A judge in Florida refused to temporarily block the state’s aggressive new congressional map on Tuesday, allowing it to stay in place as a lawsuit against it moves forward. The map could give Republicans four additional seats as they try to maintain control of Congress in the November midterm elections.
The voting rights groups who filed the suit this month argue that the map violates a state ban on partisan gerrymandering that Florida voters passed in 2010.
But Judge Joshua M. Hawkes of the Second Judicial Circuit in Tallahassee wrote that the groups had not sufficiently proven that the map had been drawn with partisan intent.
The plaintiffs said that they would appeal, though time is running short. Congressional candidates began qualifying for Florida’s primary ballot on Monday, a deadline that was extended earlier this year as President Trump pushed for Republicans across the country to take the highly unusual step of redistricting in the middle of the decade.
Florida’s primaries are scheduled for Aug. 18.
Under the previous congressional map, which had been in place since 2022, Democrats held eight of the state’s 28 congressional districts; under the new map, they are favored to win only four.
Republican lawmakers, who hold supermajorities in the State House and Senate, adopted the new map last month at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. Lawmakers were preparing to vote on it when the Supreme Court issued a long-awaited decision that weakened the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act; the ruling set off a scramble across Republican-held Southern states to redraw voting districts.
The court found that Louisiana lawmakers had unconstitutionally relied on race when they drew a 2024 congressional map to include a second majority-Black district. Mr. DeSantis had predicted such an outcome and used it to justify redrawing Florida’s map, citing a majority-Black district in South Florida.
The state’s new map not only carved up that Democratic-held district, making other districts around it more Republican-leaning, but also did away with Democratic-held seats in the Tampa Bay and Orlando areas.
The case before Judge Hawkes, whom Mr. DeSantis appointed to the bench in 2020, did not center on racial gerrymandering. Rather, three voting rights groups argued that the map violated the ban on partisan gerrymandering that Florida voters passed in 2010 under the Fair Districts amendments. The DeSantis aide who drew the new map told state lawmakers last month that he had done so based partly on the partisan breakdown of voters.
“This case is unusual because the map drawer admitted on the public record that the districts were drawn with partisan data and without the need to comply with the Fair District amendment,” Christina Ford, a lawyer with Equal Ground, one of three groups that sued, said in a virtual court hearing in mid-May.
But lawyers for the DeSantis administration and for state lawmakers countered that the plaintiffs had not proven a partisan intent behind the new map. They said that a full trial should take place before the judge decided whether to block the new map, especially given that the midterms are so soon.
They also argued that the state no longer needed to comply with the ban on partisan gerrymandering.
A Fair Districts provision allowing race to be used as a consideration when redrawing maps is unconstitutional, they maintained, and so the provision banning partisanship as a consideration should also be invalid.
“It is intertwined,” Mohammad O. Jazil, a lawyer for Florida’s executive officials, said in the court hearing. “It is interlocked, it is interwoven.”
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
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