Thursday the Florida house finalized redistricting plans for Congress, the Florida House and Florida Senate. Quick approval is expected by the Florida Senate next week, sending the plans on for DOJ and Florida Supreme Court review. As expected, the plans were approved on straight party line votes.
You can review the plans and data on the Florida House redistricting blog here.
What I wanted to look at was the potential shift between parties in the 3 plans. My numbers and charts are below.
This cycle the process is complicated by Florida falling under the Voting Rights Act and the approval in 2010 of the "Fair Districts" constitutional amendments, which require the delveopment of compact districts that respect community boundaries, prohibit the consideration of where currently elected official live or party consideration and prohibit the dilution of minority strength.
Because the Florida legislature did such a masterful job of Democratic district packing in the 2001 effort, they really didn't have a lot of room for improvement this time around. Add to that the additional of 2 congressional seats, shifting of populations away from Democratic rich southeast Florida and the impact of the Fair Districts amendments they weren't expected to be able to improve on their gerrymandering efforts that resulted in 2 to 1 Republican advantages across the board, despite a 500,000 Democratic voter registration advantage.
The House seems to have taken non-protection of incumbents to heart, given that their FL House plan puts at least 38 incumbents (out of 120) into competing districts. The Senate, however, does not seem to have worried about this with their plan, as none of the 40 districts result in incumbents in the same district.
Much has already been written about the domino effect resulting from the proposed Congressional plan, especially in SE Florida, with Allen West announcing he was fleeing FL-22 for a more favorable district to the north. He was able to accomplish because Tom Rooney announced he was going to run in a more western district.
To try and gauge the potential improvement in Democratic representation in all 3 plans, I compared the current distribution to 2008 presidential vote, the 2010 gubernatorial vote and the current party registration for each proposed district.
Even though voter's party registration is not supposed to be considered when drawing plans, the necessity to create minority districts, especially African American districts which are heavily Democratic, allowed the legislature to accomplish the same thing by packing African Americans into minority districts. Even so, there is potential for Democratic gains across the board.
In looking at the plan data, I considered the 2008 presidential vote as the most optimistic Democratic potential and the off-year 2010 governor's vote as the most pessimistic. This was certainly born out by the Republican improvements across the board in the 2010 general election. Voter registration is often not a great predictor, especially in northern Florida, where you still have so many registered Dixiecrat-Democrats who maintain the Democratic voter registration but really vote as Republicans.
CONGRESSIONAL PLAN:
Currently Republicans have a 19-6 advantage. Both the election data numbers would indicate the potential of reducing this to a 17-10 advantage.
FLORIDA HOUSE PLAN:
Currently Republicans have a 81-39 super majority, which pretty much allows them to ignore Democrats in Tallahassee. The potential here is certainly to eliminate the super majority, with Democrats going to somewhere between 47 and 53 with these plans. It's interesting to note in the House plan, the Republican advantage in voter registration is only 61-59. However, the Florida Democratic Party does such a poor job of developing House candidates that it will be a long time before we'd ever come close to chasing out that many Republican incumbents.
FLORIDA SENATE PLAN:
Probably the worst of the plans, especially for Republican incumbent protection. Currently Republicans have a 28-12 advantage. Perhaps there is the opportunity to pick up 2-4 seats, which would again eliminate the Republican super majority.
There's still a long way to go. Significant challenges are expected. Minority voting interests appear to have been protected minimally and, especially in the Florida Senate plan, they appear to have completely ignored the new requirement for compact districts.
By approving plans this early (the Florida constitution actually requires session start 2 months earlier in January of redistricting years) the hope is that the legislature can respond to any court challenges before the end of session in March.
But at least now, barring complete turmoil from court challenges, we have an idea of what districts are going to look like and candidates can begin to identify where they are going to run. We expect to see a lot of "domino" action in the coming weeks in Florida.