To understand the demographic shifts of Florida’s growing Hispanic vote, you need only look to South Florida, where three congressional districts long dominated by registered Republican voters are being crowded out by more Democrats and independents.

Tallahassee has taken notice. This week, legislators approved a redistricting plan that would offer safer and stronger districts for Miami’s three Cuban-American Republican lawmakers, U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and David Rivera.

Since 2002, the last time legislators reconfigured the political districts to reflect the new census data, the number of registered voters has soared in their districts.

Growth has been particularly strong among non-Cuban Hispanic voters, the majority of which have registered as independent, no party affiliation or Democrat, political analysts say.

The results have Democrats salivating while Republicans, armed with new maps, remain confident they will retain their stronghold.

“Miami-Dade is not staying with three Republican Congress people,’’ predicts Christian Ulvert, a Miami-based Democratic political consultant. “With Miami’s population changes, and the fact that Hispanics tend to be trending more Democratic, that could prove problematic for them.”

Ros-Lehtinen dismissed the notion that a demographic shift will hurt Republicans. She said she’s been hearing the same argument since taking office in 1989 following the death of legendary Democratic congressman Claude Pepper.

“I guess if they repeat it often enough, they might believe it," she said.

Still, the makeup of Ros-Lehtinen’s current District 18 illustrates that things may not be the same, anymore. Her district, which stretches from Key West up the coast to the Broward County line, grew by 58,699 voters since the 2000 census. But 61 percent of the newcomers registered as no party affiliation; 26 percent registered as Democrat; and, Republican registration dropped 3 percent.

The result: a district where Republicans went from a 69,000 vote margin to one where the GOP margin was only 745 voters.

Florida’s Republican-led Legislature hit the reset button with the once-a-decade redrawing of political maps and approved a map that strengthens Ros-Lehtinen’s staying power. Her newly-drawn district shrinks dramatically in size as she loses the Keys and the more liberal strongholds of Miami Beach, but the district’s Republican to Democrat voter advantage climbs ten-fold.

"I’m proud to represent any area that the Legislature gives me,’’ Ros-Lehtinen said last week. She said she will be reluctantly giving up the Keys and Miami Beach but she’ll return to representing Hialeah, home to her first state legislative district.

The new proposed maps also help Diaz-Balart, himself a former legislative redistricting chairman. In the last decade, his current District 21 saw a 26 percent increase in registered voters and the Republican to Democrat voter margin of 29,000 voters shrunk to 6,000 votes by 2012.

Diaz-Balart’s new district sheds voters in University Park, Kendall and Country Walk. It becomes more rural, moves west over the Everglades, north through Immokalee and up to LaBelle. And the new map gives the congressmen 24,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.