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      Judge Approves N.Y. House Map, Cementing Chaos for Democrats

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      The new district lines, approved late Friday night, will create pickup opportunities for Republicans and force Democratic incumbents to run against each other.A state court formally approved New York’s new congressional map late Friday, ratifying a slate of House districts drawn by a neutral expert that could pave the way for Democratic losses this fall and force some of the party’s most prominent incumbents to face off in primary matches.The map, approved just before a midnight deadline set by Justice Patrick F. McAllister of State Supreme Court in Steuben County, effectively unwinds an attempted Democratic gerrymander, creates a raft of new swing seats across the state, and scrambles some carefully laid lines that have long determined centers of power in New York City.Jonathan R. Cervas, the court-appointed mapmaker, made relatively minor changes to a draft proposal released earlier this week whose sweeping changes briefly united both Republicans and Democrats in exasperation and turned Democrats against each other.In Manhattan, the final map would still merge the seats of Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, setting the two Democratic committee leaders, who have served alongside each other for 30 years, onto an increasingly inevitable collision course.Another awkward Democratic primary loomed up the Hudson in Westchester County, where two Black Democratic House members were drawn into a single district. But the worst outcome for Democrats appeared to be averted early Saturday morning when one of the incumbents, Representative Mondaire Jones, said he would forego re-election in his Westchester seat. He said he would run instead in a newly reconfigured 10th Congressional District in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, a race that has already drawn the candidacy of Bill de Blasio, the former New York City mayor, but which no other sitting House member is expected to enter.Republicans were already eying pickup opportunities in the suburbs of Long Island and in the 18th and 19th Districts in the Hudson Valley that could help them retake control of the House. Representative Mondaire Jones said he would run in a newly reconfigured 10th Congressional District.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesAnd in New York City’s only Republican-held district, Representative Nicole Malliotakis breathed a sigh of relief that Mr. Cervas had reversed one of the boldest moves by the Democratic leaders in the State Legislature, when they inserted liberal Park Slope, Brooklyn, into her Staten Island-based district.Some of the most notable changes between the initial and final district lines came in historically Black communities in Brooklyn, where Mr. Cervas reunited Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights into single districts. He had faced uproar from Black lawmakers and civil rights groups after his first proposal divided them into separate seats.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.Responding to feedback from community groups, Mr. Cervas also revised the map to reunite Manhattan’s Chinatown with Sunset Park in Brooklyn, another heavily Asian American community, in the 10th Congressional District. In each case, he said the communities had been “inadvertently split” in his first proposal.Justice McAllister’s order approving the congressional and additional State Senate maps on Friday makes New York one of the final states in the nation to complete its decennial redistricting process. But both parties were already girding late Friday for the potential for civil rights or political groups to file new, long-shot lawsuits challenging the maps in state or federal court.Justice McAllister used the unusual five-page order to rebut criticisms leveled at Mr. Cervas and the court in recent days, as the maps were hastily drafted out of public view. He conceded that the rushed time frame was “less than ideal” but defended the final maps as “almost perfectly neutral” with 15 safe Democratic seats, three safe Republican seats and eight swing seats.“Unfortunately some people have encouraged the public to believe that now the court gets to create its own gerrymandered maps that favor Republicans,” wrote Justice McAllister, a Republican. “Such could not be further from the truth. The court is not politically biased.”The final map was a stark disappointment for Democrats, who control every lever of power in New York and had entered this year’s decennial redistricting cycle with every expectation of gaining seats that could help hold their House majority. They appeared to be successful in February, when the Legislature adopted a congressional map that would have made their candidates favorites in 22 of 26 districts, an improvement from the 19 Democrats currently hold.The new map reverses one of the boldest moves by Democratic leaders: inserting Park Slope, Brooklyn, into Representative Nicole Malliotakis’s Staten Island-based district.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut Republicans sued in state court, and Justice McAllister, a judge in the state’s rural Southern Tier, ruled that the maps violated a 2014 state constitutional amendment outlawing partisan gerrymandering and reforming the mapmaking process in New York. In late April, the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, upheld the decision and ordered a court-appointed special master to redraw the lines.Justice McAllister appointed Mr. Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon with few ties to New York and scant experience drawing state lines, and delayed the congressional and State Senate elections until Aug. 23.On Friday, Mr. Cervas produced a 26-page report explaining the rationale of his map, in which he tried to balance the need to protect communities of shared interest, existing districts, and other constitutional requirements.Mr. Cervas eliminated one district overall, carving it out of central New York to shrink the state’s congressional delegation to 26. The change was required after New York failed to keep pace with national population growth in the 2020 census.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      How Carolyn Maloney Has Become the New Target of NY's Ascendant Left

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      Justice Democrats, a left-wing group that fueled the rise of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is backing Rana Abdelhamid’s primary bid.Nearly three years ago, a little-known left-wing organization helped engineer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock victory over Representative Joseph Crowley in a House primary. Last year, the group, Justice Democrats, aided Jamaal Bowman’s ouster of Representative Eliot Engel in another House primary.Now the group has found its next New York target: Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, 75, a Democrat first elected to Congress in 1992, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.Justice Democrats will throw its support behind Rana Abdelhamid, a community organizer and nonprofit founder, in her bid against Ms. Maloney, laying the groundwork for a generational, ideological and insider-versus-outsider battle that will test the power and energy of the left with President Donald J. Trump now out of office.Ms. Abdelhamid, a 27-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America who is keenly focused on matters of housing access and equity, intends to officially launch her candidacy for the 2022 primary on Wednesday.“We strongly believe in Rana’s leadership capabilities to build a coalition like we’ve been able to in some of our previous elections,” said Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of Justice Democrats, adding that she believed Ms. Abdelhamid could connect with younger voters, working-class voters of color, some older white liberals and those inspired by left-wing leaders like Senator Bernie Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.Ms. Maloney’s district, the 12th District of New York, is home to wealthy, business-minded moderates along the East Side of Manhattan. But it also includes deeply progressive pockets of the city in western Queens and a corner of Brooklyn with a well-organized left-wing activist scene.There is great uncertainty around what the district will ultimately look like following an expected redistricting process, and Ms. Abdelhamid is not Ms. Maloney’s only likely challenger; Suraj Patel, who has unsuccessfully challenged Ms. Maloney twice, has indicated that he intends to run again.But for now, Ms. Abdelhamid’s candidacy will measure whether New Yorkers reeling from the pandemic and navigating economic recovery are skeptical of elevating another political outsider to steer the city forward — or if vast inequalities, which only worsened over the last year, have put the electorate in an anti-establishment mood.Ms. Abdelhamid, a daughter of Egyptian immigrants, is a 2015 graduate of Middlebury College and 2017 graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, with a day job at Google. A first-degree black belt in karate, she founded a nonprofit called “Malikah” — “queen” in multiple languages — that offers self-defense training and other efforts to empower women, an initiative she launched after a man tried to yank off her hijab when she was a teenager.Ms. Abdelhamid, left, founded a nonprofit that offers self-defense training and other efforts to empower women.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesShe embraces her age as she casts herself as a change agent who keenly understands the challenges facing working-class and immigrant communities in the district: Her own family was priced out of the area.“Congresswoman Maloney has been in office for 28 years, for longer than I’ve been alive,” she said in an interview this week, sitting outside a restaurant on a crowded street in the Little Egypt enclave of Astoria, Queens. “Under her leadership, rent has only skyrocketed, our public schools have only gotten more segregated and more underfunded.“The progressive case against Carolyn Maloney,” she charged, “is that Carolyn Maloney is not a progressive.”Ms. Maloney describes herself as a “a recognized progressive national leader,” and her allies say that she has a long record of delivering for constituents — indeed, a map on her congressional website offers a detailed guide to the funding she says she has procured for projects across the district.“Carolyn is committed to running again regardless of who’s running against her, and she will wage an aggressive campaign as she always does,” said Jim Duffy, a partner at Putnam Partners, which works with Ms. Maloney’s campaigns. “She’s never lost a race before. She doesn’t intend to lose this one.”She was not made available for an interview on Tuesday.Ms. Abdelhamid unquestionably still faces an uphill battle against a seasoned, well-known congresswoman who is in a position to claim credit for tangible federal assistance for New York.“She’s an extremely hard worker, she delivers for her district, she works very hard on individual cases,” said George Arzt, a veteran political consultant who has advised Ms. Maloney. “Everyone in her district knows her.”And nationally, candidates backed by Justice Democrats have far from a perfect record of success.But the recent history of New York politics also shows why Ms. Abdelhamid’s entry into the race is likely to be taken very seriously.In 2018, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, then 28, defeated Mr. Crowley, who at the time was the No. 4 Democrat in the House. Last summer, Mr. Bowman beat Mr. Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.Strategists who worked with those campaigns see another opportunity for significant grass-roots engagement in 12th district, given the leftward shift of New York politics. “This is a place where our base is active, and a lot of voters and folks that power a lot of the most recent local campaigns over the past few years are here,” Ms. Rojas said.Ms. Maloney, a battle-tested candidate, won her primary contests in 2018 and 2020 — though last year, she only received 43 percent of the vote.Representative Carolyn Maloney, left, has long sought to be an advocate for women.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMs. Abdelhamid is running on a platform of housing affordability and a range of other left-wing priorities, including Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and a broadly anti-corporate message. She said she shared a number of goals and values with the Democratic Socialists, but that she was not especially active in a local chapter of the group.She also supports defunding the police, describing experiences with family members who were the subject of stop-and-frisk tactics and raising the issue of police surveillance of Muslim communities. As a victim of assault herself in the hijab incident, she said, she believed in directing more funds to community services, and she speaks passionately about racial justice.But she is likely to face intense scrutiny over her ability to navigate Washington. And she volunteered that she does not live in the district, living instead with her family, whom she says she is supporting financially, in a different part of Astoria — a fact that is almost certain to become an issue in the campaign.She did live in the district until high school, her team says, but her family moved because the area became too expensive. She sought to frame her current living situation as a reflection of how unaffordable the area has become under Ms. Maloney’s leadership. Ms. Abdelhamid, who is getting married, indicated that she plans to move back to the district in about three months.She still attends a mosque in the district and clearly has relationships there — a worker at Al-Sham Sweets & Pastries greeted her warmly as she ordered kenafeh, a Middle Eastern dessert, there this week.“My family is a working-class family that can’t afford to live in Little Egypt as an Egyptian family,” she said. “Because of gentrification. And this is a story that many working-class ethnic communities understand.” More

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      House Republicans Announce 47 Democrats They Hope to Unseat

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHouse Republicans Announce 47 Democrats They Hope to UnseatThe National Republican Congressional Committee released a list of the House Democrats whose seats it is targeting, including moderates like Abigail Spanberger and Conor Lamb.Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a moderate Democrat, has sparred with the party’s more liberal wing.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021Updated 8:51 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — The House Republicans’ campaign arm on Wednesday revealed the list of 47 House Democrats it will target in the 2022 midterm elections, whose results are likely to be determined largely by the popularity of President Biden.The National Republican Congressional Committee’s list includes 25 Democrats who were first elected in the Democrats’ 2018 wave election and six incumbents who represent districts that voted for former President Donald J. Trump in November. It includes a wide array of moderate Democrats, including Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, who have publicly sparred with the party’s more liberal wing in recent months.The target list comes three months after House Republicans outperformed pre-election polling and flipped 15 Democratic-held seats in last year’s elections. The party out of power typically does well in midterm elections: Since World War II, the president’s party has lost an average of 27 House seats in midterm elections.“House Republicans start the cycle just five seats short of a majority and are prepared to build on our 2020 successes to deliver a lasting Republican majority in the House,” said Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the N.R.C.C. chairman. “We will stay laser-focused on recruiting talented and diverse candidates, aggressively highlighting Democrats’ socialist agenda and raising enough resources to win.”The Republicans’ list is speculative, given that it will be months before states are able to begin drawing new congressional district lines. The Census Bureau is already late in delivering reapportionment and redistricting data to states, delaying until at least late summer a process that typically begins in February or March.The tardiness of the census data has left both parties’ congressional campaign committees in limbo as they seek to recruit candidates for presumptive districts. Sun Belt states like Texas and Florida are expected to add multiple new House districts, while Northern states including Illinois, Ohio and New York are likely to lose at least one seat each.At least six House Democrats who represent districts Mr. Trump carried in November are on the N.R.C.C. list: Representatives Cindy Axne of Iowa, Cheri Bustos of Illinois, Jared Golden of Maine, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Andy Kim of New Jersey and Ron Kind of Wisconsin.Ms. Bustos, who led the House Democrats’ campaign arm in 2020, had margins of victory that shrunk from 24 percentage points in 2018 to four points in 2020. But with Illinois certain to lose at least one seat, her gerrymandered district, which snakes around to include Democratic-leaning sections of Peoria and Rockford along with the Illinois portion of the Quad Cities, will change before she faces voters again.The N.R.C.C. also believes a handful of Democrats who underperformed Mr. Biden may be vulnerable against better-funded challengers. Those Democrats include Representatives Katie Porter and Mike Levin of California, who both had significantly less support than Mr. Biden in November.And the committee included on its list 10 Democrats it declared to be potential targets of redistricting — a crop that includes the likes of Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York, whose district Mr. Biden carried by 70 points.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More