{"id":251155,"date":"2026-04-29T15:04:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T15:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/251155\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T15:04:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T15:04:26","slug":"desantis-map-drops-central-floridas-hispanic-majority-seat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/251155\/","title":{"rendered":"DeSantis map drops Central Florida’s Hispanic-majority seat"},"content":{"rendered":"

TALLAHASSEE \u2014 A new redistricting plan Gov. Ron DeSantis wants the Legislature to approve this week eliminates Florida\u2019s sole Hispanic-majority Democratic congressional seat, in violation of the state\u2019s Fair Districts amendments and possibly of the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 28 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.<\/p>\n

DeSantis\u2019 map splits the Hispanic vote now in Central Florida\u2019s Congressional District 9 among several different Republican-leaning districts \u2014\u00a0 turning the seat occupied by Kissimmee Democrat Rep. Darren Soto, who is of Puerto Rican descent, into a strong-leaning Republican seat.<\/p>\n

However, it preserves three Hispanic-majority Republican seats in South Florida.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s a reflection of the commitment of this legislature to be hell bent on decimating the voting rights of Floridians,\u201d Genesis Robinson, cofounder of the Equal Ground voting rights group, told the Orlando Sentinel.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

DeSantis\u2019 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\u2019s district from 50% to 36%, said Matt Isbell, an elections analyst and Democratic consultant.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not race neutral. It is clearly deliberate,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Soto\u2019s 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\u2019s seat.<\/p>\n

DeSantis\u2019 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\u2019s Fair District rules are also unconstitutional because they also require that race be considered.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"DemocraticDemocratic political consultant Matt Isbell created this map showing the distribution of the Hispanic voting-age population (VAP) in Central Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposed Congressional redistricting. District 10, now held by Orlando Democrat Maxwell Frost, would be the sole Democratic-leaning district in the region. The reconfigured District 9 would lose its current Hispanic majority and gain Republican voters, posing a reelection challenge for incumbent Osceola Democrat Darren Soto. (Courtesy Matt Isbell, MCI Maps)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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 \u2026 that the way they drew FL-9 will be legally acceptable,\u201d said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato\u2019s Crystal ball, a political analysis blog at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not surprised that this governor and the legislature have now come four years later \u2026 doing the same thing to our Hispanic brothers and sisters,\u201d Robinson said. \u201cThey have equal access rights to elect candidates of their choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"GenesisGenesis Robinson, cofounder of Equal Ground, speaks to a crowd of protestors gathered at the State Capitol on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. About 200 showed up on the opening day of a special session to protest the new redistricting map by Gov. Ron DeSantis that eliminates four Democratic seats, including a Hispanic-majority seat in Osceola County. (Jeffrey Schweers\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Poinciana resident Adenago Galarza said the proposed change worries him.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst of all, we are underrepresented anyway, as a Latino in Florida,\u201d said Galarza, a retired New York City police officer. \u201d I believe that if you eliminate that seat then we don\u2019t have a say,\u201d he said. \u201cSo we have to rely on somebody else that\u2019s not from the neighborhood to take up our fights or our concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Jorge Bonilla, a conservative radio host who has lived in the Orange side of Soto\u2019s district for more than a decade, said most residents won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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

\u201cI don\u2019t 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,\u201d Bonilla said.<\/p>\n

At the Capitol, protesters carried placards supporting Fair Districts Amendments, which voters approved in 2010, and denouncing the governor\u2019s scheme as a bad faith gerrymandering scheme that only benefitted his and other Republican leaders\u2019 ambitions.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine your map being twisted into strange shapes\u2026 and you\u2019re a young mother concerned about affordable housing and your seat is lost in the shuffle,\u201d said Carla Rivera, a registered voter from District 9 and policy director for Alianza for Progress, an advocacy community for Puerto Ricans and Hispanics. \u201cI am young. I am Hispanic. And I feel my vote is not being counted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"PeoplePeople came from all over Florida to the State Capitol Tuesday, April 28, 2026, to protest Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new congressional map, which eliminates four of the state’s eight Democratic seats including the state’s only Hispanic-majority district. giving Republicans a 24-4 edge. (Jeffrey Schweers\/Orlando Sentinel)<\/p>\n

DeSantis called a special session in January, after Texas and other states already went through a similar process \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The governor\u2019s justification for redistricting is that Florida\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should not be drawing maps to favor one political party or\u00a0 incumbents, so it is on that belief that we hope the courts will intervene when the time is appropriate,\u201d Robinson said.<\/p>\n

Isbell said the elimination of the Hispanic-majority district could be the largest legal stumbling block for DeSantis because his map splits or \u201ccracks\u201d the Hispanic voting bloc in Osceola County.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese Hispanic voters are heavily Puerto Rican and and lean more Democratic\u201d and have become a major swing group in recent elections, Isbell said.<\/p>\n

And right now, he said, said that district is still protected by the federal Voting Rights Act.\u00a0 \u201cAnd even if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Voting Rights Act protections, the Florida Fair Districts amendment still applies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Florida gained two Hispanic-majority seats in the 1990s, then picked up a third in the 2000s, he said \u2014 all Miami-area districts with heavily Cuban-American and Central American neighborhoods. It gained a fourth in 2016 when Soto was elected.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow we\u2019re going backward,\u201d Isbell said.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

DeSantis\u2019 office said it did not consider Fair Districts because it views it as wrongly requiring race-based decisions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd because race was never considered, the map also makes no attempt to adhere to the race-based requirements of the FDA,\u201d the memo said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TALLAHASSEE \u2014 A new redistricting plan Gov. Ron DeSantis wants the Legislature to approve this week eliminates Florida\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[114,115,139,141,140,99,109],"class_list":["post-251155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-latest-headlines","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-politics","tag-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}