A Redistricting Surprise in New York: A Map That Plays Few Favorites

When New York’s top court ordered the state to redraw its congressional map late last year, the state’s ruling Democrats were widely expected to exploit the opening to aggressively reshape district lines in their favor.

But on Thursday, a bipartisan state commission created to guide the redistricting process overwhelmingly approved a new proposed map that looks a lot like the current court-drawn map that helped Republicans pick up seats in 2022.

The panel’s 9-to-1 vote now thrusts a politically and legally thorny choice on legislative leaders in Albany who have the final say on any plan.

They can rubber-stamp the compromise, dashing the hopes of Representative Hakeem Jeffries and other powerful Democrats in Washington, or reject it and risk sending the whole process back to court by pushing for a more favorable alternative.

The answer could have far-reaching consequences for the national fight for control of the House this fall, where New York’s swing seats alone could be enough to tip the contest.

The commission’s map includes modest tweaks that would help Democrats flip one seat in Syracuse, and would most likely make a pair of vulnerable incumbents — one Democrat and one Republican — safer in the Hudson Valley.

But it does not touch lines on Long Island or in Westchester County, both major suburban battlegrounds where Democratic campaigns were looking for a leg up, or on Staten Island, where the party has long coveted a right-leaning seat. Even subtle shifts in those areas could have made a handful of Republican-held seats virtually unwinnable for incumbents in November.

The commission’s leaders began selling the deal on Thursday as an equitable conclusion to a haywire redistricting saga that has transfixed New York’s political world for two years.

“This vote is ultimately a victory for the commission process and for small-D democratic participation in the State of New York,” Ken Jenkins, the commission’s Democratic chairman, said.

Addressing potential critics in his own party, Mr. Jenkins added that “all the legal input we have requires compromise” to comply with the court’s ruling.

It was unclear how Democratic leaders in the Legislature, which is not scheduled to be back in session until Feb. 26, would proceed. Under the State Constitution and a court order, if lawmakers reject the plan, they would then take over the mapmaking power themselves, thus claiming far greater latitude to draw lines as Democrats wish.

But they are likely to face intense lobbying in the coming days from people close to Mr. Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, who represents a New York City district and has spent a year blasting the current lines as unfair, and from other partisan interests across the political spectrum.

The agreement, if it holds, would immediately endanger Representative Brandon Williams, a first-term Republican who won a Democratic-leaning, Syracuse-area seat by less than one point in 2022. By adding the towns of Cortland and Auburn to the district, the proposed map would make its base line almost four points more Democratic.

It would spell good news for four other endangered Republican incumbents who had been bracing for career-ending changes. Those first-term representatives — Mike Lawler in New York City’s northern suburbs; Anthony D’Esposito and Nick LaLota on Long Island; and Marc Molinaro in the Hudson Valley — still face difficult re-elections in districts President Biden won by between 0.2 and 14 percentage points in 2020, but shifting them left would have made the task all but impossible in some cases.

Mr. Molinaro would actually benefit under the new lines, by trading blue parts of Ulster County to Representative Pat Ryan, a Democrat, in exchange for redder Orange County.

Privately, some Democratic operatives close to leaders in both places said they feared the Legislature had no option but to accept a plan with such broad support on the commission.

All of it was playing out under the eye of the courts and the threat that Republicans would sue to block any solution deemed too partisan.

New Yorkers first voted to create the commission in 2014 as part of a suite of changes to the State Constitution designed to diminish partisan gerrymandering. But when the panel first assembled in 2022 to draw maps for the next decade, it deadlocked along party lines, failing to complete its work.

That failure began a cascade of connected actions that spelled disaster for Democrats.

The Democratic Legislature assumed control of the process and adopted a map that experts said would clearly favor the party’s candidates. Republicans sued, and New York’s highest court ultimately ruled the map an unconstitutional gerrymander.

A court-appointed special master ultimately drafted a replacement map, and Republicans competing on it flipped four seats in that fall’s midterms, almost single-handedly delivering their party’s House majority.

Then, at Mr. Jeffries’s urging, Democrats’ House campaign arm filed a new lawsuit arguing that the process should be restarted ahead of the 2024 elections to give the commission — and ultimately the Legislature — another chance to complete its work.

In December, the state’s highest court, transformed by the appointment of a new judge, sided with Democrats and ordered the commission back to work to put new maps in place for the June primaries.

Party leaders in New York and Washington had anticipated that the body’s five Democrats and five Republicans would break down on partisan lines again.

The commission’s Republican members entered negotiations last month opposed to making any changes to the current map. But after weeks of private negotiations, they agreed to acquiesce to some Democratic requests, in part to stave off a situation in which the Legislature again commandeered the process and adopted more sweeping changes.

There were other, smaller, changes to the map the commission proposed on Thursday.

The panel decided not to intervene in a bitter Democratic primary contest between Representative Jamaal Bowman, one of the House’s most outspoken progressives, and George Latimer, the Westchester County executive. Mr. Jenkins is a close ally of Mr. Latimer’s and could have greatly improved his chances with new lines, but both sides said they were happy to see them unchanged.

The panel made other, small changes in New York City and Western New York, moving around communities of interest that Democrats had argued should shift from one district or another. None of the changes were likely to have a meaningful partisan effect, though.