By TODD HOOPER, Florida Forward Party Chairman
Gerrymandering refers to when a political party draws convoluted legislative district maps to gain seats in Congress. Instead of cutting a pizza into eight uniform slices, picture a pizza pie carved with no straight lines, crust on only half the slices, and three-quarters of the pepperoni on just two of the pieces. Yeah, it’s a mess.
This dark art is centuries-old, pervasive, and effective. It corrodes our representative democracy and today predetermines the winning party in more than 90% of U.S. House elections. In 2024, just 35 out of 435 House seats races were competitive – decided by less than 5% of the vote – down from 60 seats in 1992. So, it is getting worse. Gerrymandering is quite legal and remains so because both major parties love to wield it to retain and expand power.
Brazenly, the duopoly has declared its intention to push this self-serving practice even farther. Recently, state leaders - I use that term loosely - in Texas, California, Illinois, Indiana, New York and our own state of Florida have announced efforts to redistrict their states in the hopes of gaining Congressional seats in the 2026 mid-terms. Republicans and Democrats intend to reduce the number of competitive races down into the teens.
In Florida, the pattern of reduced competition is similar. Still, people tend to think that Florida Republicans are rigging the system in their favor and at the expense of Democrats. That is only half right.
The GOP is certainly manipulating the system. In 2024, only 38% of voters were registered as Republicans and yet they captured 20 of 28 House seats, or more than 70%. The half wrong part is that somehow the Democrats were penalized. They represented 31% of Florida’s registered voters and secured eight House seats, or 29% of the 28 – about what they should expect.
The people who are ripped off by this system are the 31% of voters not buying into the duopoly. We have zero representatives from alternative parties or NPAs (No Party Affiliation).
Efforts to reduce gerrymandering, such as the creation of non-partisan districting commissions and, in Florida, changes to our Constitution approved by voters in 2010, have at best slowed the noxious spread. We should continue to apply these brakes, but they must be augmented with other initiatives.
Luckily, Florida has an advantage over many states to reverse the arthritic effects of gerrymandering. Our 31% of “neither-Red-nor-Blue” voters is higher than in many states and can be a forceful electoral lever. For example, adopting non-partisan primaries in which the top three vote-getters move on to the general election regardless of party affiliation would unleash the voting power of this 31% in ways gerrymanderers cannot predict. Thus, the gerrymander effect would be greatly reduced and elections made fairer.
We should all be imploring our Governor and state legislators to ignore the most recent calls to redistrict. Our state has real problems to solve. Let’s encourage our elected representatives to work on those.
