A look at Florida’s (dwindling) list of competitive US House races

Our congressional vulnerability list has shrunk. This is the eighth election cycle the Tampa Bay Times has ranked the U. S. House seats in Florida most vulnerable to a party switch; it’s our first look at the state of Florida’s House races since May. Because the latest round of redistricting has created mostly safe House seats in the Sunshine State, the current partisan breakdown in the House delegation — 20 Republicans and 8 Democrats — looks reasonably secure.

Three contests we’d been watching as potentially competitive have now dropped off our list entirely. Still, while party flips aren’t necessarily likely this year, they aren’t impossible, either. We have placed four races in the “Potentially Vulnerable” category: The seats held by Republican Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Pinellas County; Laurel Lee of Hillsborough, Pasco and Polk counties; and Maria Elvira Salazar of Miami; plus the seat held by Democratic Rep. Darren Soto of greater Orlando.

We have placed one incumbent in our lowest vulnerability category, “Minimally Vulnerable” — Republican Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Miami. It may seem odd that four of these five races are in GOP-held districts, given how red the state has become. But that’s an artifact of the post-2020 Census redistricting, in which Florida Republicans spread GOP-leaning voters across a wide range of districts rather than placing them in a smaller number of districts to produce wider margins. Meanwhile, three seats held by Democrats now seem solid enough for the incumbent that they have fallen off our vulnerability list, joining the state’s other 20 House seats that are not competitive.

The three seats newly off the list are held by Democratic Reps. Jared Moskowitz of Broward and Palm Beach counties; Lois Frankel of Palm Beach County; and Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Broward County. Here’s a rundown of the five races still on our list. Statistics below are from the Almanac of American Politics 2024.