Voto Latino’s Maria Teresa Kumar guest hosted Saturday’s edition of Velshi on MSNBC and declared that a key reason Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won re-election is because he gerrymandered the state. The fact that you can’t gerrymander a statewide office made no difference to Kumar.
Addressing the Lincoln Project’s Tara Setmayer, Kumar asked, “is Ron DeSantis Trump 2.0?” Downplaying the threat DeSantis poses to Democrats, she alleged, “a lot of people are asking this question, but one of the things that has been under reported is the fact that Ron DeSantis, yes, he won, but he highly gerrymandered the state of Florida and oftentimes, people say, “well, that was, you know, he was a statewide office.”
They say that because it’s basic civics and while gerrymandering is a difficult concept for MSNBC to understand and even if it were true, it would hardly be unique to Florida or even red states. Yet, Kumar continued to search for excuses as she further wondered, “But gerrymandering has the impact of chilling potential voters for the opposite side of going out and voting. There’s no way he could gerrymander himself across 50 states. What would be his pathway?”
[DeSantis beat Charlie Crist by nineteen points. Even if gerrymandering had any impact on statewide races, which it doesn’t, the impact wouldn’t be a nineteen-point blowout and winning all but five counties in the state — including Miami-Dade. — Ed]
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