Could the New Florida Congressional Map Be a Dummymander?
Florida is charging ahead with a political map that would increase the number of House districts won by Donald Trump in the 2024 election and give Republicans the opportunity to add four seats to its House delegation. But whether this will fully offset the gerrymandered Democratic map approved by voters in Virginia last week depends on whether Floridians—and Latinos in particular—will turn out for Republicans the same way they turned out for Trump two years ago.
That has already been shown to be an unlikely bet. Last month, in three special elections in heavily Trump-favored districts in the state, Democrats outperformed the Trump 2024 margin by around nine points on average, according to data collected by The Downballot, and won both a state House and a state Senate seat previously held by Republicans. (The state House seat was in Trump’s own district in Palm Beach County.) In two state legislative special elections last December, the margin change was even higher, with Democrats outperforming Kamala Harris’s performance in the seats by 22 and 17 points, respectively. Last September’s special elections for two other state legislature seats outperformed by 22 and 15 points, and three others last June outperformed by 11, 21, and 9 points. There were also two special elections for Congress in Florida a year ago, where the outperformance was 23 and 16 points. Finally, Democrats also won the mayor’s office in Miami last December for the first time in more than two decades, pulling off an 18-point turnaround relative to the Trump-Harris race in 2024.
Overall, Democrats have done better than the 2024 presidential results by an average of 15.17 points across 12 special elections for state legislature and Congress. These are low-turnout elections that do not necessarily align fully with national elections that are highly publicized and draw more voters. But the trend is unmistakable.
Nevertheless, the Florida House is expected to clear the new map today, and final action could be completed by the end of the week.
A 15-point swing would be higher than the level needed to assure a Republican victory in at least two districts reshaped by the Florida gerrymander: the 25th District along the southern Atlantic coast around Broward County, and the 22nd District, which stretches nearly across both coasts in the southern part of the state. Both of those districts favored Trump by around nine points, and both could be at risk if Democrats have a good night. Joe Biden carried both of those districts in 2020.
Stephen Wolf, a redistricting expert, found several other potentially close seats given a 2020 scenario, among districts that Trump carried in 2024. They include the 26th and 27th Districts in South Florida (58-40 and 57-42 Trump in 2024) and the 14th District around Tampa (55-44 Trump). The heavily Black Fourth District around Jacksonville was only a 55-43 Trump seat in 2024, as was the Seventh District on the central coast, near Orlando.
The House Majority PAC, the main Democratic outside funding operation, has already booked time for the fall with millions of dollars in ads around Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. That was under the old maps, but the analysis of the district splits in 2020 shows that at least some of that investment would still be viable for the midterms despite the redistricting.
Several of those districts have high concentrations of Latino voters, who have sharply turned away from Trump amid an affordability crisis and aggressive interior enforcement of immigration laws against longtime residents. The 22nd District is 33 percent Hispanic and the 25th District is nearly 29 percent Hispanic, according to Dave’s Redistricting. The 26th, 27th, and 28th Districts are all a whopping 73 percent Hispanic. The 14th District in the Tampa area is around 28 percent Hispanic.
The result, then, could be a dummymander—an attempt to gain seats that goes so awry that it actually loses them. If Democrats sweep all potentially contested races and win nine House seats, that would reflect a pickup of one relative to the current 20-8 map.
That’s not a guarantee, of course. Hispanic voters are not a monolith. One recent nationwide poll of Latino voters showed 67 percent disapproval of Trump but a much smaller disapproval rating in Florida, which has high concentrations of Venezuelan and Cuban expats who oppose the regimes that Trump has bullied or even ousted in those countries.
Democratic House members, for their part, are planning to run in their redistricted seats, including Rep. Kathy Castor in the 14th District in Tampa and Rep. Darren Soto in Orlando. There are three heavily blue seats in South Florida and four current Democratic incumbents, but one of them could potentially run in the 22nd or 25th Districts.
The proposed map is currently unconstitutional, but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is betting that the Supreme Court will retroactively bless it with its ruling in Callais v. Louisiana, which would virtually eliminate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the section intended to protect minority communities of interest from having their votes diluted in the redistricting process. As of Wednesday morning, that was a good bet. The Supreme Court issued its ruling in Callais, which does not totally kill Section 2, but makes it much weaker to apply. This creates an open invitation for Florida and several other southern states to take away districts that were designated as minority seats.
Florida also has anti-gerrymandering laws in place, but the state supreme court, dominated by Republicans, has previously shown itself willing to ignore those rules in the exercise of raw political power.
Still, Democrats are confident that DeSantis is overextending the state and will pay a price in November. “Florida Republicans are going to find themselves in the same situation as Texas Republicans,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said in a press conference amplified in a social media posting. Texas is also relying on 2024 levels of Latino support to gain five seats in its gerrymander; that also appears to be a risky wager.
The biggest prize in Florida has nothing to do with its House maps: An internal poll shows whistleblower Alexander Vindman within the margin of error against appointed U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody, though other polls show Moody with a more comfortable single-digit lead.
This story has been updated to reflect the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act Section 2.
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