Possible gerrymander?

Dems worry court changes could open door to GOP redrawing political districts

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling and changes at Florida’s top court leave the door wide open for Republicans to gerrymander political districts in their favor, Democrats say — and the party is already preparing for a battle.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that gerrymandering for partisan reasons — though not along racial or ethnic lines — was not explicitly banned by the Constitution, leaving it to states to be the final arbiter of how far parties can go in drawing maps.

Florida voters approved a socalled “Fair District” amendment in 2000 designed to end gerrymandering and force district lines to follow city and county boundaries as much as possible. But it took a judge’s ruling in 2015 to throw out what he said were unfairly drawn state Senate and congressional maps designed by GOP leaders.

Now, with appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis moving the state Supreme Court majority from liberal to conservative, Democrats and political scientists say the lure of redrawing district lines could be hard to resist. Central Florida could be one of the most tempting targets, they said.

“Republicans are going to work to take this [U.S. Supreme Court] ruling to create the biggest advantage for themselves they can,” said Florida Democratic Party executive director Juan Peñalosa. “And they’re going to do it through duplicitous and unfair tactics.”

The difference this time, Peñalosa said, “is now we know their playbook.”

Republicans have drawn districts based on where registered voters give them an advantage, he said. But if Democrats can bring in more nonvoters and unaffiliated voters, “it makes it more difficult to draw unfair lines.”

Republicans responded by saying nothing nefarious is planned.

‘The possibility for mischief’: The original congressional lines approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2012 featured one district, Republican Dan Webster’s 10th, that included an extension shaped like a lobster claw from heavily Republican Lake County to take in GOP-leaning suburbs of Orlando.

Another district stretched across Tampa Bay to take the African American areas of Pinellas County out of the competitive District 13.

The most notorious congressional district, Democratic U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown’s 17th, stretched from Jacksonville to Orlando and branched out to take in almost every majority African American community along the way, including parts of Gainesville, Eatonville and Sanford.

A lawsuit in 2015 led Leon County Judge George Reynolds to implement new maps, which were later approved by the state Supreme Court.

Sanford was joined to the rest of Seminole County in District 7, helping Democrat Stephanie Murphy win that congressional seat in the 2016 election.

Now, “Stephanie Murphy’s district would be a serious target for Republicans,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “Presumably it would be difficult to do an overt, obvious gerrymander — but as we learned from the 2012 redistricting, it’s not necessarily impossible to try.”

So when the Legislature meets to draw up new districts in 2021 — including, experts predict, one or two new seats due to growth in Central and South Florida — “It again opens up the possibility for mischief, I might say,” Jewett said.

‘A straight face’: The state Senate, currently 23-17 Republican, is where Democrats could best block gerrymandering attempts, said Matthew Isbell, who runs the MCI Maps website devoted to political mapmaking and analysis.

“The closer the Democrats get to a tie – 21-19, 22-18 – is the key,” Isbell said. “A narrowly split chamber can force compromise.”

There also is a limit to what gerrymanders can do, he said. Just last week, a court in North Carolina ruled the state’s GOP-drawn legislative boundaries violated the state constitution and ordered a new map.

Jewett said there were still several ways redistricting could pass a Fair Districts challenge.

District 7 currently includes parts of Orange County, he said, but “there’s no reason, with a straight face, they could just say, ‘OK, we’ll draw it now by keeping Seminole County whole but carve out some of Volusia or Brevard.’”

But doing so could raise questions in court, Isbell said. “If you’re splitting Volusia, the question is, why?”

Elsewhere, Isbell said, GOP-leaning Cuban Americans could be shifted into Democratic-held districts. But District 7 — won by Murphy in 2018 with almost 58% of the vote — could be a step too far.

“The Republicans might decide, ‘You know what, let them have it’,” Isbell said. “And they may want to make it even bluer to shore up [Republicans] in other areas.”

Murphy was asked about gerrymandering in a July interview with the Sentinel. She said her seat “is one of seven districts in the entire country with a zero partisan tilt. I can assure you, that makes for a very different [Congress] member than people who are in super safe districts, either red or blue.”