What Redistricting Looks Like In Every State

On June 2, the Florida Supreme Court announced it would not fast-track a challenge to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s new congressional map, likely ensuring that the map will be used in the 2022 midterm elections.

Democrats are suing over the map’s 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. The new lines make it very likely that Republicans will 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 elimination of the 5th District was particularly controversial, given that it was specifically created to enhance the representation of Black voters in North Florida. A state judge even briefly replaced the DeSantis map with one that restored the predominantly Black 5th District, finding its elimination “unconstitutional because it diminishes African Americans’ ability to elect candidates of their choice.” However, Florida’s 1st District Court of Appeal overruled the decision to impose a new map (while leaving the broader questions of its constitutionality unanswered for now).

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.

The legislature passed a compromise between its and DeSantis’s positions, but DeSantis stood firm and vetoed it. Eventually, the legislature acceded to DeSantis’s demands and passed his proposed map in a special session. The vote came amid a sit-in from Democratic legislators who were protesting the map’s treatment of Black voters and argued that DeSantis had overstepped his authority by proposing his own map.