Florida Supreme Court Turns Down DeSantis Voting Map Challenge

WASHINGTON — The Florida Supreme Court refused on Thursday to step into a challenge to a new map of the state’s congressional districts that was approved by the Republican State Legislature. The ruling all but ensures that the November elections will be based on districts that a lower state court said diluted the voting power of Black residents, violating the State Constitution.

The ruling, which preserves the new House map personally ordered by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, was a fitting coda to a once-a-decade redistricting process that began with efforts to reduce the raw political self-interest built into the exercise.

But in the end, it devolved into a power struggle between Democrats intent on preserving their narrow majority in the House of Representatives and Republicans who feel confident about retaking control of the House in advance of the 2024 presidential race.

The Democrats appear to have come out of the map-drawing battles in slightly better shape than before they began. But their gains were marginal in the face of President Biden’s plummeting approval ratings and the historical pattern of losses by the party in power. The Florida court ruling appeared to extinguish their last hope of further bolstering their midterm prospects.

In its two-sentence denial, the State Supreme Court said it was premature for the justices to intervene in a suit seeking to overturn the congressional map because the case had not yet wound its way through the state court system, which could take months or years.

The new House map dismantles a congressional district held by Representative Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, and strongly boosts Republican odds of capturing other competitive House seats.

Donald J. Trump carried Florida by 3.3 percentage points in the 2020 election. Yet in the new map, Mr. Trump was favored by a majority of voters in 20 of the 28 districts, while voters favoring Joseph R. Biden Jr. were a majority in eight.

Voting rights groups argued that the map ignored an amendment to the State Constitution approved by voters in 2010 that outlawed partisan mapmaking and specifically barred creating districts that diminished the likelihood that minority voters could elect their preferred candidates.

Mr. DeSantis contended that Mr. Lawson’s district was itself unconstitutional because it was drawn specifically to permit the election of a Black representative, taking in African American voters from across northern Florida.

A lower court blocked the Republican map from taking effect last month, substituting a map drawn by a Harvard University redistricting expert. The state’s First District Court of Appeal later lifted that stay, saying the judge had exceeded his authority. The Supreme Court ruling on Thursday rebuffed a request to overturn the appeals court’s decision.

While the Florida lawsuit will grind on, as will a handful of other court challenges to political maps nationwide, the odds that they will produce further changes in maps before November are vanishingly small.

“At this point, it seems hard to see congressional maps being upset for this November, especially given the Supreme Court’s repeated admonitions to federal courts to hold back on changes to election laws in the period close to the election,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine.

The Democrats’ comparative success in this year’s map drawing is a marked departure from the last redistricting in 2011, when Republicans’ dominance in state legislatures enabled the party to gerrymander its way to comfortable control of the House until the Democratic wave election of 2018. Even as President Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, Republicans maintained a 17-seat majority in the House.

That edge slowly eroded as courts undid some gerrymanders and the political landscape shifted. Redistricting this year netted the Democratic Party further small gains: Mr. Biden carried 226 of the 435 new districts in 2020, two more than before the new maps were drawn, while Mr. Trump carried 209 districts, two fewer than before.

Still, those numbers do not tell the whole story. According to an analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Biden performed better than his 2020 average in 215 of the new House districts — a big improvement from the current map, where he only outperformed in 207 districts. But Mr. Trump beat his average in 220 of the new districts, an indication that the House as a whole still tilts slightly Republican.

Redistricting also has created a much less competitive House map than before, in no small part because of gerrymandering, which tends to create lopsided districts. The margin of victory in the 2020 presidential contest was smaller than five percentage points in 33 of the 435 districts, a third fewer than before, the Times analysis found.

Both parties claimed success in the redistricting.

Republicans noted that they had shored up 15 to 20 Republican incumbents in Congress by drawing districts that were more safely Republican. And while the House map includes more districts that voted for Mr. Biden than ones that supported Mr. Trump, Republicans also performed two to four percentage points better than Mr. Trump on average in 2020, according to data from the National Republican Redistricting Trust.

“We are going to have a huge offensive playing field this fall,” said Adam Kincaid, the organization’s executive director. “If you had told me coming into this redistricting cycle that we’d be able to make the gains that we’ve made with less control, with a significant funding disparity between us and the Democrats, I would have taken it in a minute.”

Democrats made their own claims. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the party’s primary redistricting organization, said its calculations showed that Democrats would hold a House majority in November if they won a popular vote majority of 2.1 percent nationwide. That would represent a vast improvement from 2012, when Mr. Obama’s win did not dislodge Republicans from control of the House.

“Democrats just straight up are in a stronger position than Republicans,” said Kelly Burton, the president of the party’s redistricting committee. “We have a higher baseline number of seats. And that is true no matter how you slice it.” 

Such statements underscore how much of a zero-sum game redistricting has become as Democrats, who campaigned against partisan redistricting, chased the same kind of partisan advantage in states like New York and Illinois as Republicans have achieved in states like Texas and Wisconsin.

A decade of efforts by citizens and voting rights advocates to rein in partisan maps produced some results, though they were largely a wash. A ballot initiative undid a Republican gerrymander of the House map in Michigan, and a state court struck down a G.O.P. gerrymander in North Carolina. But courts also negated Democratic gerrymanders in New York and Maryland, and let Republican ones stand in Kansas and Ohio.

Most everywhere else, fierce partisanship was the order of the day, which Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and former chairman of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said was inherent in the system.

“It’s a political process,” he said. “It was intended by the framers to be a political process, and I don’t think you’ll ever be able to take the politics out of it.”

Nate Cohn contributed reporting.