Florida's 3rd Congressional District was renumbered to 5th Congressional District but was little changed in the redistricting process in 2012, still winding from Orlando in the south to central Jacksonville in the north. From 1973 to 1993 the erstwhile 3rd district was based in Orange County, including Walt Disney World and most of Orlando. The peculiar shape of the 3rd Congressional District dates from reapportionment done by the Florida Legislature after the 1990 U.S. Census. The 1993–2012 3rd Congressional District was geographically distinctive. Starting from the southern part of the district, it included the Pine Hills area of the Orlando-Kissimmee Metropolitan Area with small pockets of African-American neighborhoods in the cities of Sanford, Gainesville, Palatka, and finally the larger African American communities of Jacksonville. Connecting these areas were regions which are sparsely populated—either expansive rural areas or narrow strips which are only a few miles wide. Barack Obama received 73% of the vote in this district in the 2008 Presidential election.
Court-ordered changes
On July 11, 2014, Florida Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis ruled that this district, along with the neighboring District 10, had been drawn to favor the Republican party by packing black Democratic voters into District 5. On August 1, Judge Lewis gave Florida's state legislature an Aug. 15 deadline to submit new congressional maps for those two districts. 5th District Representative Corrine Brown issued a statement blasting Lewis's decision on the district map as "seriously flawed," and Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Marcia Fudge sent a sharply worded letter to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel complaining about the party’s support for the lawsuit challenging Florida's district maps. Brown said that "we will go all the way to the United States Supreme Court, dealing with making sure that African Americans are not disenfranchised." Florida House Redistricting Chairman Richard Corcoran, a Republican, said that "consideration of political data is legally required" to ensure that district boundaries would not be so shifted as to not allow African-Americans a chance to elect representatives of their choice. On appeal, the Florida Supreme Court approved a redrawn version of District 5 on December 2, 2015. That plan went into effect for the 2016 elections. The new district had a dramatically different shape than its predecessor. It now stretched in an east-west configuration along the Georgia border from downtown Jacksonville to Tallahassee. However, it was no less Democratic than its predecessor, as noted in the Florida Supreme Court's final opinion: "With a black share of registered Democrats of 66.1%, the black candidate of choice is likely to win a contested Democratic primary, and with a Democratic registration advantage of 61.1% to 23.0% over Republicans, the Democratic candidate is likely to win the general election."
