As you may or may not know, Florida governor Rick Scott (R-FL) withdrew the request that the U.S. Justice Department approve the Fair Districts Amendments and stalling their implementation. I believe that he is dragging his feet so that the amendments are not in place during redistricting, but that is not the topic of this diary.
Although I fervently supported these amendments, and was very happy when they cleared the very high threshold of 60% of the vote, and that it is another step in the fight for fair redistricting, I read a few months ago that it is unlikely to do anything about the Democrats' standing in the state. And in the future, it could possibly make it worse than it has to be.
According to this article in the Orlando Sentinel, the amendment would likely not boost the Democrats any higher than now, and especially not to majority status.
How is that, you ask? How can a state with a Democratic registration advantage have so many Republicans in Tallahassee? How can a state like that only have 6 Democrats of 25 seats? It's obviously devious and brilliant gerrymandering. But no. It's actually simple.
Earlier this month, researchers from Stanford University and the University of Michigan presented a yearlong study of where Florida voters live that ran thousands of complex simulations of elections in computer-drawn contiguous and compact districts.
Their models found that even using maps drawn by nonpolitical algorithms, Republicans would still win 59 percent of all the districts.
That's basically because more Democratic voters live in concentrated clusters in urban cores, while Republican voters are spread out along the suburban and exurban landscape, they concluded.
"Their [Democrats'] larger problem is with the extreme concentration of support in cities, and the constitutional reforms will ... not help them there," said Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford who presented the research with University of Michigan professor Jowei Chen at the American Political Science Association annual conference in Washington, D.C..
"In order to achieve a 'fair' translation of votes to seats, the Democrats would need to draw very non-compact wedge-shaped districts starting in downtown Miami and reaching out into the suburbs," Rodden said.
So basically, fair districts would give Republicans 59% of the legislative districts...which is basically what they had throughout the last decade. In a better year for Democrats, some of those seats in the GOP's current supermajority are likely to go back to the Democrats, bringing the Democrats back to the slightly larger minority status.
There are two things Florida Democrats can do: try to move Democratic voters to be dispersed among the state, or accept that basic geography keeps them from state majority status.
This didn't use to be a problem. Until the 1990s, The Florida Legislature was solidly Democratic because of Dixiecrats in North Florida. Since rural areas were sending Democrats to Tallahassee, the population dispersion was favorable to Democrats.
But those days have passed. The Florida Legislature fell to the GOP in 1994, and with the voter approval of term limits in 1992, the rest of the entrenched Democrats were gone by the end of the decade. So although Florida Democrats had a good ride, it's now harder than ever.
Here's another user-created map from Swing State Project. It shows that the amendments will change the look of the districts, but not change the basic partisanship of any, and even possibly remove Corrine Brown from the delegation.
The only Republican truly made vulnerable by this amendment is Allen West...but he was always vulnerable, regardless of district composition. The only way he wouldn't be is if they performed a gerrymander so egregious that it would suck GOP voters from other districts, and despite what the Tea Party likes about him, they likely wouldn't go that far to save a freshman. And his district is D+1, meaning any Republican in that district is vulnerable in a Dem wave year.
If anything, this could be bad news for Democrats. If by some off-chance the Democrats take the Florida Legislature some time in the future, they won't be able to gerrymander to their heart's content, because of this amendment. Democrats could certainly make inroads in the state with intense gerrymandering, while the GOP doesn't even have to.
I'm obviously not saying I didn't want this to pass. I said earlier that I did. But if you look at it, these amendments could possibly hold back Democrats more than Republicans. I know that on this site, we say we all want fair districts, but what we all really want are districts that are more fair to Democrats. And that won't happen in Florida. Because in Florida, "fair" means GOP-dominated.
So in short, don't believe that these amendments will send Democrats into a possible majority status in Florida. Maybe some day, when demographics change, but not right now.