All eyes are on Florida next week, as it is likely the final battleground in the high-stakes fight between President Donald Trump and Republicans versus Democrats over congressional redistricting.
A special session of the Florida legislature, called earlier this year by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to redraw the right-leaning state’s U.S. House districts, kicks off on Tuesday.
At stake is which party will control the House of Representatives during the final two years of Trump’s second term in the White House.
Republicans and Democrats over the past nine months have been redrawing the House district maps in states they control to gain partisan advantages heading into this year’s midterm elections, when the GOP will be defending its razor-thin congressional majority.
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Lawmakers in the GOP-dominated Florida legislature are meeting one week after voters in Virginia narrowly passed a referendum that, if it clears legal hurdles, will give the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature — rather than the current nonpartisan commission — temporary redistricting power through the 2030 election. It could result in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in Virginia’s congressional delegation, up from their current 6-5 edge.
The vote in Virginia put more pressure on DeSantis to deliver a new map in Florida that could create between three and five more right-leaning congressional districts.
“Florida has the right and the intention to do it. And my view is that they should,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Wednesday when asked if Florida’s maps should be redrawn in time for the midterms.
A Florida-based Republican in the governor’s wider political circle who asked for anonymity to speak more freely told Fox News Digital, “Gov. DeSantis is under tremendous pressure to deliver an answer to Virginia for Trump and Speaker Johnson.”
The road ahead for DeSantis is not easy: the governor already pushed through a new House map four years ago, which helped secure the GOP’s current 20-8 majority in Florida’s U.S. House delegation. Redrawing the map again just four years later is harder.
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There are also legal hurdles DeSantis faces: It is illegal under Florida’s constitution to redraw maps for partisan gain, known as gerrymandering. Democrats have vowed lawsuits against any new map that may come out of Tallahassee.
U.S. House Democratic leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries last week took aim at what some are dubbing “dummymander,” a play on words of “gerrymander,” and argued that redrawing the maps in Florida — where the GOP suffered setbacks earlier this spring in special legislative elections — would harm Republican members of Congress.
“Our message to Florida Republicans is, ‘F around and find out,’” Jeffries told reporters as he referenced next week’s redistricting legislative session. Jeffries said the redistricting move would lead Democrats to increase their target list of vulnerable Florida House Republicans.
He warned DeSantis and Republicans that “the electoral tide is turning in Florida.”
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Pushing back, DeSantis said “Please. Be my guest. I will pay for you to come down to Florida to campaign.”
“I’ll put you up in the Florida governor’s mansion. We will take you fishing,” the governor added.
DeSantis has argued that the last U.S. Census was full of flaws and claimed that it robbed Florida of an extra congressional seat. And the governor has also pointed to the major influx of new residents this decade who moved to Florida from other states in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
Not all Florida Republicans are on board with the effort, due to concerns it may backfire.
A Florida-based GOP strategist told Fox News Digital some Florida members of Congress “don’t want this.”
And pointing to the legislature, where there are some grumblings, the strategist, who asked to remain anonymous to speak clearly, said “some don’t want to do it, but their hands will be forced.”
Florida has already moved the filing deadline for congressional candidates back from April to June, but for candidates already running for Congress, the late-in-the-game map redraw brings plenty of complications.
“Changing the map changes the race. Candidates have been interview for a job description that just got a requirement change,” veteran Florida-based GOP donor and bundler Dan Eberhart told Fox News Digital.
Eberhart noted that “these candidates are going to have to call an audible really soon – changing districts and probably new competitors.”
Florida may be the final battlefield in a political war that started a year ago.
Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, Trump last spring first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.
The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s fragile House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.
When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.
But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.
Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
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California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that temporarily sidetracked the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and returned the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.
That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.
The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.
Republican-controlled Missouri and Ohio and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push.
In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.
Republicans in Indiana’s Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House. The showdown in the Indiana statehouse grabbed plenty of national attention.
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