Has Partisan Gerrymandering Backfired in Florida?

With just 20 days to go before the midterm elections, Kelly Kirschner faced a crowd of his supporters last week at Café Havana, a Cuban restaurant in Bradenton, Florida, located in Congressional District 16—which he is hoping to win come November.

Kirschner, a third-generation Floridian, is a former Sarasota mayor and a founder of UnidosNow, a nonprofit that has advocated for Latinos in Manatee and Sarasota counties for nearly 17 years. He effortlessly switches between English and Spanish as he addressed this group, which gathered for the launch of his latest coalition, Latinos for Kelly. The Democratic candidate is campaigning on promises to lower the cost of living, advocate for Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and protect the Gulf coast waters from development. 

“This country deserves and desperately needs a politics of good faith,” he said. “We need to get to the place that’s the opposite of what Elon Musk says, that the biggest human weakness is empathy, where we get to a place where we actually appreciate empathy, and we talk about that with our children, grandchildren, and how that will make this country better.” Half the residents in the district, he added, are living paycheck-to-paycheck. “We should stop these stupid culture wars and start focusing on how we help people, help make people’s lives better, and really change outcomes.”

Kirschner is running against Sydney Gruters, the wife of state Sen. Joe Gruters, who is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. Gruters is endorsed by Trump, as well as by other Florida Republican standard bearers, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis and US Sen. Rick Scott. Her campaign has been flooded with more than $1.6 million, including a recent check from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Kirschner and Gruters are competing to win the House seat that is now open following longtime Republican Congressman Vern Buchanan’s retirement. The race has recently captured the attention of Trump loyalist Laura Loomer, who attacked Kirschner using his old social media posts regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. “She attacked us,” Kirschner said during the event, noting that his GOP opponents “don’t send the attack dogs” unless “they’re on the verge of losing.” Gruters did not respond to my requests for an interview.

Kirschner pointed out two recent polls that show the race will be tight, with one showing Gruters leading by just four points and the other, with Kirschner ahead by just one point. This scenario is playing out in many congressional races across Florida—including those that had been gerrymandered to benefit Republicans during Florida’s redistricting special session this year. The Sunshine State joined several other states that followed Trump’s orders to participate in mid-decade redistricting. DeSantis claimed he called the special session because Florida required districts that accurately reflected its rapidly growing population. In reality, a mapmaker later divulged at a legislative hearing that the new districts were drawn using partisan data. But, nonetheless, even with changes to the electoral map that were supposed to benefit Republicans, some races are tighter than anyone would have expected. 

I spoke to political science professors and political consultants about why so many races in Florida are in play, and they all pointed to the Iran war, the rise in cost of living that has affected all voters in this state and beyond, and the overall performance of President Donald Trump. “It begins to really impact midterm dynamics,” said Michael Worley, a political consultant for several Democratic campaigns in Florida this year. “That has been a trend that we’ve seen across the United States.”

Kirschner’s now gerrymandered district that once comprised Manatee county and a portion of neighboring Hillsborough county, now includes parts of six different counties, spanning from the Gulf coast beaches to the farming communities of central Florida. In an interview after the event, Kirschner told me that no matter how different the communities may be, the affordability crisis is hitting all of them in the same way. Several factors are working in Kirschner’s favor. One has to do with the gerrymander itself, and the fact that CD16 now includes swaths of St. Petersburg, a Democratic bubble in southwest Florida. The other seems directly related to the cratering popularity of Trump. In recent weeks, a coalition of Republicans have come forward to support Kirschner as well. “I think when you recognize, are we doing better or worse than we were two years ago, the answer is very simple,” he told me after the event. “It is much worse and that’s where we see, across the political spectrum, that folks that are coming with us.”

Republicans have controlled Florida in recent years, and of the 13.7 million total registered voters, they now have a 1.5 million registered voter advantage over Democrats. Add to this the fact that the redistricted map potentially gives the GOP up to 24 of the 28 total US House seats in the state—where before they held 20. But the new advantage comes with a catch. “When you create more districts that are favorable to Republicans, the margin is not as favorable anymore,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida. That means that when lines are redrawn to create more GOP seats, the actual pool of eligible Republican voters has become more diluted. “When they drew those lines, there was the possibility that it could backfire,” he said.

The timing of the redistricting was also critical, since it took place when Trump’s unpopularity began to rise. And then there is the simple political reality that a president’s party typically loses more congressional seats during the midterms. “An unpopular president usually loses more,” Jewett told me. “He bashed the Biden administration about inflation, but since he’s been in office it hasn’t gone down, it’s gone up. A lot of voters are really frustrated with that.”

All these dynamics come together to sometimes loosen party loyalty when it’s time to vote. “When people perceive the economy as being a problem, they tend to be more open to considering alternatives at the ballot box,” said Kevin Wagner, a political science professor at Florida Atlantic University. “There is a bit of an opening for the Democratic party.” He cautioned against overly optimistic forecasts for a blue wave, however. “If we’re being fair here,” Wagner added, “Democrats have a lot of ground to make up.” Democrats have fewer registered voters than Republicans in Florida, for instance, and the state lacks a prominent Democrat in any of its executive leadership positions. Moreover, the Florida Republican party’s coffers are overflowing, with multi-million dollar campaign funding efforts in the state.

One of the unexpectedly competitive races is Congressional District 27, which encompasses much of Miami. The GOP candidate, Rep. María Elvira Salazar is facing a challenger there, retired TV anchorman Eliott Rodriguez. According to recent polling, his candidacy is gaining momentum for a seat that has been held by Salazar since 2021. As I reported last month, Salazar came under fire from her Republican counterparts when she released an ad chastising Trump over his anti-immigrant agenda. Redistricting did not affect this district as much as others, but experts with whom I spoke said the race is in play largely because of Trump’s growing unpopularity, in particular because of his inhumane immigration policies affecting Latino families. 

Worley has been working on a few of those competitive races, including the campaign for Democratic nominee Pia Dandiya in Congressional District 22. A former educator and Apple manager, she’s running against Republican Casey Askar, a millionaire businessman. Like District 16, this district was also heavily gerrymandered by Florida’s legislature and has become, as Worley said, “one of the Frankenstein districts that the Republicans put together, thinking that it would help their numbers.” But just this week, a Republican mayor crossed party lines to endorse Dandiya. Previously District 22 only included a concentrated swath of communities on the east coast, but it now stretches across the state, past the Everglades, and includes suburbs in Naples.

Today, sections of Broward county where many non-Cuban Hispanic voters with no party affiliation, such as Venezuelans, live are part of District 22. Over the last six years especially, this block of voters moved heavily to the Republican side because of the economic strains from the pandemic. Now as they are facing economic hardships again, “they are moving away from the right,” Worley said. In the northern part of District 22 is Palm Beach county, which has been the center of a data center battle as residents strongly opposed Project Tango, a proposed a 3.6-million-square-foot center that was rejected by county commissioners this summer. Republicans, such as gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, who have largely embraced data centers, “find themselves on the wrong side of that issue,” Worley said, “which is not where you want to be at this portion of the election.”

Another issue motivating voters is immigration, especially in a state such as Florida, where aggressive enforcement has been rampant. As I reported in June, more than half of the so-called 287(g) agreements between local police and ICE are in Florida. The topic was a priority for the residents who gathered at the Latinos for Kelly event I attended. Among the speakers was CJ Czaia, a local attorney and former chair of the Manatee County Democratic Party, who highlighted the devastation experienced by the immigrant community in their area. He chastised Latinos who don’t vote, as well as those who align themselves with the Republican party. “If you didn’t vote, shame on you,” he said. “Kelly Kirschner is an iconic leader, a beautiful man, and if we don’t get him elected, we will suffer and pay the price.”

Still, polling on congressional races is more limited than for other elections, which means that the outcome will ultimately be decided on Election Day. “The voters have the last word and sometimes they surprise us,” Jewett told me, “particularly in Florida.”