What is gained from re-re-drawing New York's congressional map?

Spoiler: less than you think.

Democrats mostly think that being pro-reform is also favorable to their own party. But that’s not true. Improving representation and responsiveness is directed at helping voters. Yesterday’s decision in the New York Court of Appeals is an interesting case: it opens the way to backsliding, since it gives Democrats a chance to supersede a court-drawn congressional plan that treated both major parties equitably.

The weird thing is that although the litigants are aligned on partisan grounds, a re-draw doesn’t even help Democratic politicians that much. I imagine the press will say that Democrats stand to gain 6 seats from the GOP. However, that is not true. As far as I can tell, a replacement map will lead to a net gain of 1 or 2 seats.

Recall that the New York congressional map has been the subject of many battles. In 2022, the Court of Appeals struck down an aggressive Democratic gerrymander, replacing it with a map drawn by a special master. The remedial map was evenhanded in its treatment of the two parties; the Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave it an A for its balance and competition. The map has 8 competitive seats (CD 1, 2, 3, 4, 17, 18, 19, and 22), which is not just excellent but amazing. It is rare for PGP to give an “A” for competition, which would require a plan to have more closely-divided districts than 95% of simulations.

In this graph, the six light-colored districts are in the PGP-defined competitive zone. In addition, in 2022 two more dark blue districts (CD4, CD17) flipped to Republican, which goes to show what a genuinely large wave New York Republicans had that year.

Redrawing this map is the wrong decision from a good-government standpoint. First, voters won’t be able to count on having the same Congressperson for more than two years at a time. Second, to gain seats, Democrats did not even need a new map. They were already positioned to gain seats, as long they worked for it. Now there's a good chance that we will never find out.

In the remedial map, New York Republicans won 7 out of 8 competitive races in 2022, for a total delegation of 15 D, 11 R seats. However, 4 of those 7 Republican wins were within 3-point margins, and another was held by "George Santos." So there easily could be 5 flips toward Democrats in 2024, getting them to 20 D, 6 R - one seat ahead of where they were in 2020. That would have been quite a comeback, especially considering that New York lost a seat because of reapportionment.

Based on the statewide Congressional vote and the close Hochul-vs.-Zeldin governor's race, New York Democrats' performance in 2022 was genuinely dismal. The remedial map simply allowed their performance to be translated into seats.

But instead of fielding better candidates, another option is to...redraw the map.

We don't know how the appeals court will react to another aggressive gerrymander. They previously struck down a 23 D, 4 R plan (see PGP scorecard). As Michael Li from the Brennan Center has pointed out, after that happened, Democrats missed their chance to make a counteroffer. They failed to do so. And as the saying goes, pigs get fat but hogs get slaughtered.

I am curious about whether the legislature will go quite as far as they did in their previous map. Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has indicated that it would be better to be less aggressive this time around. It would seem prudent for Democrats to be less hog-like, for instance with a 21 D, 6 R map. Such a map would potentially only produce one more seat than the court-drawn plan. That is not much of a gain. What will likely be lost is pressure to produce better candidates.

Having three different maps in three consecutive elections, with one overturned map along the way, is not a great recipe for stable representation. But if the New York legislature were to make efforts to respect communities, then it might justify the downside of having three consecutive elections under three different maps, with a fourth map overturned along the way.

An argument could be made that in our current era of sharp partisan polarization, what matters in Congressional redistricting is total national power. It raises the question of whether one should aim for an outcome that is “overall-fair.” In that view, a Republican gerrymander in North Carolina gets offset by a Democratic gerrymander in New York. However, this creates a conflict with the goal of representing communities and regions and avoiding partisan gerrymandering, all within a state. And redistricting becomes a tit-for-tat game of escalating offenses, in the name of rough justice. One would want to be cautious about going down this road.

For example, if yesterday's decision is only marginally beneficial for Democratic politicians, its main outcome is to take away power from New York voters. Consider one possible downside: Competition makes legislators work harder. One topic that New Yorkers might care about is deductibility of state taxes from federal taxes. Republicans took away the SALT deduction. From either party, representatives in competitive New York districts would likely fight to get SALT back as a means of serving their constituents.

Finally, there is the question of whether re-re-districting of New York will be a determinative factor in who controls Congress in 2025. National congressional elections typically move at least a dozen seats in either direction. That’s many more seats than the gains from even the most extreme imaginable map in New York.