NY redistricting panel approves new House map plan, with limited changes

NEW YORK — A powerful but problem-plagued New York State panel on Thursday approved a proposal to redraw New York’s House lines, sending a map to the state Legislature that is in many ways similar to the current map but that could modestly advantage upstate Democrats.

The 10-member panel, the Independent Redistricting Commission, voted 9 to 1 to approve the map proposal after the state’s top court in December ordered the commission to draw new House lines for the state.

The vote was a victory for a panel that had failed to complete its mandate to supply a bipartisan map to the Legislature in 2022 ahead of the midterms. But it might come as a disappointment to many Democrats after the party lodged a ferocious legal fight to throw out the current district lines.

New York’s redistricting battle has been closely watched and has carried potential implications for races in a suite of swing districts that could determine control of Congress after the 2024 elections. But Thursday’s vote suggested the tug-of-war may end in less-than-dramatic fashion.

Key swing districts on Long Island, for example, did not undergo major changes in the proposal.

Still, the plan, which heads next to the state lawmakers for review, could boost the reelection campaigns of a Hudson Valley Democrat and a Hudson Valley/Southern Tier Republican, and hamper a Syracuse-area Republican, according to an analysis by Dave Wasserman, an election expert with the Cook Political Report.

Wasserman said the proposal would make the district of Rep. Pat Ryan, a Hudson Valley Democrat, more Democratic-leaning; the district of Rep. Marc Molinaro, a Greene County Republican, more Republican-leaning; and the district of Rep. Brandon Williams, an Onondaga County Republican, more Democratic-leaning.

“If passed, the net effect would be to diminish the competitiveness of the map in Upstate New York, with a very slight benefit to Democrats — but nowhere near the windfall Republicans feared from an aggressive gerrymander,” Wasserman said on X.

Jeff Wice, a professor at New York Law School who closely follows redistricting, said the “biggest question” now is whether the Legislature will approve the map, but that the proposal also could be challenged in court.

At least one Democrat in the Legislature, Sen. James Skoufis of the Hudson Valley, immediately dismissed the proposed map.

“After almost two years of hand-wringing and legal battling for a fair congressional map, the only thing ‘bipartisan’ about the Independent Redistricting Commission’s proposal is that both parties are seeking to protect their incumbents,” Skoufis said in a statement.

He said the Legislature should reject the plan.

It was not immediately clear when state lawmakers would vote on the map.

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Westchester Democrat, said she was eager to review the proposal.

“We plan to discuss and decide our subsequent actions soon, taking into account the election cycle calendar,” she said in a statement. This process is critically important and we are committed to concluding it in a manner that upholds fairness and democracy.”

In 2022, the Independent Redistricting Commission deadlocked in a bipartisan bid to complete a once-a-decade redrawing of New York’s House map, leaving the process to the Democratic-ruled Legislature.

State lawmakers then drew and approved their own congressional lines, which heavily advantaged Democratic candidates across the state, before the state’s top court threw out the map in April 2022, writing that the lines were “drawn with impermissible partisan purpose.”

Under court orders, an independent expert in Pennsylvania crafted lines that were used in last year’s midterm elections. Republicans had a strong showing statewide, flipping four House seats in New York, and Democrats maintained the map was at least partly to blame.

Seeking different lines in 2024, Democrats went back to court and won. They scored a 4-to-3 ruling from the state’s top court, the Court of the Appeals, that sent the process back to the Independent Redistricting Commission for a redo.

The ruling came after the court shifted further to the left following the resignation and replacement of its former chief judge, Janet DiFiore. She resigned from the bench in the summer of 2022.

“We are holding the IRC and legislature to what the Constitution demands and will do so as often as necessary to secure compliance with its mandate,” the new chief judge, Rowan Wilson, wrote in the court’s majority opinion in December. “That said, we trust that the members of the IRC will act as the Constitution requires without further need for judicial intervention.”

The court ordered the panel to submit a map to the state Legislature by Feb. 28. It did so with almost two weeks to spare.

“This process was a challenge, and there were certainly bumps in the road,” Ken Jenkins, the commission’s Democratic chairman, said before the vote. “But the work of the commission — based on all the legal input that we have had — requires compromise.”

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