Ron DeSantis is executing a calculated power play to circumvent Florida's constitutional ban on partisan gerrymandering and engineer more Republican House seats before Election Day, according to interviews with lawmakers, lawyers, and redistricting experts.
The governor called a special legislative session for Tuesday to approve new congressional maps that his office has drawn in near-total secrecy. The strategy relies on three legal and procedural levers to outrun court challenges: the Purcell Principle, which limits judicial interference close to elections; executive privilege shielding his team from depositions; and the deliberate opacity of his process itself.
What makes DeSantis' maneuver noteworthy is that Florida already banned this exact behavior. The state constitution explicitly prohibits lawmakers from drawing districts "with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent." The governor is betting that proving "intent" in court becomes nearly impossible when the maps are drafted by his confidential office staff rather than legislators leaving a public record.
Lawmakers arriving in Tallahassee for the Tuesday vote had not yet seen the maps as of Thursday night, one sign of how tightly the governor's office has controlled the process. Many legislators signaled they would simply approve whatever DeSantis submitted and leave town, effectively offloading legal liability onto his office and the governor himself.
The move reflects mounting pressure from President Trump, who has pushed Republican-controlled states to create more GOP-leaning seats in a nationwide redistricting offensive. Virginia's Democrats recently won voter approval for up to four additional Democratic districts, raising stakes in Florida, where Republicans control 20 of 28 House seats.
DeSantis rejected calls for an open process conducted during the regular January legislative session, opting instead to rush his plan through a special session and race against the calendar. Court challenges will inevitably follow, but judges face constraints from the Purcell Principle, a 2006 Supreme Court doctrine that generally bars lower courts from overturning election laws too close to an election to avoid voter confusion. That doctrine typically benefits politicians who move late.
The governor's team also plans to invoke executive privilege, arguing that because his employees drafted the maps rather than legislators, the work product is shielded from discovery. DeSantis' office used the same argument in a 2022 redistricting case, where top officials fought to avoid depositions under the Apex Doctrine, which requires plaintiffs to exhaust lower-level witness interviews before targeting executives. Such procedural delays burn court time.
The deliberate secrecy compounds the problem for challengers. Without knowing which officials created the maps or what documents exist, plaintiffs struggle to identify targets for depositions or to gather evidence of partisan intent.
Republican operatives acknowledge the risk inherent in the strategy. Creating more GOP seats requires breaking up or diluting Democratic districts, which inevitably adds Democratic voters to surrounding Republican-held seats. That can flip once-safe GOP districts in a backlash scenario, particularly as independents shift away from Republicans and incumbent turnout drops.
One Florida Republican operative nicknamed the outcome "dummymander" and cautioned that even if DeSantis passes his map, gaining four new GOP seats is far from certain in a deteriorating political environment for Republicans. National party figures unfamiliar with Florida's political geography hope the governor can somehow engineer a 22-6 Republican advantage in the delegation, but a Republican consultant involved in the mapping process offered a blunt reality check: the opposing side gets to campaign too.
Ellen Frieden, the liberal activist who led the successful 2010 Fair Districts Florida campaign that enshrined the anti-gerrymandering amendment, called DeSantis' effort a transparent partisan power grab. A Republican election law attorney who previously worked for DeSantis agreed, saying the governor is simply "delivering more seats for the Republican Party."
That same attorney noted a potential problem for DeSantis: because Florida already has valid maps from the 2022 decennial census redistricting, judges could simply reinstate those existing maps if they strike down the new ones. A mid-cycle redistricting of this kind has no modern precedent in the state.
DeSantis has justified the special session on grounds of population growth and pending U.S. Supreme Court rulings on minority voting rights, telling the Florida Phoenix that the state has "experienced 10 years' worth of population growth in, like, three years." His office did not respond to requests for comment on the mechanics of his strategy.
The fate of Florida's congressional map now rests on whether legislators approve DeSantis' plan Tuesday and whether state and federal courts later strike it down. DeSantis appointed six of seven members of Florida's Supreme Court, giving him a structural advantage if the case reaches that bench.
Author James Rodriguez: "DeSantis is testing whether secrecy, speed, and clever lawyering can beat a constitutional amendment that was supposed to end exactly this kind of maneuver."
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