Why Democrats' New York gerrymander won't be as aggressive as the GOP's efforts

ALBANY, New York — With Democrats’ national redistricting calculus now in disarray over Friday’s court order blocking new Virginia maps, party leaders are looking to New York as a prime opportunity to keep pace with Republicans.

But as top Democrats in the Empire State move ahead with their attempt to redraw lines in 2028, they’re also far more likely to pull their punches in the ongoing gerrymandering wars.

The Supreme Court’s decision last week to end a key provision of the Voting Rights Act allows states to break up districts previously drawn to accommodate minority voters. Republicans in states like Alabama and Tennessee are rushing to take advantage by dissolving majority Black districts. In New York — the state where Democrats have the most to gain by drawing new lines — there’s virtually no appetite to respond in kind, underscoring a looming barrier for blue states in the redistricting fight.

“People were walking across bridges and being mauled, and have lost their lives for these rights,” New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said of the VRA. “These laws are there because there has been a real effort to disenfranchise certain people, certainly Black people, from being able to vote. So we want to protect that.”

In the coming weeks, New York lawmakers are expected to begin the lengthy process of approving a constitutional amendment that would let them redraw congressional lines in 2028. If successful, the measure stands to turn a state with 19 Democrats and seven Republicans into one with a 22-4 or 23-3 edge.

Such an outcome is akin to what Republicans pushed through in Texas last summer — but not as extreme as the 9-0 Republican map Tennessee lawmakers drew Thursday by eliminating a Black majority district in Memphis.

In New York, a 26-0 map isn’t plausible. But in a deep blue state where Democrats routinely receive around 60 percent of the vote in statewide races, maps that feature tendrils extending from the Bronx and Brooklyn into the furthest regions of upstate and Long Island are possible. And such a reconfiguration would give Democrats an even greater advantage compared with maps they’ve floated in the not so distant past.

Doing that would require eliminating districts that were protected by the VRA until last week. Those districts include the Brooklyn seat held by House Minority Hakeem Jeffries, who said last month that Democrats need to “fight back with every tool available.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also emphasized the urgency Democrats are feeling Friday at an event honoring Rep. Jan Schakowsky in Chicago, stressing that the court order blocking new maps in Virginia “puts responsibility — even greater responsibility — to those of us in this room, specifically in New York and in the state of Illinois.”

“We have power here in this room to help balance the scale, and we are now in a national fight in order to do that,” she said. “The decisions we make on the city level, the state level and on the federal level, with our representation is part of a much larger story."

In practice, though, New York’s Democratic leaders do not appear inclined, at the moment at least, to similarly weaponize the newfound ability to disempower Black voters.

“I don’t think we want to roll back protections for minority communities in New York,” said Senate Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris, who’s led his conference’s redistricting efforts since 2012.

The fact that keeping these districts intact is a core personal political belief for leaders like Stewart-Cousins — and a political third rail for everyone in the state’s Democratic Party — will likely limit how aggressive Democrats approach redistricting.

Consider the electoral math on Long Island, where two Democrats and two Republicans now occupy House seats. Maps floated before the 2022 redistricting process would have squeezed many Republicans into just one district, giving Democrats a narrow edge in three.

Expanding that to a 4-0 advantage would require completely ignoring political and demographic boundaries. And states now have the authority to do that under the Supreme Court’s recent decision. Picture a scenario where Democrats slice up blue districts in Brooklyn and Queens and merge them with the purple and red ones to the city’s east — a serpentine seat joining Bedford-Stuyvesant with the Hamptons, for example.

Drawing lines like that isn’t possible, though, without turning historically Black strongholds like those represented by Jeffries and Reps. Yvette Clark and Gregory Meeks into districts with white majorities — or eliminating the Asian plurality in Rep. Grace Meng’s district, or the Hispanic majority in Ocasio-Cortez's seat. And doing that is almost certain to draw intense pushback from organizations whose support is needed to win approval for the planned 2027 redistricting referendum.

“It’s really, really important that we are at the table from the beginning of this process so that the parties, as they start to course correct, are not overcorrecting,” said L. Joy Williams, the NAACP New York State Conference’s president.

“Voter disenfranchisement doesn’t require malicious intent,” she continued. “In people’s pursuit of political power, if they are doing it at the expense of voters, that’s a problem, and your course correction could inadvertently disenfranchise more people.”

The first occupant of Clarke’s Brooklyn district was former Rep. Shirley Chisholm, after the seat was created in 1966 through the VRA. That district, and the desire to protect its legacy, drew more attention than any in the state during public hearings before the 2022 redistricting — underscoring how much blowback there would be to splintering it in an attempt to boost Democratic odds in Suffolk County.

But it’s far from the only seat in New York that was kept safe due to the VRA.

As Democrats revisited the maps in 2024, the easiest gerrymander in the state would have been blending the seat then held by former Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman with the neighboring one held by Republican Rep. Mike Lawler. Doing so would have paved the way to transforming districts with a 29-point Democratic edge and a 1-point Republican edge, respectively, into two districts with 14-point Democratic advantages.

There were concerns about drastic changes to Bowman’s map, though. Overhauling a district where 60 percent of the residents are minorities could have led to a legal challenge under the VRA. And while that’s no longer the case, Democrats still appear inclined to resist aggressively splitting that seat.

“We believe in democracy,” said Stewart-Cousins. “We’re very concerned that we are in a place where not only do we need to defend against the radical remaking of how we do democracy, but that we’re actually defending the very existence of democracy in a multiracial society.”

—Shia Kapos contributed reporting