GOP strategist explains how Florida’s redistricting plans could backfire

As Florida revs up a mid-decade gerrymandering scheme to help Republicans win more congressional seats, one of the party’s most prominent elections strategists is cautioning that this could backfire.

Speaking with “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade, Karl Rove – the former senior adviser to President George W. Bush – said that there’s “a risk there” in Florida’s redistricting plans.

“They’re going to have to take Republican votes out of Republican districts and put them into Democrat districts,” Rove told Kilmeade, “and that’s going to lower the numbers for some incumbent Republicans, and they may lose a seat or two.”

In this year’s gerrymandering wars, President Donald Trump has implored Republican states to redraw their maps to decrease Democratic-held districts and expand the GOP’s power in the U.S. House of Representatives. So far, Texas, Missouri and North Carolina have answered his call – though several other Republican states have rejected it.

Having the extra GOP seats would help Trump more easily implement his political agenda. However, Democrats in California and Virginia have responded with their own redistricting plans out of necessity — to even up with the extra districts grabbed by Republicans.

Florida is now planning a special session to redraw its congressional maps to help re-manufacture a GOP advantage. But Rove’s warning echoes grumblings other Republicans have voiced: That this is a bad gamble.

“You’re going to be diluting strong Republican districts to try and create other potential Republican districts,” a Florida-based GOP consultant told The Hill.

For the Florida plan to work, the remapping would have to extract enough Republican voters out of safely Republican districts, to give Republican candidates a more-than-fair shot of winning over Democratic districts. But in doing that, as Rove explains, it then makes those once-safe Republican districts competitive and vulnerable to Democrats winning them.

There’s at least some political science to back up the idea that this is a real consequence. The Civic Data & Research Institute found that Florida’s redistricting plans could “paradoxically increase Republican vulnerability to adverse electoral conditions.”

“Any attempt to generate additional Republican-leaning seats necessarily requires diluting existing Republican vote margins across a larger geographic footprint,” reads the study. “Such redistricting efforts increase Republican electoral vulnerability, expanding the number of competitive seats from three to seven.”