The Same Votes, Redrawn: Florida

Thirteen elections, twenty-eight districts, and a mid-decade map that never comes out behind

84-355 Democracy’s Data

August 2026

A claim worth checking

Florida’s legislature passed a new congressional map in 2025 with a stated goal: turn a 20-8 Republican delegation into a 24-4 one. That is not an opponent’s inference. It is the number the map’s own drafters have used in public, both before the vote and in court since.

Florida voters added language to the state constitution in 2010 specifically to prevent this. The Fair Districts Amendment bars drawing congressional districts with the intent to favor a political party. When voting-rights groups sued over the 2025 map on exactly that ground, the governor’s own counsel told lawmakers the amendment might not bind them anymore. He pointed to a Voting Rights Act case then pending before the U.S. Supreme Court (Louisiana v. Callais), and to a 2025 state Supreme Court ruling that had already narrowed the amendment’s reach. The state’s defense of its map, in short, leans less on “this map is fair” than on “the rule requiring fairness may no longer apply.”

No court has ruled on that question yet. A circuit court declined to block the map before the 2026 elections; the plaintiffs’ appeal of that decision was later dropped, and the underlying case continues. The map is nonetheless what today’s ballot is drawn on: August 18, 2026, is Florida’s primary day.

Three of the day’s most-watched races are unfolding inside it. Jared Moskowitz faces a primary challenge from Oliver Larkin, a Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate, in a district the 2025 map substantially reshaped. Alex Vindman and Angie Nixon are competing for the Democratic Senate nomination. Byron Donalds leads an eleven-candidate Republican primary for governor. Only the first of these is a House race inside a single congressional district. This chapter’s data speaks directly to that one, and only that one; the closing section says why.

The map’s own stated goal is testable, and this chapter tests it. Florida replaced its congressional map in 2025, between censuses. The votes already cast in thirteen statewide elections can be re-counted inside both sets of lines. Same ballots, same totals; the only thing that changes is which district each precinct belongs to.

That re-count is the whole method here. If the new lines really were friendly to the party they are supposed to hurt, some election among the thirteen should elect more Democrats under them. You are about to see whether any does.

Where the data comes from, and what it is for

The two spreadsheets behind this chapter come from Dave’s Redistricting, a free public site. It rebuilds American elections at the precinct level, the few thousand voters who share one polling place, and re-sums them inside any district map you load. One file carries the map Florida enacted in 2022; the other carries the 2025 replacement. Each holds the same thirteen statewide elections from 2016 through 2024.

Who is in it, and how they got there. Every voter who cast a countable vote for a Democratic or Republican candidate in those thirteen races. Their ballots entered the file through the official county canvasses, which the site’s volunteers collect and reconcile precinct by precinct.

Who it was made for. People who draw and judge district maps. The site exists so that anyone proposing a plan can see, before any election is held, how the votes already on record would fall inside it.

What it costs to get. Nothing but an account and patience. There is no address a script can call; each election is exported by hand from a browser with the right map open, which is why this chapter ships its copies.

What has already been done to it. Three things. Precincts that straddle a district line were split, with votes shared out in proportion to population. Each district’s votes were then reduced to a two-party share – the Democratic vote divided by the Democratic and Republican votes together, third parties set aside. And the same arithmetic was run twice, once per map, which is what makes the comparison possible.

One further wrinkle, specific to Florida. Three districts (22, 23, and 25) were renumbered as part of the redraw, not just redrawn, so “the same district, before and after” is not always the district sharing a number. Every comparison below runs through a crosswalk – a table that translates each 2026 district into its 2022 predecessor. It is built by matching population, not land area, which gets this wrong for reasons the note under Figure 1 explains.

That match was found once, by assigning all 390,066 of Florida’s 2020 census blocks into both plans. Each block’s population was carried into whichever pairing of old and new districts maximized the total carried across, with every district used exactly once on each side. It is a real correspondence, not a guess, but for the three renumbered districts it is a plurality, not a majority. The closing section says what that costs for the districts it affects most.

A third source, for who lives there. Dave’s Redistricting attaches population and race/ethnicity percentages to every district it exports, so the same map files behind the vote totals also carry who lives inside each district, under both plans. Nothing further was fetched to build Figure 5.

Before you scroll, make two predictions. Across thirteen statewide elections, in how many does the new map elect more Republicans than the old one – and in how many does it elect fewer? Write both numbers down.

Watch the lines move

Figure 1. Twenty-eight districts, two maps, one set of votes, and any one district’s full history. The morph button slides every boundary from its 2022 position to its 2026 position; color re-counts whichever statewide race you select inside the lines shown. Click any district, or pick one from the District menu, to load all thirteen of its elections below the map, under both plans at once, its outline overlaid in the inset. Districts 22, 23, and 25 carry a note on hover – “mostly old district X” – because their 2026 outline is not the district their number pointed to in 2022. In print, the two plans sit side by side, colored by the 2024 presidential race, with district 25 below as the worked example.

Thirteen elections, one direction

Figure 2. The gain, race by race. Each row re-counts one statewide election under both maps; the dot never moves left. Every one of the thirteen races elects more Republicans under the new lines, from 1 to 4 more seats. Under the 2024 presidential race specifically, Republican-won districts go from 20 to 24 of 28 – the same 20-to-24 swing the map’s own drafters have described publicly as the point of the exercise. Every row uses this chapter’s own office names, including trea, which this collection’s export shorthand names for Florida’s real Chief Financial Officer; Texas’s own version of this chapter has no matching office.

Every district, every election

Figure 3. What the swap did to every district at once, 364 points. One point per district per election; below the diagonal, the 2026 lines made it more Republican. Gray points barely move. In the online version, pick a district from the menu above the chart, or from any of the other district figures, to pick its thirteen points out of all of them.

Where each district’s people came from

Figure 4. How much of each district’s 2026 population lived in the same-numbered 2022 district. Sorted from the most-changed district to the least. Most sit near 100%; the three the crosswalk renumbers – 22, 23, and 25 – are the visible exceptions. In the online version, pick any district from the menu above the chart to see its full breakdown. It lists every 2022 district that still has residents inside it, not only the single predecessor this chapter uses elsewhere.

Who a district represents

Figure 5. Race and ethnicity, both maps, every district. The static chart ranks all 28 districts by the change in non-white population share from the 2022 lines to the 2026 lines; blue districts gained non-white population, red districts lost it. In the online version, pick a district from the menu above the chart for its full composition, category by category, open circle to filled circle.

What re-run elections cannot tell you

These thirteen races are statewide contests re-counted inside district lines, not district contests. A House race has its own candidates, its own money, and an incumbent voters know. This data does not carry that; it carries what a map’s drafters would answer with instead. Read it as that kind of evidence, and say so when you quote it.

The Larkin-Moskowitz primary is a House contest inside a single district, so this chapter’s data speaks to it directly. The Vindman-Nixon Senate primary and the Donalds-led governor’s primary are statewide races that no district map touches at all, and nothing in this chapter’s data bears on who wins them, today or in November. They appear in the opening section only as the context a Florida voter reading this on primary day would actually have in mind.

The re-count also holds turnout fixed. It assumes the people who voted in 2016 through 2024 are the people who will vote in 2026, in the same numbers, with the same loyalties. Districts full of voters who switched sides recently, like Florida’s newly redrawn 25th, are exactly where that assumption is weakest. The map’s authors are betting that recent returns are the new normal; the data here can describe the bet, but cannot settle it.

Florida carries one further limit that this chapter has already leaned on throughout. The population-weighted crosswalk translates each renumbered district into its 2022 predecessor, but for districts 22, 23, and 25 that translation is a single best match, not a full accounting of a district’s ancestry. The old 23rd, for instance, carries only 46.3% of the new 25th’s population. Treat those three districts’ per-election numbers as good evidence about where most of their people came from. They are not a claim that the 2022 and 2026 districts sharing a role are the same object, the way an untouched district genuinely is.

This population match is not the only way to pair the two maps. An earlier pass at the same problem, matching districts by shared land area instead, found seven districts renumbered, not three. Most of Florida’s redraw nibbled at lightly populated edges, moving lines without moving many people; where people actually live, only a tight rotation among three South Florida districts changed hands. Land and population can tell different stories about the same map, and population is the one that matches who actually lives there.

Sources

Data

Press

Academic literature

Why this data cannot be fetched again 
The data behind this chapter cannot be fetched again by a script, and
it is worth knowing why before you try.

WHY NOT. The two spreadsheets were exported from Dave's Redistricting
(https://davesredistricting.org), which rebuilds election results at
the precinct level and re-sums them inside any district map you load.
Each export is a manual download from a browser session with a
particular map open; there is no address a script can call to get the
same file. The copies shipped with this chapter are the archive.

WHAT EXISTS INSTEAD. The site itself, free after registration. Open
the enacted 2022 Florida congressional map and the 2026 replacement,
turn on any statewide election from 2016 through 2024, and the site
shows the same district-by-district shares these files hold. Exporting
them one election at a time rebuilds the two spreadsheets, columns for
president, governor, senator, and the rest, rows for districts 1
through 28.

ONE WRINKLE. Three of Florida's districts (22, 23, 25) were renumbered,
not just redrawn, as part of the 2025 map. This chapter's comparisons
match a 2026 district to its population-weighted predecessor, not the
2022 district sharing its number — build-block-crosswalk.R found that
pairing once, from 2020 census blocks, and it is not something
re-exporting the site's data will reproduce on its own.

WHAT YOU CAN STILL CHECK. However you come by the numbers, these say
whether you are holding the same object:
- 28 rows per file, one per district; 13 election columns; the long
  table assembled from them has 728 rows
- every cell is a Democratic share of the two-party vote, strictly
  between 0 and 1
- in the 2024 presidential race, Democratic candidates lead in 8
  districts under the 2022 lines and 4 under the 2026 lines
- across all 13 elections the 2026 lines never elect fewer Republicans
  than the 2022 lines; the gain runs from 1 seat to 4