The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board has a warning for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: if you move forward with re-gerrymandering your state, it might not turn out the way you’re hoping.
This comes as the architect of DeSantis’ new congressional map admits in committee that it was designed to give Republicans a partisan advantage, which, in theory, would blatantly violate the Florida Fair Districts Amendment.
“Mr. DeSantis’s plan looks remarkably like the existing map, under which eight seats are held by Democrats,” wrote the board. “It isn’t a crime against compactness and aesthetics, the way that Virginia’s 10-1 map, supported by Gov. Abigail Spanberger, has that infamous ‘Lobstermander’ to catch the incredulous eye. Yet that doesn’t make Florida’s proposal any less of a loss for competitive democratic politics.”
The intent of the new Florida map is to delete four Democratic seats — or at least to make them much more favorable to Republicans to varying degrees.
“Mr. DeSantis’s map is designed to wipe out one Democratic seat near Tampa (Rep. Kathy Castor), one in Orlando (Rep. Darren Soto), and two in South Florida (Reps. Jared Moskowitz and Debbie Wasserman Schultz),” wrote the board. “But making a blue district more Republican means making a red one less Republican. GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart has a district that Mr. Trump won by 35 points in 2024. As the lines are configured in Mr. DeSantis’s proposal, that would have been 18 points, and Mr. Trump would have carried it by a single point in 2020.”
“How confident are Republicans that November won’t bring a blue wave that swamps their House levee?” warned the board. “Not so long ago, President Obama won Florida twice. Mr. Trump’s success in 2024 included gains among minority voters, and the exit poll says he won 58% of Latinos in Florida. The risk of thinning out the GOP’s margins is that a straight-line extrapolation of political trends can turn out to be wrong.”
Ultimately, the board concluded, rather than the escalating tit-for-tat gerrymandering war, “maybe one of the parties should try to win by simply being more appealing to voters.”
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