Florida is the last of the states with the happy task of creating a new congressional district. In states in which legislatures draft the new lines, one of the motivating factors in the new lines is legislators thinking about their future plans. If your state house or state senate district (in other words, your base) is the core of a congressional district, you have a decent shot of winning that district if you choose to run. And the best time to run is when the congressional seat is open. While the decision of the incumbent to retire (or run for higher office) is one way that the seat can become open, a new seat is automatically an open seat.
Of course, new/open is not the number of the district. It’s the geography of a district. If an incumbent is seeking another term, they are most likely to file in the district that has their old district as the core even if the district has a new number. (unlike Texas which has just tended to give the “new” districts the new number leading to numbers leapfrogging all over the map, Florida has tended to have the districts flow somewhat logically from the northwest to the southeast.) If you are a member with influence wanting to run for Congress, you want: 1) no incumbent members of Congress residing in your district (although it is possible to run for a district that you do not live in); 2) no incumbent member of Congress who represented the majority of the district; 3) to have the entirety of your current legislative district in the congressional district; and 4) to have the district favor your party as strongly as possible. In theory, under the Florida Constitution, the new lines are not supposed to be drawn to unfairly favor either party or to protect incumbents. And while courts can intervene if the legislature goes too far, the odds that any partisan legislature will strictly obey those constitutional provisions are slim approaching none.
These types of concerns influence redistricting in every state. Unfortunately, to address those personal concerns of those drawing the lines would require knowing the local politics of every state. Instead, these articles assume that the main concern is the battle between maximizing partisan advantage (in those states with legislatures in charge) versus trying to draw proportional and competitive lines (in those states with commissions in charge). With the current map (drawn after the courts struck down the previous map as too partisan), the state is actually roughly proportional. The Republicans have a 16-10 advantage (with one Democratic seat vacant), but the map is theoretically 14-13.
While the state as a whole is growing, that growth is not equal across the state. With the caution that Florida has a lot of weirdly shaped precincts that are split (i.e. in multiple districts), it looks like the northern five districts (the Panhandle, Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Jacksonville) are only a total of 40-60,000 over the target size for the new districts. The First District (the Western part of the Panhandle currently misrepresented by Matt Gaetz, at least until he is taken into custody) is around 20-25,000 over the target, but the Second District (the rest of the Panhandle) is slightly under its target population. The Fifth District (the Georgia line and Tallahassee) and the Third District (Gainesville) are close to the target population (depending on the allocation of population in those split precincts) and the Fourth District (Jacksonville area) is around 30-40,000 over the target population.
The fastest growing part of the state appears to be the I-4 corridor from Daytona Beach to Tampa-St. Petersburg (around 400,000 excess population) with the southern part of the the state coming in second (around 250,000 excess population). That implies that the core of the district will probably be just south of I-4.
My first draft had the new Twenty-Eight District (with the understanding that the districts might be renumbered to keep the general north west to south numbering system currently used which would probably make the new district the “Eighteenth District” with the current Eighteenth through Twenty-Seventh Districts becoming the Nineteenth through Twenty-Eighth District) stretching from the southeastern part of Hillsborough County in the west (in other words just outside of Tampa-St. Petersburg area) through the southern part of Polk County and Osceola County and the northern part of Hardee County, Highland County and Okeechobee County and most of Indian River County and St. Lucie County. Everything north of that is shifted slightly to the north and west. Everything south of that is shifted slightly to the south. As far as significant political impact, the new lines made the Ninth District just a little bit more lean Democrat, and the Tenth just a little less solid Democrat, but there does not look like a lot of wiggle room around the border. The Thirteenth stays as a toss-up district (which is where we could see some trade-off with its neighbors (sending Democrats to the Twelfth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth and getting Republicans in return). The first draft also put the Eighteenth at risk for the Republicans but made the Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh (Democratic districts currently held by Republicans a little bit more into the toss-up category). The new Twenty-Eight District would be a safe to solid Republican District. But the Eighteenth is surrounded to the south by Democratic districts, so the Republicans would likely try to repair the Eighteenth by shifting some of its Democratic voters south in exchange for Republican voters.
With some fiddling around, it was possible to restore the Eighteenth to its current lean Republican status and to make the Thirteenth a little more favorable to the Republicans.
Looking at the big picture, however, as stated in earlier posts, the big issue is to what extent the composit number from the first part of the decade have any continued relevance. Has the Trump hostile takeover of what used to be the Republican Party scrambled the voting pattern. If so, it might not be reasonable for those drawing the lines to depend on how Mitt Romney did in 2012 or how other candidates did in 2014. The proper composite numbers might be 2016-2020.
The other big issue is how honest the state courts keep the legislatures (and in Colorado, how nonpartisan its commission ends up being). My final map was 15-13 in favor of the Republicans (a net one over the current map) but putting the winnable swingish seats to the side, the map was 13-9 with six seats that could go either way (Seventh, Thirteenth, Sixteenth, Eighteenth, Twenty-Sixth, and Twenty-Seventh). From the states gaining a seat, I am seeing a likely +5 for the Republicans with the potential to maybe move some swing seats toward the Republicans.
The next series of states are going to be those that kept their current number of seats. In these states, the issue will be the adjusting of seat lines to try to nudge a seat from swing to lean or from lean one direct to leaning the other direction. The other issue is going to be the population shifts within the state. The loss of residents in the Republican leaning areas of the state may interfere with the desire to move Republican voters into Democratic districts as lean Republican districts shed some of their reddest areas to bring the reddest districts up to compliance with one person, one vote.
