New district lines will scramble key New York House races

ALBANY, N.Y. — Candidates are eager to run in competitive House seats in New York next year. There’s just one problem: They have no clear sense of where to campaign.

The interminable legal fight over redistricting in New York will likely leave both parties unclear which races will be competitive until sometime next spring. And more immediately, in an era where serious congressional campaigns start well ahead of election years, the uncertainty is keeping some potential candidates from declaring their intentions.

Recruitment for House races “has been somewhat frozen due to redistricting,” said former GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin, who is running a PAC to help elect candidates. “It is absolutely causing a headache for people who want to step up, but they don’t even know yet what district they’d be running in.”

Republicans in New York last year were able to flip three seats in the House — critical victories that helped the GOP gain a slim majority. Now the parties are gearing up for 2024 as key races loom on Long Island, the Hudson Valley and parts of upstate, again turning the state into a key national battleground that could decide control of the next Congress.

Lawsuits have made this the second election cycle in a row in which the New York congressional field has been stuck in a holding pattern due to questions over the maps.

Potential candidates didn’t have any official lines for the 2022 elections until the Democratic-dominated Legislature approved them in February of that year. Republicans eventually won a lawsuit arguing that the Legislature didn’t take the proper steps in drawing the maps, leading toan entirely new plan drawn by the courts in May.

The fields for 11 of the state’s 26 congressional districts reshuffled at least once during those four months, and there could be a similar shift next year.

Last year, for example, Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney initially planned a move from the Utica area to a new district in the state’s southwestern corner when the Democratic plans were printed, but switched to the northwestern corner the night the court maps came out.

Republican Mike Lawler, then a state assemblymember, was contemplating a state Senate run after the first set of maps last year, but he ultimately ran for Congress under the court lines. He then pulled off one of the country’s biggest upsets — toppling Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the then-head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Democrats are now arguing in court that last year’s lines should be considered temporary. The case is unlikely to be decided until around Thanksgiving.

A win would let the Democratic-led state Legislature take another crack at drawing lines in early 2024. And that would presumably be followed by yet another round of litigation in which Republicans would seek to block the new maps, once again leaving the political calculus uncertain well into the spring.

Several candidates have said they’re not too concerned how a potential redesign would impact their races.

“I’ve lived in Central New York my entire life and know the areas around it well,” said state Sen. John Mannion, a Democrat seeking to challenge Republican Rep. Brandon Williams. “There are really shared regional priorities in any direction that you go.”

But even if candidates are comfortable with running in districts with different designs, it’s clear that any new maps could lead to just as much reshuffling as in 2022.

“For anyone who’s thinking about running for Congress in 2024, whether you’re in elected office or not, I would say the biggest factor may be what district are you running in, what does the district look like?” Zeldin said.

There is a “very different calculation” between deciding whether to run in a district with an incumbent versus an open seat — or running in a Democratic-friendly versus a Republican-leaning district, Zeldin noted.

“That really is the biggest thing politically in analyzing all of these House races across New York state.”

The simplest possible scenario if Democrats get a legal victory would involve the Legislature reviving the lines that were on the books for a few months last year.

And if that happens, consider how much disruption it would cause in just the four Hudson Valley seats:

• Westchester County Executive George Latimer has made some noise about mounting a Democratic primary challenge to Rep. Jamaal Bowman. If a seat is once again centered on the Long Island Sound, which was proposed but rejected by the courts last year, Latimer's Rye home would be joined with the Nassau County seat currently held by Rep. George Santos.

• Liz Whitmer Gereghty, the sister of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, has launched a high-profile Democratic bid against Lawler. But the Westchester County area where she currently serves on a school board would be taken out of Lawler’s district and split between districts currently held by Bowman and Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan.

• Former Rep. Mondaire Jones moved to Brooklyn to run unsuccessfully for Congress in 2022 after the court-drawn maps placed him in the same seat as Bowman. He is now also planning to run against Lawler and would likely be the favorite for the Democratic nomination if the legislative-drawn lines were brought back. But it would be a very different seat than currently drawn.

• Democrat Josh Riley started running for Congress in 2021 when his hometown Ithaca was included in a Western New York seat. The Democratic maps moved it to a Central New York district tethered to Syracuse, and he lost to Republican Marc Molinaro . Riley has announced a rematch, but the old legislative maps would place Ithaca in Williams’ seat, where five Democrats are running.

Those are only some of the changes that would occur in just one corner of the state if last year’s Democratic maps were brought back unchanged. And they could just as easily look at how political realities have shifted since early 2022 and come up with an entirely new plan.
Democrats, for example, may try to force Molinaro to decide between either running 100 miles from his home near Poughkeepsie or in a more-Democratic friendly version of the seat in which Ryan defeated him in a special House election last summer.

“I hope we don’t have to redo this again,” Molinaro said. “It’s very exhausting and confusing to people, but I accept whatever happens next. The one thing I can be certain of in New York and New York politics is nothing is ever certain.”

Riley, meanwhile, campaigned throughout 20 counties as Ithaca was repeatedly bounced between districts in 2022. He said in an interview when launching a new bid this spring that he wasn’t concerned about further changes.

“The thing I learned last year is to just focus on conversations with the voters,” Riley said. “The lines might change, but the issues facing upstate New Yorkers really are consistent.”

Still, it’s clear that new maps would require a reoriented campaign. Riley’s campaign continues to attack Molinaro, but the Republican might not wind up being his opponent in 2024.

And soon after a mid-level court ruled in Democrats’ favor on the redistricting case last month, Riley sent out a fundraising email that underscored the significance of more potential district changes.

“I need to ask if you can chip in a few dollars to support our campaign because fundraising now is more important than ever, given the uncertainty we're facing,” he wrote. “We need to be prepared for anything that is thrown our way.”

Nick Reisman contributed reporting.