FiveThirtyEight: “On Thursday, the Florida Legislature finally caved to DeSantis’s wishes and passed one of his proposed congressional maps — the last major piece in the national redistricting puzzle. And befitting DeSantis’s national reputation (and ambitions), it is a dream map for partisan Republicans, single-handedly adding four new Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. But while DeSantis’s uncompromising insistence on maximizing Republican power may give him a nice story to tell if he runs for president, it could also be the map’s undoing in court.
Florida’s soon-to-be congressional map (it will go into effect once DeSantis signs it) creates 18 seats with a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean1 of R+5 or redder and only eight seats with a partisan lean of D+5 or bluer. (The remaining two seats fall into the “highly competitive” category between R+5 and D+5.)
This map will significantly shake up Florida’s congressional delegation, as it virtually guarantees that Democrats will lose three of their House seats in Florida: The 7th District goes from a D+5 partisan lean to R+14, the 13th District now has a partisan lean of R+12, and Rep. Al Lawson’s North Florida district is completely refigured into a solidly Republican seat. In addition, the new congressional seat that Florida gained from the 2020 census — numbered the 18th — is dark red under this map, for a GOP gain of four seats in total.
This is about as big of a Republican bias that Florida’s congressional map could have — and darn close to the most egregiously partisan map in the country. The map has an efficiency gap of R+20, which means Republicans would be expected to win 20 percent more seats under this map than under a hypothetical, perfectly fair map. Because Florida has 28 congressional seats, that translates to a 5.7-seat Republican bias — right on Texas’s heels for the “honor” of having the biggest bias of any state.”