Ron DeSantis enters the chat: governor eyes chance to redraw Florida maps

With Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbott, the respective heavyweight governors of California and Texas, trading blows over plans to gerrymander the 2026 midterms, it was always kind of inevitable that Florida’s Ron DeSantis would enter the chat.

The Republican sees his state, the nation’s third-largest by several metrics, not least its 28 congressional seats, as pivotal in the redistricting wars for control of the House.

So few were surprised this week when DeSantis gave his full-throated endorsement to two projects to try to save the Republican majority: Donald Trump’s call for an unprecedented mid-decade census that could blow things up nationally; and state Republicans’ efforts to redraw existing district maps in their favor, similar to Abbott’s scheming in Texas.

“We have 28 now, we might have 29, 30, 31, maybe. Who knows?” DeSantis said at a press conference in Melbourne on Monday, expressing his belief that a new national population tally that excludes undocumented immigrants could expand Florida’s congressional delegation.

Currently, 20 of those 28 seats are held by Republicans. Even without a census, DeSantis and allies including the Florida house speaker, Daniel Perez, have concluded that tinkering with existing boundaries and dumping blocs of Democratic voters into heavily Republican districts could net them several more.

Perez, bolstered by a Florida supreme court ruling in July that approved DeSantis’s wholesale stripping of Black voters’ influence in the north of the state, is convening a “select committee on congressional redistricting” to do the same in the south.

The long-serving congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Trump bete noire Jared Moskowitz are two of the prominent south Florida Democrats in DeSantis’s crosshairs.

“We are going to have to do a mid-decade redistricting,” DeSantis said. “Obviously you would have to redraw the lines. Even if they don’t do a new census, even if they don’t revise the current census, I do think that it is appropriate to be doing it.”

To Florida Democrats who have promised to fight the emerging threat to the eight House seats they do still hold, DeSantis’s maneuvering is a stereotypical power-play by a governor who has frequently been able to bend the state legislature to his will.

“This isn’t about drawing lines on a map, this is about who gets hurt and who gets silenced in this thing we call democracy, or in this democratic process,” said Shevrin Jones, a Democratic state senator whose district covers parts of downtown Miami and Miami Beach.

“Floridians were extremely clear years ago when we voted on fair districts that the redistricting process should be fair and transparent, that it should be reflective of the people and not the political ambitions of those who are in power. Yet that’s what we’re seeing right now.”

To many critics, the Florida supreme court’s ruling, authored by the chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, a DeSantis appointee, was a sleight of hand: it stated that the districts drawn – by Republicans – that ensured fair Black representation violated a 2010 voter-approved constitutional amendment banning partisan and racial gerrymandering during redistricting.

Yet the effect of the ruling was to essentially nullify the amendment by validating DeSantis’s manipulation of the northern districts to the Republicans’ advantage, and to give him a green light to do the same anywhere else.

Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said the governor had seized on the ruling to blatantly attempt to rig the 2026 midterms.

“After gutting representation for Black Floridians and stacking the court to uphold it, he wants to further gerrymander and suppress the vote of millions of Floridians,” she said in a statement.

“If Ron DeSantis spent half as much time solving real problems as he does scheming to steal elections, maybe we wouldn’t be in the middle of a housing, insurance and education crisis.”

Republicans hold a supermajority in both chambers of the Florida legislature, so any walkout by Democrats, similar to that seen in Texas where lawmakers fled the state to deny quorum, would be ineffective.

Instead, Jones said, his party, at state level at least, will continue to call out what they see as underhand efforts by the DeSantis administration to join the national Republican drive to save its House majority in support of Trump’s agenda.

“I understand where Gavin Newsom and a great deal of Democratic governors are coming from when they say fight fire with fire. That’s fair, we can’t continue as Democrats to show up to a gunfight with slingshots,” he said.

“I also understand that the Republicans are in power, and I understand they have no scruples about what they’re doing, I get that. The question is when or how can we find the alliances that exist to push back on the bullshit that the Republicans are doing, because it’s an absolute threat to not just democracy, but an absolute threat to our national security and our future.”

Jones said that DeSantis, a lame-duck governor about to enter his final year in office before being termed out, had leapt upon the opportunity to inject himself back into the national picture.

Still wounded by the humiliating collapse of his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination a year and a half ago, DeSantis has seen himself eclipsed in the 2028 race by emerging hopefuls including Vice-President JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator.

“This isn’t just about Florida, it’s about national political positioning. The only way Ron DeSantis can prove that his voice is still loud is doing or saying asinine things like this to continue to kiss ass to Trump,” Jones said.

“I think the governor is trying to restart a failing campaign that lost gas quickly, and I think he’s trying to fill it back up. But that car doesn’t work any more, and I don’t know any mechanic that wants to work to fix it.”