Jacksonville groups decry Florida’s proposed congressional redistricting

Rosemary McCoy says it is a waste of Floridian resources for Gov. Ron DeSantis to call a special session that started Tuesday to address congressional redistricting.

McCoy filed suit against the state of Florida for its 2022 congressional maps. She has not ruled out doing so again over the state’s mid-decade redistricting.

The maps the Governor’s Office released Monday would overwhelmingly affect congressional seats in Central Florida and South Florida. That did not stop Northeast Florida voting rights advocates from speaking out against the maps and their effect on Floridians.

McCoy drove from her home on the Westside to Tallahassee to speak against the maps, which the Florida Legislature will consider Wednesday.

McCoy says too many elected officials lack integrity and a spirit of public service.

“When we have a choice, we can pick someone in our best interest,” McCoy says. “It doesn’t matter the race of the person, or the party. If you have the interest of the people equally. We are humans; we are not property.”

One-party dominance

The maps are widely seen as a response to President Donald Trump’s desire to create more Republican-leaning districts to preserve the Republican majority in the U.S. House. But DeSantis says the mid-decade maps are necessary to account for Florida’s rapid population growth in recent years. He told Fox News his proposed map “more fairly represents the makeup of Florida today.”

The redistricting bill passed the Florida Senate Rules Committee 14-9 on Tuesday afternoon. All the Democrats on the committee, including Sen. Tracie Davis, D-Jacksonville, voted against the bill. They were joined by Sen. Jen Bradley, R-Fleming Island, and three others. Bradley said in committee the bill was unconstitutional and hinged on legal theory.

The maps could give Republicans as many as 24 of the 28 seats in Florida’s congressional delegation.

With one party represented by 85.7 % of Florida’s available congressional districts, it would mark the highest percentage of single-party representation in the Sunshine State since the 1950s.

At the time, Democrats controlled seven of the state’s eight congressional seats. Republican William Cramer beat incumbent Democrat Courtney Cambell by 1,543 votes to represent the Tampa Bay area in Florida’s CD-1 in 1954. Cramer became the first Republican to represent a portion of the Sunshine State in Congress since Jacksonville attorney Horatio Bisbee was seated in CD-2 after multiple contested elections in the 1880s.

Activists and members of the Florida Legislature are concerned the DeSantis team is trying to return Florida to that era of one-party domination.

“They have that cotton belt mentality,” McCoy says. “Instead of moving forward … we are sitting here in America tearing everything down. That’s the way I look at the state of Florida and our nation as a whole.

“(Redistricting) affects everyone. Once they create these policies, it’s going to affect everyone. I don’t care if you are a rich person, a poor person, a homeless person, you’re going to be affected. The impact will not be in your favor.”

In 2022, at the height of Florida’s prior redistricting conversation, historian Tameka Bradley Hobbs told Jacksonville Today that Florida’s one-party dominance post-Reconstruction and throughout the early half of the 20^th century was predicated on disenfranchising minority voters as well as implicit and explicit threats of racial violence.

Finding out on Fox

This week, racial minorities in the Florida Legislature expressed their annoyance at the proposed maps. Rep. Rita Harris, D-Orlando, and Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis, D-Orlando, said they learned of the congressional maps after DeSantis’ appearance on Fox News on Monday morning.

Meanwhile, state Rep. Angie Nixon, D-Jacksonville, in a social media video shared Monday, said the maps were illegal and unconstitutional.

Northeast Florida’s congressional maps remain similar to the 2022 maps the Governor’s Office drew.

Those maps removed a minority-access district in Northeast Florida. It was challenged in federal court by groups that included the ACLU of Florida, Florida Rising, the Florida Conference of the NAACP and others.

The Florida Supreme Court rejected the challenge in July 2025, finding there “is no possible, non-racial explanation for using a nearly 200-mile-long land bridge to connect the Black populations of Jacksonville and Tallahassee.”

Voting rights advocates express dismay

Florida Rising’s chief advocacy and political officer, Moné Holder, says she was outraged but not surprised that Florida seeks to redraw its congressional maps six years early.

“Calling for mid-decade redistricting is about more than maps. It’s about whether the people of Florida have any real say in the issues shaping their day-to-day lives and our shared future,” Holder said in a statement.

“Governor Desantis is reaching for an illegal power grab and it must stop. When politicians draw districts to protect themselves, they stop having to answer to voters. And when that happens, families across this state, from those struggling with rising housing costs to those rebuilding after disasters, pay the ultimate price. There’s nothing fair about deciding elections before voters do. Over half of Floridians oppose partisan gerrymandering, not to mention it is banned by our state’s constitution. Which begs the question: do voters still have power in Florida or are politicians taking it for themselves?”

McCoy says she is disgusted by the political system that allows for the redistricting conversation to take place during the middle of a decade.

Elsewhere in the River City, the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville says it will fight the proposed maps, which it believes violate the letter and spirit of Article III, Section 20 of the Florida Constitution.

The Florida Constitution states that no individual district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party. The state constitution also declares districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying equal opportunity of racial or language minorities from the ability to elect representatives of their choice.

“Black voters are used to illegal tactics being used to suppress representation, and Governor DeSantis’ new Congressional redistricting map is just one more attempt,” Northside Coalition President Kelly Frazier wrote in a statement. “In Jacksonville, NCOJ sued the city council and won when city council ‘packed’ Black voters into a few districts to reduce our influence. Now, DeSantis is openly ‘cracking’ Democratic districts to dilute Democratic influence — which is illegal under the Florida Constitution — in order to send more Republicans to Washington.

“We will fight this map, and, win or lose, will work to get out the vote in November so that, as much as the politicians try to pick their voters, it will be the people who pick their representatives.” 

‘Maps, they don’t love you like I love you’

Once Northeast Florida’s “minority access district” was removed during the 2022 redistricting process, voters in Nassau, Clay and portions of Duval County elected Republican Aaron Bean, R-Fernandina Beach, to the newly drawn Congressional District 4.

Bean said during his victory party in Fernandina Beach that the “opportunity didn’t even exist” as recently as seven months before his election. He added at the time that he planned to change course after he was term-limited from the Florida Senate.

“Then, under Ron DeSantis, something happened. A little over six months ago this new seat was created — one of four,” Bean said in his victory speech. “It caused us to start chatting about it. I felt a calling. We felt a calling. We thought we could do something. If we could take a chance and make that happen.”

Bean’s congressional colleague, Rep. Darren Soto, CD-9, quipped on Monday night that the DeSantis administration’s latest maps resembled those a 3-year-old would draw on an Etch-A-Sketch.

After getting his jokes off, Soto claimed the maps DeSantis’ office released Monday morning would dilute the vote of 1.3 million Puerto Ricans who live in Florida.

Soto’s seat is one of four that could be affecte by redistricting.

All four seats are currently occupied by Democrats who are women, religious minorities or racial minorities. They include Rep. Kathy Castor, CD-14, Rep. Lois Frankel, CD-22, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, CD-25.

Politico reported Monday that Rep. Jared Moskowitz, CD-23, would be shifted to a new congressional seat.

McCoy is hopeful elected officials devote their time to tackling affordability, housing access, wages and cost of living rather than redistricting.

But she doesn’t hold her breath.

“This is so unbalanced,” McCoy says. “They are going to vote in the way they want to vote. It’s not in the best interest of all people.”