TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The balance of power in Florida, and maybe even in Washington, lies in the hands of 160 state lawmakers who have already begun the process to redraw congressional and legislative boundaries.
Redistricting is inherently political, as any change in the lines can mean the difference between winning or losing a U.S. House or legislative seat. That’s especially true in Florida, a historical swing state whose constant population surges mean the 2020 U.S. census data used to capture the changes will reshuffle the political calculus.
The stakes are high. Democrats hold a slender 220-212 advantage on the U.S. House over Republicans, so a map that helps elect one or two more Republicans could help push the GOP over the top to control the chamber after the 2022 midterm elections.
“It can make the difference,” said Matt Isbell, an elections expert who runs the MCIMaps website, of Florida’s redistricting. “With the House as close it is, every state’s redistricting process really matters here.”
Republicans’ advantage over Democrats in the Legislature, which stands at 78-42 in the House and 24-16 in the Senate, is unlikely to be overcome by changes in the maps.
Lawmakers held their first meetings on redistricting in September but won’t hold floor votes on new maps until the next regular session begins Jan. 11.
The ‘shadow process’
On the surface, the task is simple: redraw boundaries to account for the uneven population growth since 2010. The current maps were drawn to have 696,345 people in each congressional district; the new maps, which will include an additional 28th district, will need to have 769,221 people in each.
But there are plenty of laws, rules and guidelines that govern where lawmakers can draw the new lines. The most recent are the Fair District Amendments passed by voters in 2010, which prohibit drawing lines to favor or disfavor political parties, incumbents or ethnic groups.
Those amendments tripped up Republicans in charge of the Legislature during the last redistricting cycle, leading to a drawn-out court battle that ended with the Florida Supreme Court adopting state Senate and U.S. House maps drawn by the League of Women Voters in 2015.
In the subsequent 2016 elections with the new maps, Democrats gained one seat in the Florida congressional delegation and one seat in the state Senate.
The court found some GOP state senators and consultants engaged in a “shadow process” to pass maps that were favorable to Republicans. This time around, Republicans leading the redistricting process have pledged to follow the law and stamp that out by requiring each person who submits a map to reveal whether they’re a lobbyist or have been paid or reimbursed by an outside group.
“[House Speaker Chris Sprowls] and I have made it consistently and abundantly clear that the House will conduct this process in compliance with the Florida Constitution and relevant federal and state legal standards, including relevant court precedent,” House Redistricting Committee chairman Tom Leek, R-Ormond Beach, said at the outset of the panel’s first meeting on Sept. 22.
Nevertheless, Democrats are wary that Republicans will bend or break the Fair Districts amendments this time because the makeup of the Florida Supreme Court has switched from a 5-2 liberal majority to a 6-1 conservative bench.
“My biggest concern is individual members doing something that violates the constitution,” said House Democratic Leader Evan Jenne. “That’s my biggest worry for the entire process ― Democrats and Republicans — is somebody trying to influence the maps so that it benefits them, somebody they know.”
If lawmakers are given more leeway within the bounds of the Fair Districts amendments, it would be only the latest erosion of federal laws and court precedents governing redistricting.
‘Pork Chop Gang’: Florida’s past
Before the 1960s, lawmakers redrawing political boundaries was a foregone conclusion. White, male Democrats from rural districts drew lines without regard for equalizing the populations allowing them to remain in control of the Legislature.
Prior to the Civil Rights Era, a group of 20 conservative Democrats known as the “Pork Chop Gang” held power in the Legislature at the expense of urban areas. At times, a minority of 12% of voters could elect a majority to the state Senate.
There were no minority access districts to worry about to make sure African-Americans got a chance to vote in a Black lawmaker. Through a series of Jim Crow laws, Blacks were effectively barred from the polling booth anyway.
Historically, the courts had little say in how districts were drawn, as the U.S. Constitution gives the power to the state legislatures. Then in the 1960s, the Voting Rights Act and a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions opened the door to greater review by the courts, gave protections against racial gerrymandering and required states to divide districts with an equal or approximate equal population.
Some of those precedents, however, have been eroded in the past decade. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder found that section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was invalid.
That provision had required federal Department of Justice approval of voting law changes and redistricting plans in jurisdictions with a history of racist voting laws. In Florida, it had applied to Collier, Hardee, Hendry, Hillsborough and Monroe counties.
Another U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2019, Rucho v. Common Cause, renounced the federal courts’ power to review claims that state maps excessively favor one party.
State Rep. Geraldine Thompson, D-Windermere, said she’ll be looking to ensure Republicans don’t pack African-American voters who largely vote Democratic in districts as a way of improving GOP performance in surrounding districts.
She said her victory as a Black woman in House District 44, which was 60% white and 10% Black as of the 2010 Census, shows diminishing the Black vote doesn’t equate to a reduction in Black lawmakers.
“There is concern that will be an excuse for packing and therefore bleaching everything around the few minority districts that are carved out,” Thompson said. “You don’t have to pack minority individuals in single one or two districts in order to have minority representation.”
‘Like a meteor’: The future
One thing that is certain is Thompson’s district, which now covers western Orange County and includes Winter Garden, Windermere and Disney World, will change. That district saw the greatest growth of any House seat in the last 10 years at 51%. It has 237,174 people or 57,689 more than the ideal population of 179,485 per district.
And it’s not just her district.
All of Central Florida is where most of the action will be when it comes to drawing the new lines, experts said, thanks to its booming population, growing Hispanic numbers and a potential GOP target in Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy’s swing seat.
But those situations all intersect with each other, meaning Republicans in the Legislature will have to make a choice. Do they focus on squeezing as many GOP seats as they can out of a new map, helping the party win back Congress in 2022? Or do they look at long-term trends and focus on protecting their incumbents with the safest seats?
“It’s going to come down to how much risk Republicans are willing to accept,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida.
Osceola County saw an almost 73% increase in the Hispanic population from 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Census, and Hispanics now make up more than half the total population. Orange and Polk counties saw similar increases, with Hispanics making up 33% and 25% of the populations of those counties, respectively.
That means a majority Hispanic district could be drawn in Central Florida, a major milestone but also one that might have to be drawn according to federal law. While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that partisan motivation could now be used to draw maps, ethnic representation is still protected under the Civil Rights Act.
District 9, which stretches from Orange County through Osceola to Polk and is currently held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Darren Soto, the first Congress member from Florida with a Puerto Rican background.
“You can’t really change its Hispanic character, since it’s currently electing a Hispanic candidate,” McDonald said. “You’re not going to radically carve it up, because that would just be an entree for the Department of Justice to come in with a lawsuit.”
But Florida could follow the lead of Texas, where the newest announced maps seemed to flaunt the Civil Rights Act by keeping heavily Hispanic areas split. Even so, Isbell agreed with McDonald that Florida Republicans probably don’t want to start a fight over the issue.
“It’s one thing to raise a lawsuit under Fair Districts,” Isbell said. “It’s a whole other can of worms to trigger a Voting Rights Act lawsuit. … In 2014 and 2015, there’s this history of these folks being dragged through depositions and being embarrassed about what was going on. So if you’re a current lawmaker, do you really want to put up with all that?”
Targeting Rep. Murphy?
A better option for Republicans, he said, plays into a potential attack on Murphy by moving Democratic voters into a largely African American 10th District and a majority Hispanic 9th and leaving fewer Democrats in her 7th district in Seminole and Orange counties. That would alter a seat that Murphy won handily three times but is considered evenly split among Democrats and Republicans by Cook Political Report.
“It’s the smarter political move to just pack up the 9th and 10th as much as possible and see if you can keep the rest of Orlando out of the 7th,” Isbell said.
But, both Isbell and McDonald said, there could just be too many Democrats in Orange County, and eventually even Seminole County, for that to work.
There were 367,994 registered Democrats and 215,154 registered Republicans in Orange County as of Oct. 1. In Seminole, Democrats were just behind Republicans with 115,090 registered voters to the GOP’s 115,334. Many Democratic-leaning Puerto Rican and Hispanic voters also register as unaffiliated.
In addition, breaking up Murphy’s seat could mean dispersing Democratic voters into neighboring Republican-held districts, a potentially dangerous strategy for GOP lawmakers when the area is likely to trend even more Democratic over the next 10 years.
Texas again provides a potential guide. Instead of extreme gerrymandering by the GOP Legislature to gain even more GOP seats, McDonald said, it ultimately ended up protecting incumbents by shoring up their Republican-leaning seats instead of radically breaking up Democratic ones.
“Republican incumbents didn’t want to draw down the partisan strength of their districts in order to help the potential possibility of electing another Republican,” McDonald said.
The kind of suburban areas in Orange and Seminole counties that could be parceled out into safe GOP seats, he said, “have been trending Democratic within the last few election cycles. And that could make Republicans pause. … I think there’s some reason to think that Republicans might not be so aggressive.”
Another possible movement of Democratic votes would be to recreate the infamous District 5 that stretched from Jacksonville to Orlando, grabbing up Black neighborhoods along the way. But McDonald said that not only would that potentially cause Civil Rights Act problems by breaking up the largely Black 10th District, it would also bring back what Democrats and voting experts pointed to as the “linchpin” of past GOP gerrymandering.
Doing so also would probably violate Fair Districts in that legislators are supposed to consider county lines when drawing districts.
“I don’t think that they’ll do it,” McDonald said. “But I would imagine that it’s one of those scenarios that the Republicans are taking a look at.”
One seat almost certainly to be gained by Republicans in Central Florida is the new 28th District added this year following the 2020 Census. But even that was one less new seat for Florida than had been predicted leading up to the census, giving Republicans less leeway in where they put it.
“When you drop that rock into Central Florida, it’s going to be like a meteor and it’s going to create a huge hole,” McDonald said of the new district. “And it’s going to upset a lot of the other surrounding districts because of the debris.”
The Villages, the retirement mecca that stretches across Lake, Marion and Sumter counties, was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States from 2010 to 2020, growing by 39% from about 93,000 to about 130,000 people.
But by itself, the heavily Republican-leaning area probably wouldn’t be the basis of a new seat, Isbell and McDonald said. Instead, it’s likely to be somewhere along the I-4 Corridor between Orlando and Tampa.
“You can see Polk maybe finally getting a district that’s just Polk,” Isbell said of the county with a population of 725,000. “Right now it’s split between all these different districts.”
McDonald said he could envision I-4 as the dividing line for a new district that stretches horizontally to include booming areas around Tampa as well as in Polk.
“As I like to say, and people don’t realize this, there are more redistricting plans for a state like Florida than there are quarks in the universe,” McDonald said. “It’s a huge mathematical partitioning problem. And there are so many different ways in which you can draw a state that it boggles the mind.”
