On Nov. 3, voters across America handed Democrats control of the U.S. House and Senate. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called it "the political equivalent of a meteor strike" and said Florida was the one state that held the line.

He's half right. Every Republican on this site who was on the ballot in Florida won. But almost all of them won by much less than last time, and several won by a single point or less. The governor's race was decided by about 106,000 votes out of more than 8 million. And the new congressional map Republicans drew this spring to take four more seats didn't take any.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: the map backfired, and the supermajority is gone

Four seats targeted, four seats lost

In April, DeSantis released a new congressional map that, on paper, turned Florida's 20–8 Republican delegation into 24–4. It went after four Democrats: Kathy Castor in Tampa, Darren Soto around Orlando, and the Democratic seats in Palm Beach and Broward counties. Under the new lines, Trump would have carried three of the four districts by double digits in 2024, and the fourth by about 9 points.

Democrats won all four.

• Kathy Castor beat former Republican state Rep. Mike Beltran, 51.2% to 45.9%, according to NBC News. Her new district voted for Trump by 11 points in 2024. Republican groups spent more than $20 million on attack ads against her, according to the Florida Phoenix.
• Jared Moskowitz beat Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer, 51.3% to 46.6%. "This district was re-drawn to defeat me," Moskowitz said. "Voters had other plans."
• Pia Dandiya, a first-time candidate and former educator, beat businessman Casey Askar, 51.9% to 48.1%, in a district that now runs from inland Palm Beach County through part of Broward and all of rural Hendry County into part of Collier County.
• Darren Soto held on by 1,506 votes, 50.3% to 49.7%. His district was the one changed the most. It went from a seat that voted for Kamala Harris by more than 3 points to one Trump would have won by 18.

So Florida's delegation stays 20 Republicans and 8 Democrats, exactly what it was before Republicans redrew it. All of these counts are NBC's, with about 99% of the vote counted as of Nov. 13.

The supermajority is gone

For four years, Republicans held two-thirds of the Florida House. With that many seats, they could pass a six-week abortion ban, the death penalty for crimes other than murder, and harsh immigration laws without a single Democratic vote. They could also change the chamber's rules on debate and override the governor's veto on their own.

That ended on Nov. 3. Democrats flipped Republican-held House seats across the state and lost one, the Palm Beach County seat that includes Mar-a-Lago. Going into Election Day, Democrats held 34 of the 120 seats. On election night they won 49, 15 more, and well past the line that ends a supermajority: Republicans needed 80 seats to keep it.

Then came a 50th. In House District 33 in Brevard County, Democrat Daniel McDow led Republican Rep. Monique Miller by 289 votes, 36,430 to 36,141, going into a machine recount on Nov. 10. He won it by 286 votes after the recount, the first time the district has gone to a Democrat in more than a decade. Democrats will have their strongest numbers in the Florida House since 1996, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Among the Republicans who lost:

• Hillary Cassel, who won her House seat in 2024 as a Democrat and switched to the Republican Party after the election.
• Danny Alvarez, a Hillsborough County Republican.
• State Sen. Jason Brodeur, a Sanford Republican who lost to Maitland Mayor John Lowndes by 10 points.

In the Senate, Democrats will have 13 seats to Republicans' 25, with one independent and one seat that will be filled in a special election. That seat belonged to Bryan Ávila, who was just elected lieutenant governor. A supermajority in the Senate takes 27 seats.

Florida Democrats say they did this without major national investment. Their voters showed up: about 68% of registered Democrats voted, compared with 63% of Republicans, according to the Fresh Take Florida Project. One Democratic data consultant said that was the party's highest midterm turnout in living memory.

The bad: they won, by less

Byron Donalds will be Florida's next governor. He beat Democrat David Jolly 50.0% to 48.7%, a margin of 106,239 votes, with 99% counted, according to NBC News. Four years ago, Ron DeSantis won the same office with 59.4%. Donalds is the first Black person ever elected statewide in Florida.

He didn't win it on a level field. Donalds raised nearly $174 million between his campaign and his political committee, according to the Florida Phoenix. Jolly raised less than $28 million. Much of Donalds' money came from the very top: a Tampa Bay Times analysis found 17 of the 18 billionaires who gave in the governor's race backed Donalds. Even with roughly six times the money, he won by about a point.

"Mr. President, I want you to hear from Florida that we are still red," Donalds said he told Trump on election night.

Ashley Moody won the last two years of Marco Rubio's Senate term, beating state Rep. Angie Nixon 50.9% to 48.0%, according to NBC News. When Rubio last won this seat in 2022, he got 57.7%. Moody spent much of her campaign calling Nixon a socialist. In her primary victory speech, she pinned four positions on Nixon that PolitiFact found no evidence Nixon holds. Nixon, in turn, kept bringing up the $10 million in Medicaid settlement money that went to the Hope Florida Foundation with Moody's sign-off, and from there to a political campaign.

"The war is not over — 2028 is around the corner," Nixon said in her concession speech. "Ashley Moody, you better get it right because we're coming for you."

The rest of Florida's Republicans in Congress all won. All the numbers below are NBC's, with about 99% counted as of Nov. 13. Districts 1 through 7 kept their old lines, but 20 of Florida's 28 districts were redrawn. So for most of the members below District 7, the 2024 number was on different lines.

• Jimmy Patronis won 62.5% in the Panhandle. Matt Gaetz won the same district with 66% in 2024. As Florida's insurance watchdog, Patronis took money from a fake-insurance operation whose CEO is now serving 25 years.
• Kat Cammack won 55.1%, down from 61.6%. She wrote the Defund NPR Act, and the public station in her own district, which runs Florida's storm-alert radio network, lost about a fifth of its operating money.
• Aaron Bean beat LaShonda Holloway by 6,315 votes, 50.2% to 48.1%. Against the same opponent in 2024, on the same lines, he got 57.3%. Before Congress passed Medicaid work requirements, Bean wrote the bill. Twice.
• John Rutherford won 56.4%, down from 63.1%. That's after ten years in Congress without a single town hall.
• Randy Fine won 58.9%. Mike Waltz won the same district with 66.5% in 2024. Two days before his primary, a doorbell camera caught Fine going through a constituent's mailbox.
• Mike Haridopolos won 53.2% on the Space Coast. In 2024 he won 62.2%. He talks about spending "in the sunshine," but a college once paid him $152,000 for a book that existed in one copy.
• Gus Bilirakis won 52.7%. He won 71% in 2024. He voted against the bill that took FEMA's disaster fund out of emergency rationing, the day before Hurricane Helene made landfall.
• Anna Paulina Luna beat retired Army Brig. Gen. Leela Gray by 2,491 votes, 49.5% to 48.7%. She won 54.8% in 2024. Luna pushed to ban lawmakers' families from trading stock, while her husband owns 10% of a drone startup that got $37 million in Pentagon deals.
• Laurel Lee won 54.3%, down from 56.2%. She filed the House version of a bill to throw out every mail ballot that arrives after Election Day, even one postmarked days early.
• Greg Steube won 58.5%, down from 63.9%. He promised never to vote by proxy, then filed a false letter saying a "public health emergency" kept him away. He was at CPAC.
• Scott Franklin won 50.3%, a 9,957-vote margin. In 2024 he won 65.3%. Protesters put his face on a "MISSING" flyer, and his office said he prefers the telephone.
• Brian Mast won 53.9%, down from 61.8%. After Parkland he asked Trump to pause AR-15 sales; four years later he voted against the assault weapons ban.
• Mario Diaz-Balart won by 1,704 votes, 49.9% to 49.1%, in a seat he won with nearly 71% in 2024. More on that below.
• Maria Elvira Salazar won by 1,086 votes after a recount, 50.2% to 49.8%. She won by 20 points in 2024. She ran an ad saying Trump's immigration crackdown has "gone too far," after casting a deciding vote to give it $70 billion.
• Carlos Gimenez won 52.9%, down from 64.6%. He voted twice for Trump's Medicaid and SNAP cuts, then signed a letter saying Republicans "will not take healthcare away from families who depend on it."

The ugly: a map drawn against the rules

Florida voters banned partisan gerrymandering in 2010. The Fair Districts amendments in the state constitution say congressional districts can't be drawn to favor a party or an incumbent. This spring, Florida Republicans drew one anyway.

How the map was drawn

The new map came out of DeSantis' office, not the Legislature. His office gave it to Fox News first, before state lawmakers saw it, as a graphic coloring each new district red or blue. "I don't know how you can argue a red and blue map released from the governor's office doesn't show some form of partisan intent," a Republican consultant told NBC News.

The man who drew it, DeSantis staffer Jason Poreda, told lawmakers he used partisan data. The governor's lawyers didn't argue that the map follows the ban. They argued the whole Fair Districts amendment should be thrown out. Their theory: the amendment's protections for minority voters are unconstitutional, so the ban on partisan maps has to fall with them. Even one of the Republicans carrying the bill disagreed. "I don't think we should do gerrymandering on the basis of political partisanship," state Sen. Don Gaetz said on the Senate floor.

The voting-rights groups who sued say the map splits the city of Tampa three ways and Democratic-leaning Orlando five ways, "even though it only has the population for two congressional districts." The Legislature passed it, and DeSantis signed it on May 4.

What the courts said

Three lawsuits were filed. On May 26, Leon County Circuit Judge Joshua Hawkes refused to block the map for 2026.

Here's exactly what he ruled. He found there wasn't enough evidence of "impermissible intent," even though Poreda had admitted using partisan data. He pointed to the calendar: "The primary is less than three months away, and the general less than six months. The public interest weighs more in favor of certainty than a haphazard judicial mandate of discarded maps." He also suggested the old 2022 map might itself be illegal under a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling on race and redistricting. And he called it "premature" to decide whether Florida's ban on partisan gerrymandering still stands.

So the court never ruled the map was fair. It ruled the challengers hadn't proved enough, early enough, to stop it before the election. In September, Hawkes denied their request for a jury trial. The case is still going, and no court has decided whether the map breaks the ban.

What it was worth on election night

Nothing. It didn't gain Republicans a single seat. And some Republicans warned before it passed that it could cost them. To create more Republican-leaning seats, "the margins in many redrawn districts will get smaller for Republican incumbents," NBC reported in April. "Does he want us to lose? I don't understand this," one veteran Florida Republican operative said.

Mario Diaz-Balart's district is the clearest case. The new map took Collier County out of his district and added part of southwest Broward, creating a district more competitive for Democrats, according to CBS News Miami. He won it in 2024 with nearly 71%. This time he beat Democrat Nicole Locklin by 1,704 votes, and CBS News didn't project him the winner until Nov. 9, six days after the election. Florida's longest-serving member of Congress held his seat by less than one point, in a district his own party reshaped.

The rest of the ugly

• The official running the recount said the result before the recount. Miami-Dade's elections supervisor, Alina Garcia, a Republican, told the Miami Herald that Maria Elvira Salazar had won "with or without a recount" before the recount began. Her son-in-law is the lawyer representing Salazar in that recount, and her daughter works at the same firm. A federal judge called Garcia's comment "a really dumb statement to make", but let her stay on the board that reviewed the ballots.
• A tax cut that will cost cities and counties up to $12 billion a year. Amendment 3 passed with about 62% of the vote, just over the 60% it needed. It raises the homestead exemption on non-school property taxes to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028. State economists estimated it would cut local revenue by as much as $12 billion a year once it's fully in place. Renters get nothing from it, and Byron Donalds made it the centerpiece of his campaign. The Florida Sheriffs Association opposed it. A United Way leader in Tampa Bay warned that after-school programs, libraries and recreation centers could be among the hardest hit.
• A 2023 law that fines the groups that sign people up to vote. In 2023, the Republican-run Legislature passed a law that fines voter-registration groups $50 for every day a form is late, up to $2,500 per application. Florida now ranks fourth worst in the country for registration: only 67% of eligible adults are registered, said Democratic data consultant Matt Isbell. He said Republicans' 11-point lead in registered voters is why Democrats didn't win statewide this year. University of Central Florida professor Aubrey Jewett called that lead the Republicans' "insurance policy."

What the results show

Every Republican on this site who was on Florida's ballot won, nearly all by less than last time. Byron Donalds won the governor's race by 1.3 points after raising about $174 million to David Jolly's $28 million. Ashley Moody won by 2.9 points in a Senate seat Marco Rubio won by 16.4 in 2022. Republicans redrew 20 of Florida's 28 congressional districts to take four Democratic seats, using a map the governor's own mapmaker admitted was drawn with partisan data in a state that bans partisan maps. They won none of the four. The map left Mario Diaz-Balart, who won with nearly 71% in 2024, holding his reshaped seat by 1,704 votes. And Democrats won 50 of the Florida House's 120 seats, up from 34, ending the Republican supermajority.

Source

Once again, the Democratic blue wave misses Florida — Mitch Perry, Florida Phoenix, November 4, 2026.