DeSantis’ congressional map was designed to flip 4 seats to the GOP — Will it?

Among the four seats Florida Republicans are supposed to flip from the Democrats this year following their mid-cycle redistricting is Florida’s 22nd Congressional District in South Florida.

The Palm Beach County district has been held for 14 years by Democrat Lois Frankel.

Its geographic bounds have shifted west. It now covers inland Palm Beach and the Broward County areas of Wellington and Parkland. It then moves further west to gather all of rural Hendry County and then into southern Collier County.

From a partisan perspective, it shifted from a district that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 by more than five points to one that supported Donald Trump by more than 10 points.

As in other races in Florida, the new map set off a game of congressional musical chairs. Frankel dropped out of the race and ran instead in Congressional District 23. Democrat Pia Dandiya, 39, dropped her challenge to Republican Brian Mast in Congressional District 21 to run in the new CD 22.

She easily won the Democratic primary in August and now takes on 57-year-old Naples businessman Casey Askar, who defeated six other Republicans in his primary, winning 31% of the vote.

The new map sent to legislative leaders from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office in May showed CD 22 flipping from blue to red, but that’s not guaranteed by any means in this political environment. The Cook Political Report recently shifted it to a “toss-up” election.

Dandiya is a 39-year-old Palm Beach native and daughter of Indian immigrants. A Harvard graduate with a B.A. in government, she is a former high school teacher and principal who later went to work for Apple.

Like many candidates from both parties this year, she’s running hard on an anti-corruption platform.

“If there’s one thing principals believe in, it’s celebrating progress but also holding people accountable. And I think that it’s time, as key measures to earn back the trust of voters across the country in government, to say we are standing strong against corruption — whether it’s banning congressional stock trading, whether it’s banning prediction market betting by members of Congress, ending Citizens United, and so much more,” she told the Phoenix last week.

After founding and serving for five years as principal at Democracy Prep Public School in Harlem, Dandiya spent a year working under both the Trump and Biden administrations as a White House fellow. She then worked for more than three years as a manager in the Strategic Initiatives Group for Apple. That’s been a point of contention for Republicans, who say she served as a lobbyist for the company.

Dandiya said she was leading public-sector initiatives, finding ways to use technology to better achieve outcomes in education and healthcare.

“These are ways that we can help our society be more connected and effective in reaching communities from so many different walks of life, and anyone at Apple who had even a single conversation with an elected or a state leader had to technically register as a lobbyist,” she said. “That job was very distinct from the full time corporate lobbyist that Apple does hire at the state and national level.”

Casey Askar

Dandiya’s GOP opponent, Casey Askar, was born in Iraq and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was a child. He has said that they were Christians escaping religious persecution.

Askar responded to a request by the Phoenix for an interview by asking us to send him some questions, which we did. He did not reply upon receiving them, so we turned to publicly available information.

At 18, he signed up to serve in the U.S. Marines. He’s now a restaurant franchise owner with a net worth of $176 million, as calculated by Quiver Quantitative based on previous disclosures. This is his second bid for office. He ran in the 2020 Republican primary race in Florida’s 19th District, finishing third in a race won by Byron Donalds.

Askar is in synch with Dandiya in calling to ban members of Congress from trading stocks, but otherwise there are few similarities between the two candidates.

He says the Affordable Care Act needs to go and be replaced “with a vehicle that works for all Americans.”

In June, he said he wants to rename the Alligator Alley portion of I-75 the “President Donald J. Trump Interstate.” The president responded in September by endorsing Askar. However, on his website under endorsements, Askar lists eight individuals and CPAC but not the president.

In a recent interview with Newsmax, he said he was running “against a socialist.”

“A Harlem school teacher-principal that runs on a DEI-agenda, where the Democratic Party falls in the far-left. Transgender, LGBTQ,” he added.

He boasted about his abilities as a job creator, saying his company, Asker Brands, has employed thousands of people across the country and in South Florida, and that Democrats can’t run on a pro-business agenda.

“They have no substance. They just speak in non-sequitur, all hyperbole, vapid, no-nothings, just against our country. Hating our country. Hating our sovereignty and they’re socialists, communists. So, the message is very clear and we’re getting that to the voters.

Dandiya insists, “Unequivocally, I am not a socialist.”

She adds that she’d rather define herself by what she believes in, which is that she wants to be “a fixer, not a fear-monger.”

Money

There has been a lot of outside spending in this race.

Dandiya is getting a boost from a media campaign by the Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund and the House Majority PAC. The two Democratic PACS announced last week that they were spending $10 million to elect Moms Demand Action volunteers in CD 22 and seven other Democratic congressional races.

A Super PAC tied to President Donald Trump has spent more than $3.76 million against Dandiya, according to midtermmoney.com.

Republicans have about a 8-point voter registration lead in the district, but Democratic data analyst Matt Isbell notes that it contains a large block of moderate voters. On the same day the district backed Trump in 2024 by more than 10 points, data analyst Matt Isbell notes that it voted for Amendment 4, the ballot measure that would have enshrined abortion rights in Florida, by a 20-point margin.

In addition to CD-22, Democratic incumbents Jared Moskowitz, Kathy Castor, and Darren Soto all saw their seats redrawn to make it more difficult to win re-election next month.

Moskowitz moved to the CD 25 race, which the Cook Political Report now says leans Democratic. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the top Republican House super PAC, decided this week to cancel $6 million in planned television spending in the market, PunchBowl News reported Tuesday.

Cook lists Castor’s CD 14 seat as a “toss-up.”

Soto’s CD 9 seat in Central Florida was the most radically redrawn of any of the state’s 28 congressional districts, going from a 3.5-plus seat for Harris in 2024 to one that would have voted for Trump by nearly 18 points. That district remains “Likely Republican,” according to the Cook Report.