Democrats Pass a N.Y. House Map That Modestly Benefits Them

Why It Matters: The map is key to the broader fight for the House majority.

The new map once again positions New York as one of the nation’s pre-eminent House battlegrounds. With a half dozen seats in play, both parties agree the fate of Republicans’ paper-thin majority could be determined in the state.

In many ways, it was an unlikely outcome.

Democrats tried to use their redistricting powers in New York to adopt an aggressive gerrymander in 2022, and were slapped down by the courts. The replacement map imposed by a judge helped Republicans win a four-seat majority in the House.

When New York was granted a do-over this year, both parties expected Democrats to try to offset the three to four seats Republicans are expected to gain from a new gerrymander in North Carolina.

Instead, Democrats appeared chastened by their earlier missteps, and constrained after a bipartisan state commission created to guide the redistricting process passed its own compromise plan.

The Response: Some Democrats were dejected, and Republicans were pleasantly surprised.

Privately, party leaders sold the map as a targeted but effective upgrade to the current lines that they believed could withstand another court challenge. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader, had blessed the outlines of the arrangement.

“This is a much fairer map for the people of the state of New York,” he said on Wednesday just before the vote. “We’ll put it in their hands to determine what congressional representation looks like after the November election.”

But the middle-road approach stung many Democrats as a brutal disappointment. They vented that the party was squandering its supermajority in the State Legislature by declining to stack the deck against Republican incumbents.

“Hakeem Jeffries now owns New York’s map,” David Nir, the political director of the progressive website Daily Kos, wrote on X. “If Democrats come up short in November and New York is the reason why, it will be on him.”

Republicans had opposed any attempt to redraw districts and were largely locked out of the mapmaking process. But on Wednesday, Republicans in Congress and the State Legislature said they were pleasantly surprised Democrats had not gone further.

Three Republicans joined every Democrat to approve the maps in the State Senate, and a dozen joined Democrats to pass it in the Assembly.

“There are small changes here or there, but none of them are materially significant from a political standpoint,” said John Faso, a former Republican congressman at the center of the redistricting battles.