DeSantis Is Ready to Join Trump’s Midterms Power Grab

Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis is the reigning champ of the outrageous partisan gerrymander. In the last decennial redistricting in the Sunshine State, DeSantis contemptuously rejected a map drafted by his Republican legislature and came up with his own that generated a net gain of four GOP U.S. House seats in 2022 (gains Republicans held in 2024) and an overall 20-8 margin in the state. He did so despite the apparent restraints placed on gerrymandering by a 2010 “Fair Districts” state ballot initiative creating a set of tests for prospective plans. Most recently, the Florida Supreme Court approved the DeSantis map on grounds that federal laws banning racial gerrymandering overrode state laws that had protected certain Democratic majority-minority congressional districts.

So it’s unsurprising that as Texas and other states eye a mid-decade rewriting of the congressional maps, DeSantis wants to get in on the action. The governor and his allies, undoubtedly with encouragement from the White House and congressional Republicans, are preparing to take another bite at the redistricting apple, as Politico reports:

The nation’s redistricting war is now officially coming to Florida.

Citing a recent court ruling on the state’s congressional map, state House Speaker Daniel Perez said Thursday he’s creating a select committee to look at drawing up new districts seven years ahead of the normal schedule.

This syncs up with recent talk from DeSantis arguing that rapid population changes in Florida have already made the existing maps “flawed” and with Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 census numbers need to be “fixed.” But what’s really driving the bus is the national GOP lust for some election rigging prior to a 2026 midterm cycle that could cost Republicans their governing trifecta in Washington and give Democrats a toehold for fighting Trump more effectively. As The Hill recently reported, the remapping fever didn’t take long to reach Florida:

Rep. Jimmy Patronis (R-Fla.) came out in favor of redistricting in a post on social platform X, writing that “Texas can do it, the Free State of Florida can do it 10X better.”

Florida Republicans say they were already headed in this direction following a state Supreme Court decision that upheld a congressional map supported by DeSantis and state Republicans.

But the plan is gaining even more traction in the wake of Texas Republicans’ unveiling of a new congressional map.

“It’s picking up steam,” Florida GOP Chair Evan Power told The Hill. “We were probably heading there with the court decision, but Texas made it top news.” 

There are three current Democratic-held U.S. House seats DeSantis & Co. would likely target, according to Politico: those of Jared Moskowitz and Debbie Wasserman Schultz in South Florida and of Kathy Castor in the Tampa Bay area. Let’s say that happens. Add a net gain of three seats to the five Texas is arranging, then the two that Ohio (which is required under a court order to draw new maps before 2026) might engineer, perhaps supplemented by one-seat remaps in Missouri and Indiana. It’s easy to see that there’s not much Democrats (whose best and perhaps only prospects for pre-2026 gerrymandering are in California, where a risky ballot initiative will be necessary) can do to keep up.

More broadly, the Florida gambit shows how Trump is succeeding in uniting the Republican Party around the goal of raw partisan power. DeSantis, after all, once posed an existential threat to the 45th president’s comeback campaign. The two men traded vicious insults throughout their fight for the 2024 presidential nomination, and although DeSantis endorsed Trump after his own campaign failed, the bad blood appeared to persist. But the one thing Republicans can all agree on is that they want to minimize Democratic influence in American government for as long as possible, and it’s dawning on them that silly scruples about fairness may be the only thing standing in the way of an audacious reversal of the ancient pattern of midterm losses by the party controlling the White House. Perhaps Ron DeSantis still sees himself as a future occupant of the presidential office and is happy to enhance its authoritarian expansion by hook or crook.