WASHINGTON – New York's new congressional map includes a district that unites the Niagara region with the Thousand Islands region, one in Manhattan that resembles a snake run over by a car and yet another that somehow gives some people in Westchester County and Long Island the same member of Congress.
And to hear the experts tell it, it's not at all the kind of map voters expected when they passed a constitutional amendment in 2014 creating an independent redistricting commission that was supposed to take partisan politics out of the process.
Instead, experts said, voters got a gerrymandered map drawn by the State Legislature's Democratic majority, one that heavily favors Democrats to the point that it could help them maintain control of the House in the 2022 election.
"The fact that New York could end up with such an egregious congressional map represents a failure for the state’s new redistricting process," wrote Nathaniel Rakich, a senior elections analyst at the FiveThirtyEight election blog.
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Democrats and Republicans on the redistricting commission couldn't agree on a new congressional map, so they turned the map-making process over to the State Legislature.
The result, Rakich wrote, is a map with 20 heavily Democratic seats, four heavily Republican seats and only two competitive seats, which are both in the Hudson Valley and which both modestly favor Democrats.
In effect, the map could cut the state's GOP congressional delegation in half – and give the Democrats a national edge in the redistricting process.
"One of the biggest takeaways from the congressional redistricting process thus far has been that neither party has made major gains," Rakich wrote. "But the congressional map that New York legislators just introduced is so skewed toward Democrats that it could single-handedly change that."
That's not at all what supporters of that 2014 referendum had in mind. Steve Romalewski, director of the City University of New York Mapping Service, said the idea was to put the redistricting process in the hands of the people, rather than allowing politicians to, in essence, draw their own districts.
But since the commission failed, "we're back at square one, where the elected officials are choosing now," said Romalewski, who shepherds a "Redistricting and You" website at CUNY.
That failure – and the partisan map Democrats in Albany produced – left the New York State Republican Committee threatening legal action.
“These maps are the most brazen and outrageous attempt at rigging the election to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker," said Nicholas A. Langworthy, the state Republican chairman.
Even some Democrats griped about the maps.
Cynthia Appleton, the Democratic chairwoman in Wyoming County, lamented that her county and Livingston County would be split between the 23rd and 24th districts.
"It is an absolute travesty," she said on Twitter.Â
Nate McMurray, a former Democratic congressional candidate, offered a more succinct description of new congressional map.
"It's nuts," he said on Twitter.
