Republican lawmakers advanced a major overhaul of Florida’s congressional districts Tuesday, a move that could reshape the political boundaries and legal landscape for redistricting in the state.
Over the objections of Democrats, who slammed the move as a blatant power grab designed to help the GOP retain the U.S. House in the midterm elections, House and Senate committees approved the new map (HB 1D, SB 8D) ahead of a floor votes later in the week.
“This is clearly unconstitutional,” Senate Democratic Leader Lori Berman of Boca Raton said. “This is gerrymandered map rigging and I don’t see how anybody can support it.”
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In the House the vote was along party lines and in the Senate three Republicans, Sens. Jennifer Bradley of Fleming Island, Ileana Garcia of Miami and Erin Grall of Vero Beach voted against the map.
Berman pointed to the Fair Districts Amendment passed in 2010 by Florida voters, which bars lawmakers from drawing new districts to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent, or to diminish the voting power of racial or language minorities.
But in a memo to lawmakers submitted by Gov Ron DeSantis on Monday when he issued the new map, his attorney argued the FDA isn’t enforceable. He pointed to a 2025 decision by the Florida Supreme Court, in a ruling that upheld the current congressional districts, that struck down the part of the FDA that prohibits the drawing of districts to favor racial minorities.
That ruling didn’t explicitly strike down all of the FDA, but Mohammed Jazil, who has represented the state in several cases involving election laws, argued it should in practice.
“It was packaged to the voters as this one big reform,” Jazil told the Senate Rules Committee.
Pushing for a challenge to all of the FDA seemed a stretch even to Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, who is sponsoring the bill (SB 8D).
“You don’t need the entirety of the FDA to be struck down,” Gaetz told Jazil. “You seem to be carrying a bit more of a burden than you need to in my judgment.”
DeSantis convened the special session to redraw the state’s 28 congressional districts, citing a pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a Louisiana redistricting case he believes will strike down part of the Voting Rights Act that allows race to be taken into account while drawing districts.
The map was made public Monday, with DeSantis’ office giving a map showing the potential partisan breakdown to Fox News before it was formally submitted to the Legislature. The new map could flip four districts, changing the current 20-8 Republican-Democrat makeup of Florida’s delegation to 24-4.
Democrats took umbrage at the move.
“Fox News receiving a map before the legislators is wild to me,” said Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-Miami Gardens. “Y’all know what that means? He has no respect for us.”
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At stake in the redistricting battle is control of the U.S. House. There are currently 217 Republicans, 212 Democrats, one independent and five vacancies in the chamber.
President Donald Trump’s has called on GOP-controlled states to change their districts ahead of the midterm elections. Texas and some others complied, but Democratic-led states responded, with California and Virginia responding in kind.
In Florida, though, the FDA is supposed to bar deliberately helping a particular party.
The map was drawn by Jason Poreda, an aide for DeSantis, who presented it to lawmakers along with Jazil.
Poreda said he used partisan data when drawing the map and consulted with other DeSantis staffers, but refused to name who they were. But he said he didn’t draw the map to intentionally favor the Republican Party and didn’t know who leaked the map with the partisan breakdown to Fox News.
The main reasons for redrawing the map, he said, were to draw districts in a race-neutral way, anticipating the pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and to account for an influx of more than 1.4 million people since the 2020 census took place, throwing some districts out of balance.
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That led directly to a redraw of several districts in south Florida that were drawn to give Black and Hispanic voters the ability to elect a representative of their choice. That led to a “ripple effect” of district line changes throughout the rest of the state, Poreda said, with the exception of north Florida, where seven districts from the current map remain intact.
The new districts were approved after hundreds of opponents spoke against them, in protests outside the Capitol and inside the committee rooms.
Orlando resident Jenny Pawlowsky got on a bus and trekked to Tallahassee to protest the proposed redistricting maps, toting a sign that read, “If you have to rig the map, maybe your party sucks.”
“We knew it was coming down the pipeline, and of course I’m upset, and I feel that neither party should be doing it,” she told the News Service of Florida.
“It feels like cheating to me,” she added. “I just want fair elections.”
