President Donald Trump and his Republican Party are vigorously gerrymandering all over America after the Republican-leaning Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act — but this may boomerang in the red state of Florida.
“Under a new congressional map signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last week, the growing community of Puerto Ricans and South Americans on display in Kissimmee will be splintered across four districts,” The Washington Post reported on Monday. Discussing a district that is being splintered into four parts, and which is currently represented by Rep. Darren Soto, the Post reported widespread dissatisfaction with the redistricting even from voters who may have actually opposed the Democratic incumbent.
“You’re not giving the voters the respect they deserve,” Ricardo Garcia Rosario, a former Florida GOP field organizer who joined other Hispanic Republicans in denouncing the redistricting. Rosario made it clear that he wants to vote against Soto — but that means actually being able to cast the aforementioned bellow.
“Give me a fair opportunity to vote him out,” Rosario argued.
As the Post reported, the new districts are designed to increase Republican representation in that state.
“Two will continue giving Republicans an edge, and one farther north in Orlando will become even more Democratic,” the Post wrote. “In the 9th Congressional District — which is held by Soto — non-Hispanic white people will surpass Latinos as the largest demographic group, and Republican candidates will gain a clear advantage in an area stretching a two-hour drive to the Treasure Coast.” While the GOP already has 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional districts, “the new map gives them an edge in an additional four districts represented by Democrats.”
For example, Soto’s district will see its non-Hispanic white population increase from 28 percent to 44 percent while the overall Hispanic population falls from 54 percent to 41 percent, with Puerto Ricans falling from 26 percent to 17 percent.
“I still have a lot of my fellow Boricuas in the community, but it quite deliberately breaks the community apart,” Soto told The Post. Although the vowed to win his seat regardless of its new composition, Cook Political Report senior editor Dave Wasserman told the Post that this “is still very far-fetched given that this district is now about as Republican as Kansas
The frustration captured by the Post is shared by other observers who note that, while Republican judges like the Supreme Court majority tend to allow the GOP to gerrymander, they seem to apply a double-standard toward Democrats, such as the Virginia Supreme Court throwing away a gerrymandered map that won three million voters and a majority in a recent state referendum.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) "openly said that Florida’s prohibition on partisan and racial gerrymandering was unconstitutional," Mother Jones columnist Ari Berman told The New Republic's Greg Sargent on Monday. "He basically is now daring the courts to strike down what is enshrined in Florida’s constitution. That is far more blatantly unconstitutional than whatever minor technical errors may have occurred in Virginia—and there’s obviously debate about whether there were even any technical errors that occurred in Virginia."
Also citing the Louisiana redistricting efforts, Berman added that “the process has been completely different in all of these red states. They have not only not been approved by voters, but they have broken so many different norms in terms of how they’ve gone about this process.”