Redrawn New York Map Nullifies Democrats’ Gamble to Gain House Seats

Earlier this year, Democratic leaders in New York made a brazen gamble: With the national party’s blessing, they created a congressional map that promised its candidates as many as three additional House seats.

On Monday, three weeks after the state’s highest court declared the Democrats’ map unconstitutional, it became clear just how spectacularly the party’s gambit had backfired.

A new slate of new congressional districts unveiled by the courts on Monday could pave the way for Republicans to make gains in this year’s critical midterm elections, a disastrous reversal for Democrats in a state where they control every lever of power.

The proposed maps, drawn by Jonathan R. Cervas, the court-appointed special master, would unwind changes that Democrats had hoped to use to unseat Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Staten Island Republican; flip other Republican-held swing districts; and secure their own tenuous seats in the Hudson Valley region.

The new lines even cast the future of several long-tenured, powerful Democratic incumbents in doubt, forcing several to potentially run against one another.

The most striking example came from New York City, where Mr. Cervas’s proposal pushed Representatives Jerrold Nadler, a stalwart Upper West Side liberal, and Carolyn Maloney of the Upper East Side into the same district, setting up a potentially explosive primary fight in the heart of Manhattan. Both lawmakers are in their 70s, have been in Congress for close to 30 years and lead powerful House committees.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a favorite to become the party’s next leader, was one of a handful of incumbent lawmakers who, under the new map, would no longer reside in the districts they represent. In one case, the new lines put Representative Brian Higgins mere steps outside his greater Buffalo district.

Taken together, the proposed changes have broad national implications, effectively handing Republicans the upper hand in a national fight for control of the House, and rattling the top echelons of House Democratic leadership.

“This is a huge swing against Democrats from the plan that was struck down,” said Dave Wasserman, a national elections analyst with the Cook Political Report. “Democrats could lose a lot of ground this fall and that could drive a stake through their hopes of keeping the House majority.”

The final results promised to make New York an anomaly in a nation composed of increasingly gerrymandered states. Numerous states used redistricting this year to reinforce the dominance of one party or the other, yet New York — one of the largest Democratic-led states — is now expected to preserve and potentially even add competitive seats.

By Mr. Cervas’s own account, the new map would create eight competitive congressional seats, a figure closer to New York’s current decade-old map than the three that he estimated the Democrats’ map would have yielded.

Mr. Wasserman put the handicapping at 15 safely Democratic seats, five safely Republican seats and a half-dozen tossups in a state where roughly 60 percent of voters supported President Biden.

The map approved by the State Legislature, where Democrats control both houses, this year would have given their party a clear advantage in 22 of 26 districts. Democrats hold 19 seats on the existing map, which was also drawn by a court-appointed special master a decade ago.

The final lines may yet still be revised to account for feedback from both parties. The state court judge in upstate Steuben County who is overseeing the case, Patrick F. McAllister, has set a Friday deadline for approving the congressional lines and a separate proposal for State Senate districts.

Mr. Cervas, who declined to comment on the maps, removed one House seat from upstate New York altogether, shrinking the state’s delegation from 27 members to 26. New York was required to shed the seat after its population failed to keep pace with growth in other states in the 2020 census, continuing a decades-long trend.

In making other changes, outside redistricting analysts said, it appeared that Mr. Cervas had sought to make the districts as competitive and compact as possible.

The effect was evident on Long Island, where Mr. Cervas created one safe Republican seat, one safe Democratic seat and two swing seats. In the Hudson Valley, he drew districts that were more competitive than the ones approved by Democrats. And he returned Ms. Malliotakis’s district to its more conservative contours, after the Legislature tried to fuse Brooklyn’s ultraliberal Park Slope neighborhood onto Staten Island.

Mr. Cervas showed less regard for protecting incumbents from changes, though, in many instances sharply redrawing lines that the previous special master laid out a decade ago.

Two upstate Republicans, Representatives Claudia Tenney and Chris Jacobs, were left scrambling to lay a stake in rearranged rural seats in central and western New York. A third Republican congressional candidate, the Dutchess County executive, Marc Molinaro, saw the territory he had competed in for months reconfigured.

The situation was more dire for Democrats, though. No fewer than five were drawn out of their districts: Mr. Jeffries; Mr. Higgins; Paul Tonko, who represents the Albany area; Grace Meng, who represents a heavily Asian American swath of Queens; and Nydia Velázquez, who represents a Latino-heavy district in Brooklyn.

Representatives are not required to reside in their districts, but the changes could create yet another layer of uncertainty for incumbents and challengers alike.

Each could still run to represent the core of the district they currently hold, but they would be forced to choose between moving their homes or explaining to voters why they do not live inside the lines they are seeking to represent in Washington.

Representatives Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman, two Black progressive Democrats in their first term, may face more difficult choices after Mr. Cervas’s map drew them into a single Westchester County district.

In a blistering statement, Mr. Jeffries accused the court of ignoring the input of communities of color, diluting the power of Black voters and pitting Black incumbents against each other in “a tactic that would make Jim Crow blush.”

“The draft map released by a judicial overseer in Steuben County and unelected, out-of-town special master, both of whom happen to be white men, is part of a vicious national pattern targeting districts represented by members of the Congressional Black Caucus,” Mr. Jeffries wrote.

Democrats could theoretically challenge the lines in front of Justice McAllister or in a new court case. Mr. Nadler said he believed the proposed map violated the State Constitution’s requirement that communities of interest and the cores of existing districts be preserved.

There were complaints, too, from Republicans and public interest groups who had blamed Democrats for usurping the will of New York’s voters, who approved a constitutional amendment in 2014 that was meant to remove partisan political motivations from the mapmaking process. These critics contended that Mr. Cervas’s proposed maps ignored various communities of shared interest or, in the case of the Republicans, were still too favorable to Democrats.

Still, with the elections just months away, most candidates seemed resigned to the new maps, choosing to simply announce that they would begin to compete on them.

Republicans, who had not hesitated to gerrymander in states that they control, challenged the legality of the congressional and State Senate maps in February. They prevailed before Justice McAllister, and his ruling was ultimately upheld by New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.

The appeals panel ruled in late April that the maps were unconstitutional on two grounds. First, the judges said, Democratic lawmakers violated the mapmaking process laid out in the 2014 constitutional amendment by asserting power they did not have to pass new maps after an independent redistricting commission collapsed. The court also found that the congressional map violated the constitutional amendment’s explicit ban on partisan gerrymandering.

The judges ordered Mr. Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University who also advised Pennsylvania lawmakers on drawing new maps there this year, to promptly draft replacements. Justice McAllister subsequently delayed the congressional and State Senate primaries from June until August to accommodate the changes.

Perhaps the most startling rearrangement came in Manhattan, an island long divided on an east-west axis. The special master proposed dividing it up north-south instead, throwing both Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney into the 12th Congressional District after three decades of serving side by side. (The change did cut the upper half off one of the city’s most bizarrely shaped districts that had inspired charges of gerrymandering.)

Allies of both candidates, including top party leaders, spent the afternoon trying unsuccessfully to convince the other to change course and run for the newly configured 10th District, which runs from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and southward to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn’s Borough Park section.

At least one prominent Democrat from Park Slope was already making calls on Monday about a potential run for the seat: Bill de Blasio, the former mayor, according to a de Blasio adviser and another person familiar with his outreach.

Mr. Nadler, 74, who, as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, played a central role the drive to impeach former President Donald J. Trump, quickly made clear that he had no intention of abandoning the Manhattan part of his current district, where he has lived for decades on the Upper West Side.

In an interview, Ms. Maloney, too, appeared ready for a fight, touting her own long record leading the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

“I’m regretful,” said Ms. Maloney, 76. “We’re longtime colleagues.”

But she added that she had no intention of redirecting to another seat.

“It’s really off the table for me,” she said. “I have my own home in the district, and I’ve lived there my whole adult life.”