What Redistricting Looks Like In Every State

After passing the legislature, Florida’s congressional map is now in the courts. There’s two main options at hand: the map introduced and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and one submitted by a Harvard professor that really only affects one district: the 5th.

The second map preserves the current configuration of the 5th District, while DeSantis’s map eliminates it. Running from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, the 5th District was specifically created to enhance the representation of Black voters in northern Florida — but DeSantis has called it illegal. After Democrats sued over DeSantis’s map, a judge ruled that it was “unconstitutional because it diminishes African Americans’ ability to elect candidates of their choice.” But DeSantis’s map will remain in place for now, as it was temporarily reinstated by an appeals court pending a final decision.

For now, plaintiffs were focusing specifically on getting the north Florida part of the map struck down in time for the 2022 elections, but in the longer term, the entire map is under legal challenge over its pro-Republican bias and dilution of Black voting power. The map has an efficiency gap of R+20 and would create four new Republican-leaning seats at the expense of three highly competitive ones. If the map is used in the 2022 election, Republicans would likely flip the Democratic-held 5th, 7th and 13th districts as well as gain a new member in the 15th District, which was added to the state’s tally by the 2020 census.

The map was first enacted in April after a drawn-out standoff between DeSantis and Republicans in the legislature. At first, legislators proposed and passed new congressional maps that had only mild Republican biases and would preserve a predominantly Black 5th District, which they argued was required by the Florida Constitution. But DeSantis insisted on a map that maximized the number of Republican seats and eliminated the predominantly Black 5th, which he said violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.