Democrats put enormous time and money into congressional redistricting, with a multi-year effort led, among others, by Barack Obama and Eric Holder. Adding to the rogues gallery is Marc Elias of Clinton campaign/Steele dossier infamy, who has led many of the litigation efforts.
For a while, it looked like the efforts would pay off big league, particularly in California and New York State, where Democrats declared they had given a Master Class on screwing Republicans out of several seats.
The result nationally was a gain of potentially several seats for Democrats purely through redistricting, which it was thought would hold open the slight possibility of holding the House. But then that coup d’etat became shaky with a Judge throwing out the gerrymandered NY State map, with an appeals court hearing on April 20.
And then there was the Free State of Florida, also known as DeSantistan. Ron DeSantis may have delivered the coup de grace to Democrats’ redistricting advantage, per NBC News:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed a new congressional map that would create four more Republican-leaning districts and wipe out Democrats’ national redistricting advantage.The map — which would carve up a Black-held district — was released Wednesday afternoon, just days after state legislators said they would defer to DeSantis, a Republican, on the new congressional boundaries. The Republican-controlled Legislature drew maps that would have created less of a GOP advantage, but DeSantis vetoed them last month.DeSantis’ map would create 20 Republican seats and eight Democratic ones based on 2020 electoral data, according to Matthew Isbell, a leading Florida-based Democratic data consultant who analyzed the maps Wednesday evening. Florida’s congressional delegation consists of 16 Republicans and 11 Democrats in the House. The state was apportioned an additional House seat after the 2020 census.
You’ll never guess what Democrats are calling the DeSantis map. No, seriously, you’ll never guess:
Black lawmakers in Florida are denouncing Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) latest congressional redistricting plan, with one state senator calling it “overtly racist.”DeSantis’s new plan, submitted Wednesday, could help Republicans pick up four seats in the House this fall, multiple outlets have reported….The new plan would do this in part by likely reducing the number of districts where Black voters are a plurality. Rep. Al Lawson (D-Fla.) told the Orlando Sentinel the plan “is a continued scheme by DeSantis to erase minority access districts in Congress in order to create more seats for the Republican party.”DeSantis has specifically argued that Lawson’s majority Black 5th District, which stretches along the Florida-Georgia border from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, is unconstitutional. DeSantis vetoed a congressional map approved by the GOP-controlled state legislature in March that didn’t eliminate the 5th District.The new map would break up that district. It would also reduce Black voting power in St. Petersburg and Orlando, according to Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.“The fact he has the gall to do something like this clearly shows what he thinks of minorities and black voters,” Florida state Sen. Randolph Bracy (D), who represents Orlando and is running for Congress in a district that would lose Black Democratic voters under DeSantis’s proposed map, told the Sentinel. “This is the most overtly racist action that you can do.”
DeSantis, however, refuses to keep the Lawson district because it was racially gerrymandered to keep Lawson in Congress, and DeSantis wants no part of racial gerrymandering, via NBC News (link above):
“We are not going to have a 200-mile gerrymander that divvies up people based on the color of their skin,” DeSantis said Tuesday at a news conference in Miami. “That is wrong. That’s not the way we’ve governed in the state of Florida. And obviously that will be litigated.”
So DeSantis did his usual jiu-jitsu, taking a hot button issue (a black congressional district racially gerrymandered)and turning it into a winning political issue.
There will be challenges, so it’s not a sure thing, but DeSantis again puts himself in the national spotlite on issues of importance, just like the anti-grooming bill which lured Disney and others into defending having public school teachers secretly talking sex and gender identity to kindergarteners.
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