10th District, is (legally) protected,” Isbell said. “So by that logic, theoretically, they should not be willing to accept the House map ever.
“That’s a real conflict,” he continued. “That’s not just about, ‘Oh, maybe we could do the lines here or here.’ This is a pretty fundamental question about protected districts.”
Republicans in the Legislature could have been emboldened by last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing Alabama’s redistricting map to go forward despite a legal challenge over lack of minority representation. That decision was on top of previous rulings that allow partisan gerrymandering as long as it isn’t along racial lines.
They could also be responding to heavily skewed maps in Democratic-led states.
While Democrats at the national level have pushed for gerrymandering reforms, only to be blocked by Senate Republicans, Democrats on the state level have taken advantage of the gridlock by pushing through maps including a 22-4 Democratic-leaning map in New York and a 14-3 Democratic-leaning map in Illinois.
But, McDonald said, the situations with federal law and in other states are very different than in Florida, which has its own legal protections for minorities.
“That Alabama case actually has no bearing on Florida’s constitution,” he said. “... It’s up to the Florida Supreme Court to look at its own state constitution. And we have pretty strong language compared with some other states about what can and can’t be done.”
McDonald said the Senate map and the alternative House map both finding ways to easily preserve District 10 would be “compelling evidence” against the House map.
“That said, we have a Republican-majority state Supreme Court,” he said. "… I think what the House is banking on is that that the Court is going to give them wide latitude.”
And DeSantis’ veto threat still looms over everything.
“So we’re in a three-way tug of war here,” McDonald said.
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