DeSantis Wants Redistricting to Help Save GOP’s House Majority

With President Trump fearful that congressional Republicans could lose their slim majority in the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm election, he has urged the state of Texas to redraw their congressional map to add as many as five GOP seats to Congress, and that he’d like other states to follow suit.

Gov. Ron DeSantis says that Florida can be one of those states.

“I think the state is malapportioned,” he said at a press conference in Bradenton on Thursday. “So I do think it would be appropriate to do a redistricting in the mid-decade. So we’re working through what that would look like, but I can tell you just look at how the population has shifted in different parts of the state over a four-to-five year period. It’s been really significant.”

District lines are typically redrawn once a decade to account for population changes in the U.S. Census, but there is nothing barring lawmakers from creating new maps in the middle of the decade.

The governor boasted on Thursday about how he had vetoed the original congressional redistricting map that GOP state lawmakers had approved during the 2022 reapportionment process, which he called “a disaster.” He then presented his own map, which erased Black representation in Northern Florida and overall increased the number of Republicans serving in Congress from 16 to 20 which the Legislature later did approve.

While voting rights groups sued to strike down that map, the Florida Supreme Court upheld it as being constitutional. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz said that legislators had a “superior” obligation to follow federal equal protection law, and not the Fair Districts Amendment passed by Florida voters in 2010. That law said that congressional districts cannot be “drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.”

The governor repeated that he believes that the state’s population was severely undercounted in the 2020 U.S. Census Count, and that along with the changes in population (which in Florida includes many more registered Republicans than there were in 2020), the time is now to redistrict Congressional seats, instead of waiting until 2032.

“I talked with the Commerce Secretary right when he got sworn in and I told him, we got a raw deal on the Census,” he said. ”We only got one seat when some of these other states were getting seats when we’ve obviously had more growth – we should have gotten at least two, and so they were going to re-do the count in time for 2026. Now they’d have to do that relatively soon because you need time to draw maps and you need time to get that done. “

Some early projections regarding the 2020 U.S. Census indicated that Florida would gain two congressional seats, but unlike other states which devoted millions of dollars towards ensuring an accurate count,  Florida chose not to invest in such an effort, as the Phoenix reported on in 2019.

There are currently eight Democrats in Florida’s 28-member congressional delegation. Punchbowl News speculated earlier this week that among the lawmakers that Republicans could target in a new map might include Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jared Moskowitz and Lois Frankel in South Florida; Darren Soto in Central Florida and Kathy Castor in the Tampa Bay area.

Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell blasted DeSantis’ remarks later on Thursday.

“Governor Ron DeSantis’ plan to consider mid-decade redistricting is an outrageous and dangerous abuse of power and an attempt to put Donald Trump’s agenda ahead of the people of Florida,” she said in a statement. “Redistricting is intended to occur once every ten years—following the Census—to reflect population changes, not to serve as a political weapon whenever those in power fear losing their grip. There is no legitimate reason to redraw Florida’s maps now—unless the goal is to serve partisan interests and protect political allies ahead of a critical election.”

–Mitch Perry, Florida Phoenix