In addition to splitting Black neighborhoods and lumping disparate cities together, Florida’s new congressional map does something else: create less compact districts.
Nowhere is this clearer than in District 15, which will now snake around Tampa Bay, connecting the heart of Tampa to rural Citrus County.
The change comes from the mid-cycle redistricting effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which netted four more Republican-leaning seats. The redraw left Florida districts slightly less compact on average.
District 15, which had included Temple Terrace and parts of Lakeland, now will stretch across four counties: Citrus, Hernando, Pasco and Hillsborough.
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A district’s compactness is measured by the Polsby-Popper statistical test, which considers area and perimeter and awards a score from 0 to 1. (The most compact shape possible, a perfect circle, would score a 1.)
District 15’s score fell from 0.58 to 0.26, now the third-lowest in the state. Statewide, more districts fall toward the lower end of the scale than they did in 2022.
District 15 now has a lower score than that of the former District 20, a majority-Black district that DeSantis critiqued for being irregularly shaped and having “claws that go out.”
Snaking, widespread districts can mean long distances between constituents, said Benjamin Schneer, an associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School who has published research on redistricting in other states.
“People who live in Tampa have a particular set of interests, and those are being diluted when you have these non-compact districts sneaking into a metro area and combining it with somewhere that’s pretty far afield,” he said.
The 15th District will now include majority-Black, urban, young neighborhoods in East Tampa and heavily white, rural, and older communities in Citrus Springs.
“When you have these non-compact districts going across geographies and across lots of different types of voters, districts that are basically much more heterogeneous, the types of candidates that are going to be elected may not be in line with the types of candidates that people in Tampa would want to elect,” he said.
Groups suing to block the new map cited District 15, among others, as evidence that the redrawn districts violate compactness standards.