By Jose Navarro | The Navarro Report
Two states, two governors, two opposite political parties — and nearly identical numbers proving the same point: mid-decade redistricting is quietly manufacturing legislative majorities that the voters themselves never asked for.
Florida just redrew its congressional map to push Republicans from 74% of the state’s U.S. House seats to a projected 86% — on a electorate that is 58% Republican by registration. California did the same thing in reverse, redrawing its map to push Democrats from 83% of seats to a projected 92% — on an electorate that is 64% Democratic. Run the numbers and both states land in almost the same place: roughly 28 percentage points of seat share above what the underlying registration would produce in a proportionate system. Different governors, different parties, same distortion, same size.
That convergence is the story. This isn’t a one-party problem. It’s a systemic one, and it’s accelerating.
The Numbers, State by State
Florida’s Republican Party currently counts 5,607,836 registered voters to the Florida Democratic Party’s 4,066,503, according to the Florida Division of Elections’ most recent report, dated July 31, 2026. Strip out no-party-affiliation and minor-party voters and the two-party split is 58% Republican, 42% Democratic.
Florida’s congressional delegation, however, doesn’t reflect that ratio — and the gap is about to widen. The current delegation sits at 20 Republicans, 7 Democrats and one vacancy, meaning Republicans hold roughly 74% of filled seats. A new map — Plan EOGPCRP2026 — passed the Florida Legislature on April 29, was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis on May 4, and was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court on June 10 to remain in effect for this November’s elections. Analysts project it will produce a 24-4 Republican advantage: 86% of the state’s 28 seats, on 58% of the two-party vote.
California tells the same story with the parties reversed. The state’s most recent voter registration report, dated May 18, 2026, shows 10,397,692 registered Democrats to 5,779,786 registered Republicans — a 64%-36% two-party split. California’s current congressional delegation, elected in 2024 under maps drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission, sits at 43 Democrats and 9 Republicans, or about 83% of the state’s 52 seats.
That wasn’t distorted enough for California’s Legislature. In November 2025, voters approved Proposition 50, a ballot measure that replaced the independent commission’s maps with new lines drawn directly by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, in effect for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections. Cook Political Report’s House editor, Erin Covey, has said the new map gives Democrats a shot at flipping up to five Republican-held seats — enough to push the delegation toward a projected 48-4 split, or about 92% of seats on 64% of the two-party vote.
Line the two states up side by side, and the “overrepresentation” — seat share minus two-party vote share — comes out to roughly +28 points in Florida for Republicans and roughly +28 points in California for Democrats. It’s the same mechanism, the same magnitude, opposite political colors.
Why the Courts Won’t Stop It
The reason both states can do this without meaningful federal interference traces back to a single 2019 Supreme Court decision. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the justices ruled 5-4 that partisan gerrymandering claims are “political questions” outside the jurisdiction of federal courts — even while acknowledging, in Chief Justice John Roberts’ own majority opinion, that such gerrymandering can be “incompatible with democratic principles.” Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent argued the majority was abandoning manageable standards that lower courts had already developed to rein in the practice’s worst excesses.
That ruling didn’t ban gerrymandering. It removed the federal courts as a check on it, leaving partisan mapmaking almost entirely to state legislatures, state constitutions, and state courts — which is exactly the patchwork now playing out in real time. Racial gerrymandering claims remain reviewable in federal court, which is why litigation over both Florida’s and California’s new maps has focused heavily on race rather than partisanship, even when the underlying dispute is unmistakably partisan.
A National Arms Race, Funded by Taxpayers
Florida and California aren’t outliers — they’re the two biggest dominoes in a chain reaction. Texas passed a new Republican-favorable map in 2025 specifically to counter Democratic gains, prompting California’s countermove; Missouri and North Carolina followed with their own redrawn maps. As of this year, at least six states — California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Utah — have adopted new mid-decade congressional maps, with Florida, Virginia, Maryland and Washington still working through their own processes. Before 2025, only two states had attempted voluntary mid-decade redistricting since 1970. This is a new phenomenon, not a recurring one.
Every one of these maps has triggered litigation, and litigation isn’t free. Missouri’s new map alone has drawn at least nine separate lawsuits, with the state’s Republican attorney general and a coalition including the ACLU fighting over whether a citizen referendum can even delay the map’s implementation. Texas’s map reached the U.S. Supreme Court on an emergency stay before being allowed to proceed for 2026, with the underlying racial-gerrymandering claims still set to be litigated into 2027. California’s Proposition 50 map faced its own federal lawsuit from a coalition of Republican members of Congress — including Reps. Darrell Issa and Ronny Jackson — before the Supreme Court cleared it for 2026 use in February.
Each of those cases runs through state attorneys general, state solicitors, outside counsel, and court costs — all paid for by the same taxpayers whose representation is being reshuffled. Redistricting has become a recurring, unbudgeted legal expense in a growing number of states, layered on top of the normal costs of running elections. That’s a fiscal accountability story in its own right, separate from the underlying question of fairness.
What Gets Lost
The technical argument for both maps is the same: neither party is required to draw proportional districts, and geography — where Democrats and Republicans actually live — will always produce some divergence between vote share and seat share under a winner-take-all, single-member-district system. Defenders of both maps would note that federal law bars intentional racial discrimination, but partisan advantage-seeking, however aggressive, has been found lawful by the U.S. Supreme Court itself.
What that defense doesn’t address is the trend line. A 16-to-18-point overrepresentation gap, which is roughly what both states’ pre-2026 maps already produced, is itself a significant divergence from proportionality. Redrawing maps mid-decade to push that gap past 27 or 28 points — in both states, by both parties — isn’t incremental. It’s a doubling-down that leaves a shrinking share of voters in each state with a real chance of electing a representative who reflects their registration, regardless of which party they belong to.
Florida and California make an unusually clean test case precisely because they’re mirror images of each other. Neither party can credibly call this the other side’s problem when their own state is running the identical play. The accountability question isn’t which party gerrymanders — it’s whether either party should be allowed to keep doing it, in any state, without the federal courts able to say when it’s gone too far.
Jose Navarro is the founder and publisher of The Navarro Report, an independent accountability publication covering government spending and fiscal oversight across California, San Diego and the nation. He holds an MBA and works professionally as a Controller. Follow the money and find the truth.