The New York state Legislature, where Democrats have supermajorities in both chambers, voted to reject a congressional map drafted by the state’s bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission earlier this month.
The map drawn by the state’s 10-person commission, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, had largely preserved the map on which Republicans flipped four U.S. House seats in November 2022. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, faulted the commission’s new map for, among other things, improving the electoral position of Rep. Marc Molinaro, an upper Hudson Valley Republican.
New York Democrats were not about to ratify a congressional map against the wishes of Jeffries, whose shot at the speakership rides on a strong showing in his home state. The votes in the New York state Assembly and Senate rejecting the commission’s map clear the way for Democrats to draw their own more favorable boundaries as soon as later this week.
The unusual mid-cycle redistricting came about because the new liberal majority on the state’s highest court, the New York State Court of Appeals, effectively reversed the ruling of the court’s more conservative majority nearly two years ago. The high court found that when its predecessors appointed a special master to draw the map in April 2022, rather than giving the legislature a chance to draft alternatives, the court violated the legislature’s constitutional authority over redistricting.
Legal merits aside, the partisan stakes of the mid-cycle redistricting process have always been clear. Democratic lawmakers were hoping to draw congressional district boundaries that would improve the party’s chances of retaking the four House seats that they lost in 2022 without running afoul of the state constitution’s ban on partisan gerrymandering.
Empire State Democrats now have the opportunity to act on that ambition and conduct a do-over of their botched 2022 effort at engineering a partisan advantage within the parameters outlined in the state constitution.
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