Incumbent: Anna Paulina Luna, R
This is the sixth of the Almanac’s updated House district profiles for the newly drawn districts in Florida. They have been written by Senior Author Rich Cohen. As with all new Almanac content on this Substack, they will be accessible only to paid subscribers. We will run a new Florida district profile every day or so until we’ve exhausted the new writeups.
Pinellas County: When Spanish explorers arrived in what is now St. Petersburg some 500 years ago, they discovered an area covered by a primeval pine forest teeming with bears, panthers, turkeys and bald eagles. They named the area “Punta Pinal” (“point of pines”), a name that has since been Anglicized into the Pinellas Peninsula. The area remained sparsely populated until two events accelerated its development. First, the Orange Belt Railway connected the region to national markets in the 1880s. Second, Dr. W.C. Van Bibber, addressing the American Medical Society convention in 1885, named the peninsula the healthiest place on earth, setting off a stampede of interest. By 1897, the area began its transition to a major tourist destination and, later, a retirement community.