Politics
Ron DeSantis blames Barack Obama for current congressional maps
It’s been nearly a decade since President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder left the White House. Yet according to Gov. Ron DeSantis, Obama’s legacy created a butterfly effect that necessitates congressional redistricting ahead of the 2026 elections.
“Well, Obama and Holder gerrymandered brutally across the country in this decade’s census,” DeSantis said on “Hannity.” “They actually even got into Florida, and I had to veto the Legislature’s map, and I ended up proposing one, which was a much fairer map and much better.”
DeSantis’ framing raises timeline questions.
It’s unclear how the Obama administration, which ended in January 2017, would have affected the 2020 census, which began in the first Donald Trump administration and completed early in the term of Joe Biden.
Likewise, it’s unclear how Obama would have influenced Florida’s congressional map in 2022, a work product crafted by DeSantis’ staff at the time.
DeSantis went on to say that Florida was “shortchanged in the census” of 2020, and said his team was leaning on the Trump administration for correction.
“We’re hoping that they’re going to be able to do that to give us that extra seat that we should have had. That would obviously force us to have to redistrict. And so we’re working with the Commerce Department to see how that’s going to shake out,” he added.
Regardless of how it shakes out, DeSantis says the “basis to redistrict in Florida” is predicated on “some racial gerrymandering that’s still lingering” in the map he signed in 2022.
Florida was “gypped” out of seats, according to DeSantis, despite the 20-8 majority Republicans now hold in the congressional delegation. To put that supermajority in perspective, there are a little more than 1.3 million more Republicans than Democrats in a state with nearly 13.6 million registered voters.
Despite the GOP advantage being more substantial than their edge in party registration, DeSantis believes new maps would be “fairer” than the one he authorized three years ago.
“The state has grown by many millions of people,” DeSantis said.
He then went on to conflate land mass with population to make a point.
“If you look at a state like Florida, we’re a red state with a few blue dots, right? And so if you do fair maps, Republicans are going to do much better,” he said.
“Florida has gone very red during my 10 years as Governor. Our population has grown, and we have every right to be able to do new districts.”
Indeed, House Speaker Daniel Perez, whom the Governor has attacked repeatedly in press conferences and friendly interviews, has already announced plans for a Select Committee on Congressional Redistricting. That means the work has begun independently of DeSantis’ Office.
The committee will exclude people who might want to run for Congress in the map they are helping to draw, the Miami Republican said last week.
And despite the claim that Florida demographics have changed drastically in recent years, there will be no new maps for the Legislature from the panel Perez will appoint.
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Mills was a day-one Byron Donalds backer in the gubernatorial race.
A former House Speaker and current candidate for Governor is leading the charge for Republicans as scandal swirls around a Congressman.
Saying the “evidence is mounting” against Rep. Cory Mills, Paul Renner says other candidates for Governor should “stand up and be counted” and join him in the call for Mills to leave Congress.
Renner made the call earlier this week.
But on Friday, the Palm Coast Republican doubled down.
He spotlighted fresh reporting from Roger Sollenberger alleging that Mills’ company “appears to have illegally exported weapons while he serves in Congress, including to Ukraine,” that Mills failed to disclose conflicts of interest, “tried to fistfight other Republican members of Congress, and lied about his party stature to bully other GOP candidates out of primaries that an alleged romantic interest was running in,” and lied about his conversion to Islam.
The House Ethics Committee is already probing Mills, a New Smyrna Beach Republican, over allegations of profiting from federal defense contracts while in Congress. More recently, the Committee expanded its work to review allegations that he assaulted one ex-girlfriend and threatened to share intimate photos of another.
Other candidates have been more reticent in addressing the issue, including Rep. Byron Donalds.
“When any other members have been involved and stuff like this, my advice is the same,” said Donalds, a Naples Republican. “They need to actually spend a lot more time in the district and take stock of what’s going on at home, and make that decision with their voters.”
The response came less than a year after Mills, a New Smyrna Beach Republican, spoke at the launch of Donalds’ gubernatorial campaign.
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Staff writer Jacob Ogles contributed reporting.
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