The Absurdity of Congressional District 16

Florida’s mid-census redistricting was nothing more than another effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis to breathe life into a political career that has been dying a slow death since his failure to launch during the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary. But like DeSantis’ other hair-brained schemes to regain favor with the MAGA crowd, it comes at a real cost to many of the Floridians he is supposed to be serving as our state’s governor. 

In 2010, with overwhelming support, Florida voters passed Amendments 5 and 6, known as the Fair Districts Amendments: the latter concerned Congressional districts, while the former applied to districts for the state House and Senate. Most notably, voters proclaimed that "No apportionment plan or individual district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent." It was also decided that they could not diminish minority voters' ability to elect candidates of their choice, that districts must be contiguous, compact, and, whenever possible, follow existing city, county, and geographic boundaries.

Jason Parada, a DeSantis aide who helped draw the map, testified during a legal challenge to it that he used political performance data when crafting the new congressional boundaries, though he claimed that no racial data was considered. While DeSantis denies the map is illegal, both the governor's office and plaintiffs in lawsuits agree that the plan violates parts of the Florida Constitution, specifically the anti-gerrymandering provisions of the Fair Districts Amendment.

The new Congressional District 16.

DeSantis is trying to claim that the Fair Districts Amendments are invalid in their entirety due to the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which raised the bar for race-based redistricting. That case involved Louisiana drawing a second majority-Black congressional district after lower federal courts said the state likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by having only one such district. 

SCOTUS ruled that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not automatically justify drawing districts primarily around race. Hence, Louisiana's map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because the state had not shown that federal law actually required the second majority-Black district. DeSantis is essentially arguing that complying with those provisions would require Florida to continue intentionally using race in district drawing, which Callais suggests is constitutionally suspect.

However, the new maps blatantly violate the rest of the Fair Districts Amendment, none of which are in any way impacted by the Louisiana v. Callais ruling. District 16 is a perfect example. What was once primarily a Manatee County district, representing contiguous communities that routinely interacted, now includes portions of Manatee, Sarasota, Pinellas, Hardee, and DeSoto counties. 

Residents on the south end of St. Petersburg and up on the beach in Reddington Shores will have the same Congressional representative as those all the way down in Arcadia, some two hours and two counties away! Those communities could not be more disimilar, less contiguous, the district less compact, and the intent, as the person who drew it admitted, was to favor one political party over the other.

I think it is fair to have a conversation in 2026 about whether districts should be drawn to deliberately create a high probability of representation by one racial group. However, when the Governor of a state with a very dark past when it comes to racial segregation, Jim Crow, the KKK, lynchings, Rosewood, and so many other horrors, immediately uses that ruling to very deliberately ensure that the blackest part of our region will not have Congressional representation, it becomes much more difficult to suggest we are in a place where it is no longer warranted.

Stuffing the Blackest part of St. Petersburg into District 16, while lopping off the Blackest part of Tampa and sticking it into a district that includes the outer edges of Citrus County, more than 90 miles away, is the exact sort of behavior that led to the provision in the Voting Rights Act in the first place. The excuse that it only looks like racial gerrymandering, but is really partisan gerrymandering, is embarrassing. 

A core tenet of democratic representation is that voters pick their representatives, not the other way around. And while both parties can share blame for past gerrymandering, it is worth noting that it has been Republicans who have resisted Democratic efforts to establish independent commissions that would remove the temptation for partisan redistricting. And there’s no way of getting around the fact that this cycle’s pissing match began in Texas, the first state to bow to Trump’s demand for a partisan mid-census redistricting, he argued he was somehow entitled to for “winning all seven swing states” in a presidential election he won by a mere 1.5%.

Congressional representation is important. As anyone who works on a Congressional district staff will tell you, there is a whole host of issues they help their constituents navigate, often involving numerous agencies across their district. Creating sprawling districts without any semblance of a coherent community will diminish a representative's ability to serve their constituents. Given how much of their job Congress has already ceded to the Oval Office, hindering constituent service is one more step toward rendering the institution completely irrelevant. 

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch's new novel, Fish Kill, is currently available and can be found, along with his previous books, here. He can be reached at editor@thebradentontimes.com.