Can a presidential administration simply hand a state a seat in Congress at whim, taking it away from another?
Gov. Ron DeSantis says yes, and argues that the Donald Trump administration should do just that for Florida and Texas in the interest of fairness ahead of the 2026 Midterms.
“We are appealing to the Trump administration to award us at least one seat from the previous census. They would obviously have to take one away from another state,” DeSantis told radio host Mark Levin.
It’s not immediately clear which state or states would make the sacrifice, and it’s hard to imagine this happening without court challenges from the states losing representation.
Florida has a 20-8 Republican majority in Congress. To put that supermajority in perspective, there are a little more than 1.3 million more Republicans than Democrats in a state with nearly 13.6 million registered voters.
“We obviously would be forced to draw a new map. The Legislature would be forced to draw a new map because we have 28 seats now. Presumably, we have 29 or 30. So we are trying to do that. And I think that would be something that would be very much appropriate,” DeSantis said.
Though censuses have been decennial throughout American history, which has seen growth in various areas via Manifest Destiny and migration patterns, DeSantis argues that what Florida has experienced is without precedent.
“We’ve never seen a state kind of grow the way Florida has done over these last four or five years in terms of income migrating here, in terms of net migration. I mean, it has been historic, and the result of that is, I think, our map is out of date.”
DeSantis has offered a series of novel defenses of his position, including blaming former President Barack Obama, who served from 2009 to 2017, for Florida’s post-2020 census map.
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