Since Reps. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.) and Al Lawson (D-Fla.) were both elected to the House in 2016, the three-term congressmen from Florida’s Panhandle have been reliably and routinely partisan in canceling out each others’ votes.
On Nov. 8, voters in Florida’s reconfigured Congressional District 2 (CD 2) will cancel one of the pair’s return ticket to Washington.
The Dunn-Lawson contest is one of just two 2022 midterm general election clashes pitting sitting incumbents against each other.
The other is in Texas CD 34, where Reps. Mayra Flores (R-Texas) and Vicente Gonzalez, Jr. (D-Texas) are on the same ballot.
All signs indicate Lawson will be the odd man out after post-2020 Census redistricting orchestrated by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis fragmented his former district, CD 5, merging blue Tallahassee precincts, and his Tallahassee home, into Dunn’s deep red Panama City-based CD 5.
As a result, analysts at FiveThirtyEight rate the district as R+16 and Cook PVI rates it as R+8, both bright red designations because the electorate now in the “new” CD 2 voted for former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden by more than 11 percentage points in 2020 despite Republicans having only a 1-percent advantage of 3,700 registered voters across the 14-county district.
Dunn, 69, a U.S. Army veteran and retired urologist, is favored in polls by 3-to-6 percentage points and has raised more than twice the money Lawson has, $1.67 million to $711,000, according to their Oct. 19 Federal Elections Commission (FEC) campaign filings.
But Lawson, 74, a 6-foot-7 former Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) basketball star who played briefly in the NBA, is a veteran campaigner who served in the Florida Legislature for 28 years, including 10 years in the Senate, before upsetting incumbent Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) in the 2016 CD 5 Democratic primary and winning the seat in the general election.
Dunn and Lawson reflect the generics of their parties’ 2022 midterm polarities.
Lawson endorses President Joe Biden’s economic agenda—claiming it has funneled $500 million in federal money for job-generating infrastructure Panhandle projects—abortion rights, and gun control, including banning certain semi-automatic rifles and handguns as so-called “assault weapons.”
Dunn says Biden’s management of the economy has fostered a 40-year high in inflation, opposes gun control, and supports the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, saying regulating the procedure is a state issue.
He was among the 147 House Republicans who voted against accepting the electoral vote and Biden’s 2020 election.
But after Lawson challenged him to clearly state if he accepted the 2020 election results in their only face-to-face encounter of the campaign Oct. 18 at the Capital Tiger Bay Club in Tallahassee, Dunn acknowledged, “Joe Biden was elected two years ago. No question. He’s been the president for the last two years. However, it’s a shame that Americans cannot have confidence in their elections.”
Redrawn Florida Maps Remain in Dispute
Florida’s newly drawn congressional maps, which are being challenged in pending lawsuits, dissolved two congressional districts now represented by Black Democrats—Lawson’s CD 5, and Orlando-area CD 10, represented by Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), who is challenging incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for his Senate seat.
Florida gained more than 2.7 million residents since the 2010 census, boosting its population to 21.54 million, a 14.6 percent increase, to gain one congressional district under the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 Apportion Results, expanding its congressional delegation to 28 seats.
After three months of contention among Republican leaders over how to map the 28 districts, DeSantis called state lawmakers to Tallahassee for an April special session to adopt his version of maps that do away with the state’s Fair Districts Amendment and could turn a 16-11 GOP congressional delegation advantage into a 20-8 Republican bloc.
Florida’s Fair Districts amendment approved by voters in 2010 requires the preservation of a “historically performing minority district” in North Florida, which was Lawson’s CD 5.
The amendment prohibits districts drawn to favor or disfavor a political party or candidate and prohibits the “diminishment of minority communities’ ability to elect a representative of their choice.”
But DeSantis claims the state’s Fair District Amendment is a “racial gerrymander” that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment on the U.S. Constitution by prioritizing race over “compactness” in drawing CD 5.
CD 5 spanned a 200-mile swath of eight counties from Jacksonville west to Tallahassee. It has been held by a Black Democrat since 1993. Under the new maps, CD 5 is a more compact Duval County-only district.
In response, Lawson in a statement called DeSantis “a dictator” who “bullied the Florida Legislature into approving his Republican-leaning congressional map” and said lawmakers’ acquiescence to “political meddling” was “alarming.”
“Florida House Democrats demonstrated courage today by protesting the DeSantis drawn map on the floor. They comprehend that this map violates the Voting Rights Act along with the U.S. and Florida Constitutions,” Lawson said.
Several voting and civil rights groups, including the League of Women Voters Florida (LWVF), have filed legal challenges against the redistricting efforts in state and federal court, but none of the suits are expected to be resolved soon.
Florida’s post-2010 Census map drafted in 2012 was legally debated for four years before it ended up before the state’s Supreme Court, which ultimately crafted the map adopted for the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections.
If legal challenges play out the same way a decade later, DeSantis’s reconfigured map will go before Supreme Court that he has reconfigured since assuming office in 2019 in appointing three of the panel’s seven jurists, transforming what had been a 4-3 narrow conservative advantage into a 6-1 bloc.
