Florida Republican Admits His Party Gerrymandered The State To Help Themselves

One of the Republicans running to fill Matt Gaetz’s empty Congressional seat admitted during a candidate event last week that the state of Florida has been gerrymandered by Republicans in order to keep themselves in power. The candidate, Jimmy Patronis, stated this as if it were the most normal and acceptable thing in the world. The other candidates attempted to fight off the accusations, but the damage had already been done. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

You know, I was kind of hoping that maybe, maybe through some small miracle when Matt Gaetz resigned as my representative in Congress, that maybe, maybe we'd get a normal person. I knew it was gonna be a Republican. This is one of the deepest reddest districts in the state of Florida, but maybe it would just be a normal Republican, right? Maybe just a regular trickle down economics Reagan type, you know, really bad on policy, but not a horrible piece of human garbage. And unfortunately, as the primary continues for the race to replace Matt Gaetz, um, it's a show. To put it mildly. It is absolutely horrific. And one of the Republicans running for this seat in the primary, a man by the name of Jimmy Patronus, excuse me, who happens to currently be Florida's chief financial officer, admitted during a candidate forum last week with the, uh, Niceville, uh, Republican Women's Club. He admitted that the state of Florida has been grotesquely gerrymandered by his own party to benefit his own party. Let me read you what he said. Let me give you a little civics lesson. Do you know why District one is where it is? It's because a Republican legislature is in charge right now. And this is what we've done since Daniel Webster was Speaker of the House. As a Republican, we try to create as many Republican congressional seats as possible. Okay? So what happened? You get gerrymandered lines.

Well, thank you for that, Mr. Patronus. I mean, we all knew it was happening, but for you to just come out and admit like, Hey, you wanna know why it is this way? It's because we made it this way, right, I mean, we just gerrymandered the hell out of it to keep Democrats out and to keep us in power. So thank you for that. Um, the big question I'm sure everyone is asking is, why would you admit this? What, what do you have to gain from going out and admitting that you are a member of a party that is basically just a bunch of cheaters? There actually is a very good reason why he said this, because you see, Mr. Petronas does not live in this district. No, he's an outsider. He actually lives in, uh, Panama City, which is in district two, but he wants to be the representative for district one. And due to the fact that our laws about running for Congress in the United States are in fact asked backwards, you don't have to live in the district that you're gonna represent. I'm sorry, but if you don't think that's the dumbest thing ever, then I don't know what

Is right? Like you could be living in South Florida right now, which trust me is night and day from Northwest Florida here. And you could still become our representative. How, why? I mean, Panama City is already night and day from Navar, Florida, which is also in this district, by the way, or Crestview. So being not in this district already tells us like, clearly this guy doesn't give a crap about us. He just wants the seat. So his Republican opponents obviously blasted him for this and are blasting him as basically being a carpet bagger, trying to come in to a place he doesn't know anything about a place he's never lived and represent us. The problem they have is that Patronus is gonna win. Patronus is the only candidate that I knew was running, and I live in the district, and obviously I follow politics. He's the only one I knew was running for office. He is the only one running any ads on TV right now, and they're even worse than the few ads Matt Gaetz ran over the years. So we get rid of gates, and now we're gonna end up with a carpet bagger who somehow, some way is even worse than Matt Gaetz. This district continues to go to hell. And to be honest with you folks, I don't know how much longer I can stay here and live with this level of bull crap.