New York Democrats are plowing ahead with an aggressive effort to rig the state’s electoral maps to give the party as many as three additional seats in Congress, a move that comes as the party has denounced similar Republican-led efforts in other states as anti-democratic.
Democrats currently have a 19-8 advantage in New York’s delegation to the US House of Representatives. Their proposed districts, unveiled on Sunday, would give them up to three additional seats, increasing their advantage to 22-4. (There is one fewer seat overall in New York because of population shifts.)
The plan puts Democrats in an awkward political position. “Democrats have given up any high ground they had over Republicans on gerrymandering,” Pat Kiernan, the popular local news anchor, tweeted on Sunday.
“These maps are the most brazen and outrageous attempt at rigging the election to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker,” Nick Langworthy, the chairman of the state Republican party, said in a statement. “What they’re doing is textbook, filthy, partisan gerrymandering.”
Over the last few months, Democrats in Congress have led efforts calling for an end to excessive partisan gerrymandering – an effort that failed last month when Republicans filibustered a sweeping voting rights bill. They’ve watched as Republican legislatures across the US have carved up district lines to their advantage to help the GOP as they try to take control of the US House later this year.
But New York is one of the few places where Democrats have complete control of the process and a chance to gain Democratic seats. Nationally, Republicans have complete control over the drawing of 187 districts and Democrats have control over just 75. More than a third of the districts Democrats will draw are in New York.
Here’s how they’re doing it in one of them.
“We’re not ignorant of the national implications of our work. But we have a long list of standards under New York law that we are required to comply with and that’s what drove our decision-making,” Michael Gianaris, a top Democrat in the New York state senate, told the Guardian. “It shouldn’t be surprising that a fairly drawn map in a deep blue state winds up electing more people of that persuasion. But that doesn’t mean that’s why the maps were drawn the way they were.”
Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, said it was hard to buy that the map merely reflected the political preferences of New Yorkers. Joe Biden won about 60% of the statewide vote in 2020, he noted, but the proposal would give Democrats control over as many as 85% of the districts. “It’s a very solidly blue state. But it’s not as blue as these maps have it,” he said.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, charged with protecting Democrats’ advantage in the House, did not return a request for comment.
Democrats, who hold a narrow super majority in the state legislature, approved the plan on Wednesday without holding a public hearing on the maps – a decision that has infuriated voting advocates. “They’re just muscling it through,” said Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group.
Advocates representing minority voters said the new district unfairly splits their communities, making it more difficult for voters there to have influence. Sunset Park, a Brooklyn neighborhood with a high Asian and Latino population, is now split, Mon Yuck Yu, executive vice-president and chief of staff at the Academy of Medical & Public Health Services, told reporters on Tuesday.
Yafa Dias, the lead organizer of the Arab Association of New York, said the new lines were “almost comedically gerrymandered”. She noted that her organization’s offices would now be in one congressional district, while the voters they advocated for would be in another.
There are notable differences in the gerrymandering strategy New York Democrats deployed compared with the one Republicans have used elsewhere, like in Texas, said Li, the Brennan Center redistricting expert.
In Texas, much of the GOP gerrymandering focused on padding Republican advantages in districts that seemed increasingly competitive. Republicans have been so successful at pursuing this aim that just one of the state’s 38 congressional districts was decided within a margin of 5 points in the last election. In New York, by contrast, Democrats have spread out their voters to give them a greater number of districts, Li noted, but didn’t create any new districts that are overwhelmingly safe. It’s a strategy that leaves room for Republicans to win back some of the Democratic districts under the right conditions in the future.
“Democrats are betting that their coalition in recent years mostly holds – that they don’t need to draw super Biden districts because their coalition is mostly going to stay intact,” Li said. “Republicans are looking at demographic change and political shifts in the suburbs and they’re scared of the future.”
In 2014, New York voters approved a ballot measure to create a 10-member bipartisan advisory commission to draw maps as part of an effort to bring more fairness to the process. But the panel never reached a consensus on a plan and the legislature rejected its proposals, taking redistricting power back for itself.
Li observed that the sweeping voting rights legislation Republicans blocked in Congress contained a provision that would have allowed a federal court to step in and quickly stop rigged maps like those in New York from going into effect.
“I do think Republicans are right to cry foul. On the other hand, they could have created a stronger process for redistricting, they could have supported the Freedom to Vote Act,” he said. “Republicans are a little bit like the people who said I don’t need to have car insurance because ‘I’ll never have an accident.’”
