Roll Call reports that a Florida court has upheld the congressional redistricticting plan passed by Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature against a Democratic challenge. That’s good news for Republicans. They current hold a 19-6 edge in the Florida delegation. Florida gained two seats in the reapportionment following the 2010 Census, and Democrats had hoped that they might reap significant gains. They still may: the Republican plan in effect for the elections between 2002 and 2010 made things awfully tough for Democrats, and they currently hold only three black-majority seats (anchored in Jacksonville, Fort Lauderdale and Miami), two heavily Jewish seats (Broward and Palm Beach Counties) and one seat with large black and Hispanic minorities (anchored in Tampa). In looking over the new boundaries, I estimate that the new districts could produce a delegation which is anywhere from 20-7 Republican to 17-10 Republican. The former would produce one new seat for each party, the latter would produce a two-seat loss for Republicans and a four-seat gain for Democrats. But it would require a shift back to a 2006-08 balance between the two parties and away from the balance that prevailed in 2002-2004 and 2010, for which we have no polling evidence in this election cycle.
Some redistricting mavens thought Republicans would have a hard time maximizing political advantage because of a ballot proposition passed in 2010 requiring redistricters to hew closely to county and municipal boundary lines. The 2002-2010 plan paid relatively little heed to them, and the 2012 plan doesn’t pay much more. But the districts in this plan that look most grotesque on the map and crisscross county and municipal lines are the black-majority districts and the heavily minority Tampa Bay district. Republicans like to create such heavily Democratic districts, because they drain voters from adjacent districts, and they are generally thought to be required under the prevailing interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. Evidently the judge in this case and the Justice Department which gave preclearance to the plan agreed that it met the requirements of the Voting Rights Act and that this federal statute trumped the Florida law passed by the voters. Don’t look for Republicans to move to change the relevant provisions of the Voting Rights Act any time soon.
