‘Clearly deliberate': Gov. Ron DeSantis cuts Florida's Hispanic-majority Democratic congressional district

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - A new redistricting plan Gov. Ron DeSantis wants the Legislature to approve this week eliminates Florida's sole Hispanic-majority Democratic congressional seat, in violation of the state's Fair Districts amendments and possibly of the U.S. Constitution.

The plan, which was submitted the day before the Legislature convened a four-day special session on redistricting Tuesday, eliminates four of the eight current Democratic-leaning districts, giving Republicans a 24-to-four advantage. Currently, Republicans hold 20 of Florida's 28 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

DeSantis' map splits the Hispanic vote now in Central Florida's Congressional District 9 among several different Republican-leaning districts - turning the seat occupied by Kissimmee Democrat Rep. Darren Soto, who is of Puerto Rican descent, into a strong-leaning Republican seat.

However, it preserves three Hispanic-majority Republican seats in South Florida.

"I think it's a reflection of the commitment of this legislature to be hell bent on decimating the voting rights of Floridians," Genesis Robinson, cofounder of the Equal Ground voting rights group, told the Orlando Sentinel.

Robinson joined about 300 people who protested the map outside the Capitol on Tuesday morning as lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Legislature began discussing it. The House and Senate are scheduled to vote on the map Wednesday.

DeSantis' plan adds Hispanic voters to the Republican-leaning 11th district and strongly Democratic 10th district, represented by Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Orlando. But it reduces the Hispanic voting-age population in Soto's district from 50% to 36%, said Matt Isbell, an elections analyst and Democratic consultant.

"It is not race neutral. It is clearly deliberate," he said.

Soto's current district is centered on Osceola County and includes part of Orange County. His new district would stretch south from mostly Democratic Osceola to deep-red Glades County, which is more than 100 miles south of Kissimmee, Osceola's seat.

DeSantis' office, in a memo released with the map, took the position that considering race in drawing congressional district is unconstitutional and assumed the U.S. Supreme Court will soon agree. His office said the state's Fair District rules are also unconstitutional because they also require that race be considered.

The Supreme Court has taken up a case from Louisiana that could strike down part of the Voting Rights Act that protect minority communities during the redistricting process.

"It certainly seems like the DeSantis administration has proceeded in such a way that they do not believe the Florida Supreme Court will enforce Fair Districts against this map and that the federal legal environment will change in such a way … that the way they drew FL-9 will be legally acceptable," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal ball, a political analysis blog at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

DeSantis and the Legislature made similar moves in 2022 when they adopted a congressional map that eliminated two seats that were created to help Black candidates get elected to Congress, Robinson said.

"We are not surprised that this governor and the legislature have now come four years later … doing the same thing to our Hispanic brothers and sisters," Robinson said. "They have equal access rights to elect candidates of their choice."

DeSantis spent months urging the Legislature to take up a rare mid-decade redistricting process leading up to the 2026 midterm elections, responding to a call from President Donald Trump that Republican-led states try to increase the number of GOP seats in an effort hold onto control of Congress.

Poinciana resident Adenago Galarza said the proposed change worries him.

"First of all, we are underrepresented anyway, as a Latino in Florida," said Galarza, a retired New York City police officer. " I believe that if you eliminate that seat then we don't have a say," he said. "So we have to rely on somebody else that's not from the neighborhood to take up our fights or our concerns."

But Jorge Bonilla, a conservative radio host who has lived in the Orange side of Soto's district for more than a decade, said most residents won't care or will welcome a chance to elect someone else to Congress. Bonilla, who is also of Puerto Rican descent, unsuccessfully ran in the district previously.

Most Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics in Central Florida are too bogged down with everyday responsibilities to care about redistricting, he said.

"I don't think everyday Puerto Ricans that live in Orange and Osceola counties are going to be heartbroken that Darren Soto has to go into the private sector," Bonilla said.

At the Capitol, protesters carried placards supporting Fair Districts Amendments, which voters approved in 2010, and denouncing the governor's scheme as a bad faith gerrymandering scheme that only benefitted his and other Republican leaders' ambitions.

"Imagine your map being twisted into strange shapes… and you're a young mother concerned about affordable housing and your seat is lost in the shuffle," said Carla Rivera, a registered voter from District 9 and policy director for Alianza for Progress, an advocacy community for Puerto Ricans and Hispanics. "I am young. I am Hispanic. And I feel my vote is not being counted."

DeSantis called a special session in January, after Texas and other states already went through a similar process – and moved the session back a week from April 20 to this Tuesday after Virginia voters approved a map that added four Democratic seats to their congressional delegation.

The governor's justification for redistricting is that Florida's population has grown dramatically since the last congressional map was adopted in 2022, along with a huge shift in voter registration that gave Republicans a 1.5 million vote edge over Democrats.

Democrats and voting rights groups have already drafted lawsuits to challenge the new map, if adopted by the Legislature this week. They called the rare, mid-decade redistricting unconstitutional, especially because Fair Districts specifically prohibits partisan gerrymandering.

"You should not be drawing maps to favor one political party or incumbents, so it is on that belief that we hope the courts will intervene when the time is appropriate," Robinson said.

Isbell said the elimination of the Hispanic-majority district could be the largest legal stumbling block for DeSantis because his map splits or "cracks" the Hispanic voting bloc in Osceola County.

"These Hispanic voters are heavily Puerto Rican and and lean more Democratic" and have become a major swing group in recent elections, Isbell said.

And right now, he said, said that district is still protected by the federal Voting Rights Act. "And even if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Voting Rights Act protections, the Florida Fair Districts amendment still applies."

Florida gained two Hispanic-majority seats in the 1990s, then picked up a third in the 2000s, he said - all Miami-area districts with heavily Cuban-American and Central American neighborhoods. It gained a fourth in 2016 when Soto was elected.

"Now we're going backward," Isbell said.

The state's Fair Districts Amendments ban drawing districts that favor one party or incumbent or one that diminishes the ability of minorities to elect the candidates of their choice. They also require districts to be contiguous, compact, follow existing political and geographic boundaries as much as possible, and be relatively equal in population.

DeSantis' office said it did not consider Fair Districts because it views it as wrongly requiring race-based decisions.

"And because race was never considered, the map also makes no attempt to adhere to the race-based requirements of the FDA," the memo said.

A staff analyst and attorney for DeSantis told a House committee Tuesday that they considered race in the 2022 redrawing of the congressional map, but did not take race into consideration this time.

_____

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published April 29, 2026 at 1:09 PM.