Political musical chairs

Democratic Rep. Al Lawson’s November playbook is a campaign version of a half-court buzzer-beating shot he might have tried as a standout basketball player for Florida A&M University in the early 1970s and then briefly in the pros with the Indiana Pacers and Atlanta Hawks.

The 6-foot-7-inch lawmaker is seeking reelection in Florida’s new Republican-leaning 2nd Congressional District based in the conservative central Panhandle. It’s a starkly different constituency than Lawson’s current minority-majority 5th District, which straddles the Georgia state line. Lawson, who is black, first won the district in 2016 after a court-ordered redrawing of Florida’s 27 House seats. (It’s about to become 28 due to population growth over the past decade.)

In November, Lawson will have to beat a House colleague, GOP Rep. Neal Dunn, to keep his seat. House member-vs.-member general election fights are rare but hardly unprecedented. A smattering usually pop up every decade or so after the redistricting process, which in this cycle was used in Florida by Gov. Ron DeSantis to maximize Republican gains in the Sunshine State’s House delegation.

The Lawson-Dunn contest isn’t the only lawmaker-vs.-lawmaker 2022 contest. In a much more competitive race, newcomer Republican Rep. Mayra Flores will try to hold her seat against Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in Texas’s 34th District, based in the eastern Rio Grande Valley.

While that seat was drawn by Republican state legislators in Texas to be politically competitive, the opposite was true in Florida. Lawson’s current district was dismantled during redistricting. In the new district, former President Donald Trump would have beaten President Joe Biden in 2020 by about 11 points. The new district has a much more rural bent, taking in a swath of conservative counties that have increasingly voted Republican in recent decades.

But thanks to his high name recognition, Lawson isn’t out of the game. After Lawson’s professional basketball career ended due to injuries, he moved back to his hometown of Tallahassee and coached the Florida State University men’s team for a spell while also going into the insurance business. He was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1982 and held his Tallahassee-based seat through 2000, when he was forced from the chamber by term limits.

Lawson then was a state senator for 10 years. And after a pair of losing congressional bids, in 2016, he beat scandal-plagued Rep. Corrine Brown in the 5th District Democratic primary, cruising to victory in November.

In the House, Lawson has generally voted with the Democratic leadership but has deviated on some issues, such as support for charter schools. Dunn was also elected to the House in 2016 during his first run for public office, and he has voted a consistently conservative line.

Dunn, a Boston native, after earning his medical degree from George Washington University, settled in Panama City, Florida, where he helped found the Panama City Urological Center and the Panama City Surgery Center and was the founding chairman of Summit Bank.

It’s likelier to be a closer race in the South Texas district that is being closely watched not only for who wins the fight between Flores and Gonzalez but how much Republicans have improved their performance with Latino voters. Flores became a GOP hero of sorts when, in June, she won a special election to complete the term of former Rep. Filemon Vela, a Democrat who resigned from the House to join a Washington, D.C., law-and-lobbying firm.

Flores, an immigrant from Mexico, became the embodiment of Republican efforts to win over traditionally Democratic voters in South Texas and nationally. In November, she’ll face Gonzalez for a newly created House seat, the 34th District, near the U.S. border with Mexico.

This time, though, Flores faces a tougher race. The new 34th District would have backed Biden over Trump 57.2% to 41.7%. And now, Flores, though running as an incumbent, will be facing a House colleague, Gonzalez, who has been in office since 2017. In the House, Gonzalez has voted with the Biden administration more than 97% of the time, making for a classic ideological matchup featuring a conservative Republican against a liberal Democrat.

Both parties are watching the race closely. House Republicans need to net only five seats in the 435-member chamber to win a majority for the first time since the 2018 elections. But polling of late has shown that that’s far from inevitable, so the Texas district, near the bottom of the continental United States, this fall ought to swell with political ads and candidate events.