2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Florida

[Water Hazard]

The best solution to avoid being egregious in the Tampa area is to make one whole Pinellas district using its reddest precincts and send the remainder across the bay with road connections. Something like this:



I connected with route 60 here instead of 275 because I can't split Tampa Bay with 2016 shapes but the idea is the same. FL-13 here is about Trump +10. Given that FL-14 is contiguous by road and takes out more than just the black precincts (the part of Pinellas in the district is only 29% black), I don't see why the court would have a problem with it.

It's pretty easily to deal with the remainder of Hillsborough here using Pasco and/or Polk. You could even make an R seat entirely in Hillsborough, though it probably would only have gone for Trump by high single digits. Pinellas/Hillsborough/Pasco is almost exactly 4 districts by 2016 numbers.

Similarly, I don't believe a GOP-appointed court will have a problem with getting rid of FL-05, provided the map doesn't do something like split the black areas of Jacksonville. It's easy to make all of the north Florida seats safe R, so there's no incentive for the GOP to leave it as is if they don't have to. But regardless, whether it goes away or not doesn't have much of an impact on how the rest of the map is drawn, and ultimately only the court can decide what's permissible.

[Water Hazard]

Similarly, I don't believe a GOP-appointed court will have a problem with getting rid of FL-05, provided the map doesn't do something like split the black areas of Jacksonville. It's easy to make all of the north Florida seats safe R, so there's no incentive for the GOP to leave it as is if they don't have to. But regardless, whether it goes away or not doesn't have much of an impact on how the rest of the map is drawn, and ultimately only the court can decide what's permissible.

One of the absolutes here in redistricting is the case of minority seats. The redistricting amendment is incredibly lax in most places, but it does say "Districts may not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process; or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice."

This essentially means that you cannot cut a minority seat once it is drawn. One can jostle the percentages of course, with the incentive to push minority percentages higher until the point when it's better to cut districts in twain for multiple plurality seats. FL05 itself has been an AA seat for decades - it just went to Orlando. And of course it can't return to Orlando in 2020 because that a: was illegal and returning the district would just invite true redistricting reform, b: would cut FL10 which is also now protect by the constitution. It can't be cut, only reshuffled.

This provision of course doesn't favor any side in particular. While it benefits the dems in the north, it hurts them in along the I4 - most notably in the case of SD19. And then there are there is Miami-Dade and her peculiar Hispanics of course.

Interesting. So per the redistricting amendment, would a "minority" district be defined by a majority non-white population, and are there further stipulations on how a minority district could be changed other than simply maintaining its minority-majority status? That would essentially mean that districts 5, 9, 10, 14, 20, and 23-27 are protected.

Also, is there any clarity given by Florida law regarding how Hispanic a district can be before it's considered packing? I assume if there can't be a Miami-Dade 90% Hispanic GOP seat, any GOP seat in the area not taking Monroe County has to cross the Everglades. Between those Miami constraints and trying to salvage red areas of Palm Beach and Broward, that could get interesting.