Florida’s House Republicans breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposed map for mid-cycle redistricting, which the state legislature approved along party lines Wednesday.

Many feared that giving Republicans an advantage in five more congressional districts in Florida would have been too risky. An advantage in four more districts? That “makes sense,” Rep. John Rutherford told NOTUS, reacting to his state’s proposed maps.

“It’s not gerrymandered like Virginia,” Rutherford said, referring to Democrats’ ambitious map that attempts to draw out all but one Republican seat in the state.

As DeSantis took up the redistricting effort, some lawmakers in the delegation expressed concern that an aggressive new map would spread Republicans too thinly across districts and put incumbents at risk of losing reelection. Florida’s House delegation is already made up of 20 Republicans, and only eight Democrats.

The map now awaiting DeSantis’ signature has calmed some nerves.

“It’s just like a big group photo,” Rep. Aaron Bean said. “When you see a group photo, the first thing we do is we look for ourselves. So I looked at Congressional District 4, which I have the honor of serving, and I’m grateful there’s no proposed change.”

Just not all nerves.

“I think people are worried that it’s more than two, but they’re grateful that it’s less than six, so we’re right there in the middle,” Bean said. His district, covering parts of Jacksonville and Northeast Florida, was largely not impacted by redistricting.

Several members of the delegation are seeing bigger changes to their districts ahead of the November elections. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, for example, would pick up parts of Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor’s district under the new map, although she said she wasn’t worried.

Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, who represents a South Florida district, including parts of Miami-Dade and Hialeah, saw drastic changes to his district.

Díaz-Balart projected confidence that he would fare just fine, considering he’d also been affected by redistricting in 2022.

“I have represented so many different areas in Southern Florida over the years that I’m really not concerned,” Díaz-Balart said. “I just haven’t been focused on it at all.”

And Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a South Florida Republican who’s on Democrats’ list of targets, said she was happy with the new lines precisely because her district stayed the same.

“I said the other day, I don’t control this process, I never knew about it. I didn’t know whether my lines were going to go up, down, to the sides,” Elvira Salazar said. “This is the governor and the state legislature.”

Red and blue states have been in a redistricting battle ever since Texas Republicans pushed a new mid-cycle map targeting up to five Democrat-held seats. In the fall, California voters approved a new congressional map that targeted as many as four Republican-held seats. North Carolina, Ohio, Louisiana, Missouri andOhio have also enacted redistricting measures; many maps, including Virginia’s, are still the subject of pending lawsuits.

Before a Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday that greatly restricted the Voting Rights Act, Florida was expected to be the last state that could potentially redistrict its map ahead of the midterms. Now, however, it’s unclear whether more Republican-led states will move to redraw their district lines in favor of their party.

Many southern states could move to give Republicans an advantage in the redistricting battle.

For some House members, like New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who Democrats had attempted to target through redistricting earlier this year, these new maps only reinforce why “political gerrymandering is wrong.”

“The shame of it all is that you’re going to lose a lot of good members in the process,” Malliotakis said. “Some of these districts that we have that are very competitive, members who are in the center, and those are the types of members you really need that are willing to work bipartisan across parties to get things done.”