Florida Republicans keep their top spot on ballots in partisan general election races under a federal appeals court decision with politics written all over it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled Wednesday that the Democratic voters and organizations who filed the lawsuit lacked standing and sued the wrong people. The Republican Party lined up with the state and the Democratic Party with the plaintiffs.

The 95-page opinion came with the main decision, a concurrence by the judge writing for the three-judge panel and a partial dissent. It took the panel a relatively quick 11 weeks to decide the case in a presidential election year.

Judge William Pryor, who wrote the opinion, concluded in his concurrence that the case raised "a nonjusticiable political question," the same issue raised Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court in its request for new briefs on the viability of U.S. House subpoenas for the president's tax records.

Pryor is a Republican appointee. In her partial dissent, Judge Jill Pryor, a Democratic appointee, cautioned against setting up a circuit split and drawing conclusions about who holds authority under Florida election law. The other judge, former Florida Supreme Court Justice Robert Luck who was named to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in November, concurred but was otherwise silent.

The panel reversed an injunction issued by U.S. District Chief Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, and ordered dismissal of the case.

The litigation affects ballots in a swing state where statewide races repeatedly have been so tight that recounts are routine. A Stanford political scientist testified before Walker that studies have established the "primacy effect" of being listed first on a ballot is worth about five percentage points.

Based on the party of the sitting governor, Democrats had the advantage in 20 general elections and Republicans in 14, including the last 10, under the 1951 state law.

Jill Pryor agreed the plaintiffs lacked standing because they were unable to prove injury, but she disagreed that the state's 67 elections supervisors should have been sued rather than Secretary of State Laurel Lee.

Florida has a diffuse system of election law where the supervisors create their own ballots, count them and report results to the state. William Pryor said Walker "erred by reaching the merits and entering an injunction against nonparties whom it had no authority to enjoin."

He wrote there was "nothing unusual or untoward" about the holdings, which "promote judicial economy by resolving issues that have percolated in our circuit for years and are likely to recur in future litigation."

Pryor dismissed Walker's decision as an advisory opinion "beyond the power of federal courts."

Jill Pryor noted the majority opinion creates a heavier burden for plaintiffs to establish traceability or redressability requirements of standing "than our precedent supports and creates a split with authority from other circuits."

Citing "principles of judicial restraint," she said her colleagues were deciding difficult questions of state law.

"Federalism concerns that counsel us to abstain from deciding such state law issues are even more compelling" when they go to the heart of state self-government, she wrote. Citing Supreme Court guidance on restraint, she said, "Just because we may offer alternative holdings does not mean that we should."

The Democrats were represented by Perkins Coie. Marc Elias, chair of the firm's political law practice and a key player in Democratic presidential campaigns, issued a statement on behalf of the party saying he strongly disagreed on the standing issue.

"Arguing that Democrats are not harmed by an illegal and unwarranted 5% Republican advantage in every single election in the state is wrong, inconsistent with running a fair election," the statement said.

Jason Torchinsky of Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky in Washington argued for the state. He called the decision "a major victory for the notion that states gets to be laboratories of democracy when running elections, and that not every progressive policy preference should be enacted by the judiciary."

The opinion allows states to set their own election laws "in spite of activist, reformer pleas to federalize all aspects of elections," he added.

The National Senate Republican Committee chaired by Indiana Sen. Todd Young intervened in the case. There was no immediate response to a phone message left at his Washington office.

Read the opinion:

|