Florida redistricting after the 2020 census, plus the state’s rapid population growth, will help redraw the country’s election map next year.
POLITICO reports that “Florida has gained nearly 3 million people since the last redistricting process a decade ago,” and that expansion has “set the stage for a remaking of its political lines headed into a 2022 election likely to determine control of the U.S. House.”
The paper’s Gary Fineout and Matt Dixon remind readers that redistricting “will be controlled by Republicans, who already hold 16 of the state’s 27 congressional districts.” Democrats worry that “the new maps will only further banish them in Florida’s political desert.”
Florida will gain a 28th seat in the next Congress, not to mention a 30th Electoral College vote in the 2024 presidential election. That nicely matches the losses suffered by New York State, and ironically enough, New Yorkers fled their own COVID lockdowns for Florida.
The seeming miracle here — at least to this Coloradan’s eyes — is that the faster Florida grows, the redder it gets.
It isn’t due to redistricting dirty tricks in Florida, either, even though you can expect Dems to scream bloody murder about them anyway. Governor Ron DeSantis revealed this spring that an “overwhelming” number of new residents are registering R instead of D.
As DeSantis told Sean Hannity at the time:
The lockdowns turned them into Republicans because they say ‘I cannot fathom,’ people say, ‘I was a Democrat because of education, and I’m in California and they’re locking my kids out of school. I come to Florida, they’re in school, people are free, people are happy.’ So I think this whole process has caused some people to reevaluate some of their prior commitments.
Would that I could say the same thing about newcomers to Colorado, where the influx of Californians has turned my state deep blue.
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It isn’t just Florida that has Democrats worried about redistricting.
Super-lefty Salon warned on Saturday: GOP may be getting “greedy” in redistricting war — but Democrats are “unilaterally disarming.”
The GOP again has an advantage this year because the party has total control of the map-drawing process in 187 congressional districts while Democrats have full control of the process in just 84 congressional districts. One reason for the major gap is that some Democratic states are “unilaterally disarming,” some Democratic lawmakers say, by shifting power to independent redistricting commissions or even cutting deals with Republicans to shrink potential gains.
The author of this piece was Igor Derysh, and I’d really like to know what he’s been drinking. How is it possible for Democrats to cut deals with Republicans that would minimize their losses, while at the same time “unilaterally disarming”?
Whatever the realities of the redistricting processes might be, the Democrat panic is real enough.
And the reason is clear enough, as Derysh notes:
Republicans need a net gain of just five seats to recapture control of the House — and might be able to pick up that many through redistricting Florida alone. The GOP could easily stand to gain six to 13 seats overall through redistricting efforts in Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina.
There are still a lot of unknowns going into 2024. The biggest one is how …questionable… election tactics, legal and otherwise, from 2020 might be used again in 2024.
But it’s harder for Democrats to cheat in Republican-held districts, and it seems certain that there will be more of those next year than there were last year.
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