Politics

Florida Votes Today on a Map That Could Cancel Out Virginia’s Democratic Gains

By Mike Harper · April 29, 2026

Florida lawmakers are voting today on a congressional map that their own members privately worry could blow up in their faces — and Democrats are already in court trying to stop it.

Governor Ron DeSantis unveiled the proposed map Monday. Florida House and Senate committees approved it Tuesday within hours of the special session opening, without public hearings and over objections from both Democrats and several Republicans. Both chambers are expected to give final approval Wednesday — meaning a map that would reshape Florida’s congressional delegation was conceived, advanced through committee, and passed into law in less than 72 hours.

The map, drawn by DeSantis staffers, would shift Florida’s congressional delegation from its current 20-8 Republican advantage to an intended 24-4 split — creating four new GOP-leaning seats by redrawing districts currently held by Tampa Democrat Kathy Castor, Orlando Democrat Darren Soto, and two South Florida Democrats. DeSantis released the map first to Fox News Digital, color-coded in red and blue — a detail that election law experts noted immediately, since Florida’s constitution includes anti-gerrymandering provisions that explicitly prohibit using partisan intent in drawing districts.

“I drew this map as a race-neutral map, without consideration for race,” Jason Poreda, the DeSantis staffer who drew the lines, told lawmakers in Tuesday’s committee hearing. Laughter erupted in the room. The Republican committee chair immediately intervened. “There will not be laughter,” he said.

The political logic behind the map is straightforward. Florida is the last available state where Republicans can target House seats through redistricting before the November midterms. Texas drew five new Republican-leaning seats last year. California Democrats countered with five of their own. Virginia voters approved a Democratic map last week that could produce four Democratic pickups. Florida is Trump’s — and DeSantis’s — answer.

The problem, as several Florida Republicans have acknowledged privately, is that creating four new GOP-leaning seats requires diluting the Republican margins in existing safe seats. In a midterm environment where Democrats have been dramatically outperforming their 2024 baselines in special elections, making previously safe Republican incumbents compete in newly competitive districts is a real risk.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been direct about what he sees as the political miscalculation.

“Our message to Florida Republicans is F around and find out,” Jeffries said. “If they go down the road of a DeSantis dummymander, the Florida Republicans are going to find themselves in the same situation as Texas Republicans, who are on the run right now.”

A “dummymander” — election analyst Dave Wasserman’s term for a gerrymander that backfires on the party that drew it — is exactly what happened in Texas, where the five seats Republicans created by spreading their voters thin are now considered competitive rather than safe in the current political environment.

University of Florida redistricting expert Michael McDonald said the map is probably a net gain of two to three seats for Republicans in a normal election year, not four — and could backfire catastrophically if Democrats’ current turnout advantage holds through November.

Legal challenges are already filed. Florida’s constitution bans partisan gerrymandering under the Fair Districts Amendment approved by voters in 2010. DeSantis’s general counsel has argued that a Florida Supreme Court ruling last year striking down the racial-protection provision of the amendment effectively nullified the rest of it — a legal theory that election law scholars have described as a stretch. The Florida Supreme Court, six of whose seven members were appointed by DeSantis, will ultimately decide.

If the map survives legal challenge and is implemented, it would cancel out Virginia’s Democratic gains and leave the national redistricting arms race in roughly the same place it started — with Republicans holding a slight edge but nowhere near the five-seat gain Trump originally demanded when he kicked off the entire process last year.