Redistricting and Reapportionment

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      How New York’s Redistricting Hurt the G.O.P. and Vax Daddy

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      Democrats could potentially expand the veto-proof majorities they already have in both the Assembly and Senate, further solidifying New York’s leftward shift.ALBANY, N.Y. — When Huge Ma, better known in New York as Vax Daddy, shut down the website he built last year to help city residents make appointments to get a coronavirus vaccine, he realized there were other more established types of public service to pursue.So Mr. Ma, a Democrat, decided to run for State Assembly, building off the folk hero status he achieved during the pandemic, with a campaign centered on policy issues he cared about, including transportation and the climate crisis.But an unexpected twist led Mr. Ma to end his nascent campaign this month just as it was getting underway: When the state’s once-in-a-decade redistricting process was complete, his home was outside the Queens district he hoped to represent.“While I currently feel a great sense of disappointment,” Mr. Ma wrote on Twitter. “I remain open to representing my community in the future.”Mr. Ma’s race was just one of many that were shaken up by the State Legislature, which Democrats control, when it approved new legislative maps that will shape the balance of power in Albany for the next decade at least.The new district lines, which were approved last week, could help fortify Democratic dominance in the statehouse for years to come. They significantly increase the odds that Democrats will protect, and potentially expand, the veto-proof majorities they already command in both the Assembly and Senate, further solidifying New York’s leftward shift.Republicans contend that Democrats effectively engaged in partisan gerrymandering to keep their grip on power. The state legislative lines, along with new congressional maps, have been challenged in court by a group of voters organized by Republicans.Rob Ortt, the Republican leader in the State Senate, said in a statement that Democrats had drawn maps “behind closed doors, without considering input from thousands of communities of interest or holding a single public hearing.”“It is clear they are only concerned with holding onto their political power and cementing the disastrous one-party rule that has made New York less safe, less affordable and less populated,” he said.Robert Ortt, the Republican Senate minority leader, accused Democratic legislative leaders of partisan gerrymandering.Hans Pennink/Associated PressState Senator Michael Gianaris, a Democrat who helped lead redistricting efforts in the legislature, has argued that the maps are fair, legal and, in practice, unraveled the results of previous gerrymandering by Republicans.What to Know About Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: 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.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Legal Battles: State supreme courts in North Carolina and Ohio struck down maps drawn by Republicans, while the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily restored Alabama’s map.“You can’t sit here and say we were wrong, but leave the maps as they are right now,” he said on the Senate floor last week. “That just enshrines that bad behavior into the maps forever. If we’re going to fix the things that you did that were wrong, we have to fix them.”The maps will also play a pivotal role in Democratic primaries, with the new district lines benefiting some incumbents that left-wing hopefuls had seen as too moderate or entrenched in the party establishment.That appeared to be the case in Mr. Ma’s district, which is now represented by Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, a high-ranking Democrat who has served for nearly four decades. The new lines for her district carved out parts of the Long Island City waterfront where some of her most likely challengers, including Mr. Ma, reside.Political observers said the new district lines could have benefited her in a primary, even though the revamped district includes portions of neighborhoods that might favor a more progressive candidate.But the race was again upended on Friday when Ms. Nolan, who was diagnosed with cancer last year, announced she would not seek re-election. The seat is now up for grabs, with a number of left-leaning candidates showing interest.“This obviously locks in the supermajorities, and means that the crux of New York State politics — for interest groups, for labor, for everyone — is going to be the ideological fight among Democrats in a primary,” said Matt Rey, a partner at the political consulting firm Red Horse Strategies. “New York is now moving to the California model.”Elsewhere in the 150-seat Assembly, which Democrats have controlled since 1975, some of the redrawn lines appear to offer additional protection for other incumbent party members. Others seemed to ensure that tossup races in key suburban areas — including Long Island’s North Shore, the Capitol Region and near Syracuse — remained competitive.The biggest changes, however, involve the State Senate, where Democrats controlled the redistricting process for the first time in decades after regaining a majority in the chamber in 2018.The new maps appear to improve Democrats’ chances of flipping at least three Republican-held Senate seats. In a reflection of New York City’s population growth and demographic changes, lawmakers shifted two upstate Senate districts to Brooklyn and Queens. Both are expected to be safe seats for Democrats.The new lines also give slight edges to Democratic incumbents in highly competitive districts, including on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, before the November election, when all legislative seats will be on the ballot.Even so, Democrats’ recent gains in Albany are bound to be tested in significant ways this year, with Republicans — helped by President Biden’s flagging approval ratings and concerns about crime and inflation — poised to perform well in the congressional midterm elections and, potentially, in down-ballot races.In justifying the new maps, Mr. Gianaris and other Senate Democrats say the lines merely restore the proper balance of power after decades of Republicans drawing maps that maximize their waning influence in an increasingly Democratic state.The Senate minority leader, Michael Gianaris, left, said the new district lines corrected partisan lines drawn by Republicans.Hans Pennink/Associated PressSenate Democrats insist that their maps more closely follow the spirit of the law, creating districts with more uniform populations after a longstanding practice among Republicans of drawing fewer, highly populous districts downstate for Democrats, and more sparse ones in parts of the state where Republicans could be competitive.Democrats say another main objective was to unify and strengthen the voting power of so-called communities of interest — ethnic, racial or cultural groups with shared concerns — that they said Republicans had divided over decades to dilute Democrats’ power in the State Senate.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? 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      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘Taking the Voters Out of the Equation’: How the Parties Are Killing Competition

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      The number of competitive House districts is dropping, as both Republicans and Democrats use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.WASHINGTON — The number of competitive congressional districts is on track to dive near — and possibly below — the lowest level in at least three decades, as Republicans and Democrats draw new political maps designed to ensure that the vast majority of House races are over before the general election starts.With two-thirds of the new boundaries set, mapmakers are on pace to draw fewer than 40 seats — out of 435 — that are considered competitive based on the 2020 presidential election results, according to a New York Times analysis of election data. Ten years ago that number was 73.While the exact size of the battlefield is still emerging, the sharp decline of competition for House seats is the latest worrying sign of dysfunction in the American political system, which is already struggling with a scourge of misinformation and rising distrust in elections. Lack of competition in general elections can widen the ideological gulf between the parties, leading to hardened stalemates on legislation and voters’ alienation from the political process.“The reduction of competitive seats is a tragedy,” said former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “We end up with gridlock, we end up with no progress and we end up with a population looking at our legislatures and having this feeling that nothing gets done.” He added: “This gridlock leads to cynicism about this whole process.”Both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for adding to the tally of safe seats. Over decades, the parties have deftly used the redistricting process to create districts dominated by voters from one party or to bolster incumbents.It’s not yet clear which party will ultimately benefit more from this year’s bumper crop of safe seats, or whether President Biden’s sagging approval ratings might endanger Democrats whose districts haven’t been considered competitive. Republicans control the mapmaking for more than twice as many districts as Democrats, leaving many in the G.O.P. to believe that the party can take back the House majority after four years of Democratic control largely by drawing favorable seats.But Democrats have used their power to gerrymander more aggressively than expected. In New York, for example, the Democratic-controlled Legislature on Wednesday approved a map that gives the party a strong chance of flipping as many as three House seats currently held by Republicans.That has left Republicans and Democrats essentially at a draw, with two big outstanding unknowns: Florida’s 28 seats, increasingly the subject of Republican infighting, are still unsettled and several court cases in other states could send lawmakers back to the drawing board.“Democrats in New York are gerrymandering like the House depends on it,” said Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization. “Republican legislators shouldn’t be afraid to legally press their political advantage where they have control.”New York’s new map doesn’t just set Democrats up to win more seats, it also eliminates competitive districts. In 2020, there were four districts where Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump were within five percentage points. There are none in the new map. Even the reconfigured district that stretches from Republican-dominated Staten Island to Democratic neighborhoods in Brooklyn is now, at least on paper, friendly territory for Democrats.Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: 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.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.North Carolina: The State Supreme Court ruled that new political maps were illegally skewed to favor Republicans.Without that competition from outside the party, many politicians are beginning to see the biggest threat to their careers as coming from within.“When I was a member of Congress, most members woke up concerned about a general election,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who led the House Democrats’ campaign committee during the last redistricting cycle. “Now they wake up worried about a primary opponent.”Mr. Israel, who left Congress in 2017 and now owns a bookstore on Long Island, recalled Republicans telling him they would like to vote for Democratic priorities like gun control but feared a backlash from their party’s base. House Democrats, Mr. Israel said, would like to address issues such as Social Security and Medicare reform, but understand that doing so would draw a robust primary challenge from the party’s left wing.Republicans are expected to win roughly 65 percent of Texas’ 38 congressional seats.Tamir Kalifa/Getty ImagesRepublicans argue that redistricting isn’t destiny: The political climate matters, and more races will become competitive if inflation, the lingering pandemic or other issues continue to sour voters on Democratic leadership.But the far greater number of districts drawn to be overwhelmingly safe for one party is likely to limit how many seats will flip — even in a so-called wave election.“The parties are contributing to more and more single-party districts and taking the voters out of the equation,” said former Representative Tom Davis, who led the House Republicans’ campaign arm during the 2001 redistricting cycle. “November becomes a constitutional formality.”In the 29 states where maps have been completed and not thrown out by courts, there are just 22 districts that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump won by five percentage points or less, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.By this point in the 2012 redistricting cycle, there were 44 districts defined as competitive based on the previous presidential election results. In the 1992 election, the margin between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush was within five points in 108 congressional districts.The phenomenon of parties using redistricting to gain an edge is as old as the republic itself, but it has escalated in recent decades with more sophisticated technology and more detailed data about voter behavior. Americans with similar political views have clustered in distinct areas — Republicans in rural and exurban areas, Democrats in cities and inner suburbs. It’s a pattern that can make it difficult to draw cohesive, competitive districts.No state has quashed competition ahead of the midterm elections like Texas. In the 2020 election, there were 12 competitive districts in the state. After redistricting, there is only one.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      North Carolina Court Rejects Republican Gerrymander of Maps

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      The State Supreme Court said maps of the state’s 14 House districts and state legislative districts violated guarantees of free elections, speech and assembly.The North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday upended Republican efforts to lock in political dominance in the state, saying that congressional and state legislative maps were partisan gerrymanders that violated the State Constitution.The ruling requires the Republican-controlled legislature not only to submit new maps to the court, but to offer a range of statistical analyses to show “a significant likelihood that the districting plan will give the voters of all political parties substantially equal opportunity to translate votes into seats” in elections.The requirement rebuffed the argument against redrawing the maps that the legislature offered in oral arguments before the court this week: that the court had no right to say whether and when political maps cross the line from acceptable partisanship into unfairness.The justices’ 4-3 decision, split along party lines, not only sets a precedent for judging the legality of future maps in the state, but could play an important role in the struggle for control of the House of Representatives in elections this November. The Republican-drawn maps had effectively allotted the party control of at least 10 of the 14 House seats the state will have in the next Congress, even though voters statewide are roughly equally divided between the two parties.It was a challenge to earlier partisan maps in North Carolina and Maryland that led the U.S. Supreme Court to end decades of federal debate over the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders, ruling in 2019 that they were political issues beyond its jurisdiction. The justices said then that Congress and state courts should rule on the question, and lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case said on Friday that the new ruling carried out that mandate to the letter.Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: 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.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Texas: Republicans want to make Texas even redder. Here are four ways their proposed maps further gerrymandered the state’s House districts.“The U.S. Supreme Court said it’s up to state courts to rein in partisan gerrymandering, and that’s exactly what the North Carolina Supreme Court has done,” said Elisabeth Theodore of the law firm Arnold & Porter. “The court’s direction is clear: The General Assembly must stop cheating and draw fair new maps so that North Carolinians can have a fair say in who governs them.”But one longtime scholar of the state’s politics, Michael Bitzer of Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., said the Republican legislature could take the case yet again to the U.S. Supreme Court.Citing their brief in the state case, he said the legislators might argue that the state court’s decision violates the provision in the U.S. Constitution that gives Congress the ultimate right to decide the “times, places and manner” of elections.The decision comes as both federal and state courts have lately proved a bulwark against some excessive gerrymanders. A state court in Ohio rejected maps drawn by Republicans in the state legislature last month as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, and a federal court in Alabama ruled last month that Republicans had to redraw their congressional map to create a second district that gave minorities a fair shot at electing their preferred candidate.The legal decisions have been a boon for Democrats, who started the latest redistricting cycle at a significant disadvantage. Republicans controlled the map-drawing process in 187 congressional districts, while Democrats were able to draw 75 districts.The court decisions in North Carolina, Ohio and Alabama all forced Republicans back to the drawing table and are likely to result in either more competitive seats or opportunities for Democrats in the midterm elections.The 2019 Supreme Court decision on partisan gerrymandering has led opponents of partisan maps to take their arguments from federal courts to the state benches, where constitutions often give more legal protections to voters. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave them an important victory in 2018, striking down Republican-drawn maps that the justices said violated the State Constitution.In the North Carolina case, a lower court said last month that even though the state and congressional maps were extreme partisan gerrymanders by any measure, the State Constitution nevertheless did not outlaw them.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      G.O.P. Lawsuit Casts N.Y. Congressional Maps as Brazen Gerrymandering

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      A Republican-led legal effort faces an uphill battle to overturn newly drawn congressional districts, which Democrats have defended as lawful.A Republican-led group of voters filed a lawsuit late Thursday challenging New York’s freshly drawn congressional maps as unconstitutional, a day after Democratic lawmakers in Albany approved district lines that would heavily favor their party in its battle to retain control of the House.The 67-page suit argued that the new district lines violated a 2014 state constitutional amendment meant to protect against partisan district drawing, saying that Democrats had “brazenly enacted a congressional map that is undeniably politically gerrymandered in their party’s favor.”“This court should reject it as a matter of substance, as the map is an obviously unconstitutional partisan and incumbent-protection gerrymander,” said the lawsuit, which was brought by a group of 14 voters.The lawsuit, which was widely expected, is likely to face an uphill battle: State courts have traditionally been reluctant to reject maps drawn by lawmakers, and it can be difficult to prove that maps that favor one political party were drawn illegally.But the lawsuit was filed in State Supreme Court in Steuben County, a Republican stronghold in the state’s Southern Tier where judges may be more sympathetic to claims of Democratic political gerrymandering.The outcome of the challenge could hinge on how a state judge interprets an anti-gerrymandering provision in the 2014 amendment that has not been tested in court before, as well as the process lawmakers followed to draw the lines.“The question is whether the court will reject 50 years of precedent and reject the plan,” said Jeffrey Wice, a senior fellow at New York Law School’s Census and Redistricting Institute.Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: 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.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Texas: Republicans want to make Texas even redder. Here are four ways their proposed maps further gerrymandered the state’s House districts.The judge could uphold or reject the maps, and potentially compel Democrats to redraw them — or appoint a special master to do so in a nonpartisan way should the Legislature prove unable to. The decision, if appealed, may eventually wind its way to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.Democrats have rejected the charge of gerrymandering, arguing that the new lines are a fair representation of a state that is overwhelmingly Democratic and where population changes over the last decade have only served to further depopulate conservative rural areas and grow urban and suburban communities that tend to be more favorable to their party.The newly drawn maps in New York position Democrats to potentially flip three House seats in November, the largest projected shift in any state.The challenge against the maps comes as both parties continue their attempts to leverage the redistricting process nationwide, with Republicans often doing so more effectively because of their majorities in large states like Texas. Republican maps are being challenged in several states.State lawmakers in New York had long been in charge of drawing the lines, but the 2014 amendment created a 10-member bipartisan redistricting commission tasked with drawing balanced maps devoid of the type of gerrymandering that had plagued the state over decades.But the commission, as many in Albany expected, became deadlocked and failed to agree on a single set of maps last month. That mean that, under the process outlined in the law, the power to redraw the maps was reverted to the Legislature, where Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers.Shortly after, Democratic lawmakers moved swiftly to draw and consider their own district lines. No public hearings were held, a move that was decried by Republicans and good-government groups, but which Democrats justified as necessary in order to comply with a time-sensitive electoral calendar.Democrats passed the maps on Wednesday and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat, signed them into law the following day.“We are 100 percent confident that the lines are in compliance with all legal requirements,” said Mike Murphy, a spokesman for Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic majority leader in the State Senate. “They are a gigantic step forward for fairer representation and reflect the strength and diversity of New York like never before”Democrats in New York currently hold 19 seats, while Republicans control eight seats. The new maps, which include one less seat as a result of population loss, would favor Democrats in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts.The lawsuit filed on Thursday outlined instances, from Staten Island and Brooklyn to Long Island and the North Country, in which, the plaintiffs said, lawmakers deliberately redrew district lines to give Democrats an overall edge.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      How N.Y. Democrats Are Leading a ‘Master Class’ in Gerrymandering

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      The maps approved by Democrats in the New York State Legislature could lead their party to seize as many as three House seats from Republicans.Democrats across the nation have spent years railing against partisan gerrymandering, particularly in Republican states — most recently trying to pass federal voting rights legislation in Washington to all but outlaw the practice.But given the same opportunity for the first time in decades, Democratic lawmakers in New York adopted on Wednesday an aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional districts that positions the party to flip three seats in the House this year, a greater shift than projected in any other state.The new lines would shape races in New York for a decade to come, making Democrats the favorites in redrawn districts currently held by Republicans on Long Island, Staten Island and in Central New York. They would also help tighten the party’s hold on swing seats ahead of what is expected to be a strong Republican election cycle, all while eliminating a fourth Republican seat upstate altogether.Legal and political experts immediately criticized the new district contours as a blatant and hypocritical partisan gerrymander. And Republicans, who were powerless to stop it legislatively in Albany, threated to challenge the map in court under new anti-gerrymandering provisions in New York’s Constitution, though it was unclear if they could prove partisan intent.Overall, the new map was expected to favor Democratic candidates in 22 of New York’s 26 congressional districts. Democrats currently control 19 seats in the state, compared with eight held by Republicans. New York is slated to lose one seat overall this year because of national population changes in the 2020 census.“It’s a master class in how to draw an effective gerrymander,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has also sounded alarms about attempts by Republicans to gerrymander and pass other restrictive voting laws.“Sometimes you do need fancy metrics to tell, but a map that gives Democrats 85 percent of the seats in a state that is not 85 percent Democratic — this is not a particularly hard case,” he said. Democratic leaders in Albany rejected the charge, saying they were confident that the new districts were entirely legal and largely wrought by adjusting for population shifts that favor their candidates.State Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader and leader of a task force that drew the lines, said that mapmakers had been “very conscious of potential legal pitfalls” and “more than complied” with the extensive list of standards outlined by the state. He said the maps were fair.“It’s a dangerous game to prognosticate on how elections are going to turn out before they are held,” he said. “Voters have the final say in all these districts, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone in a state as deep blue as New York, the results would reflect the reality on the ground.”Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: 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.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Texas: Republicans want to make Texas even redder. Here are four ways their proposed maps further gerrymandered the state’s House districts.Many of the party’s operatives and voters were less bashful in their support of gerrymandering, arguing that Democrats could not afford to take the high road when Republicans have shown no similar inclination.Both parties have weaponized redistricting for years in the larger battle for control of the House of Representatives, but Republicans recently have been more effective in doing so, based on their control of large states like Texas and Florida, and the decision by liberal bastions like California to adopt nonpartisan redistricting commissions to handle the process.On balance, their practices have also drawn greater legal scrutiny, often related to charges of racial gerrymandering. So far, state and federal courts have considered challenges to maps advanced by Republicans in several states, including Ohio, North Carolina and Alabama, and late last year the Justice Department sued Texas over new congressional maps that it said violated the Voting Rights Act’s protections for Black and Latino voters.At the same time, Republican-led states have attracted attention from the Justice Department after they advanced a series of new election laws making it more difficult to vote.In New York, the redistricting cycle began, perhaps naïvely, in the hopes that a bipartisan outside commission — approved by voters in 2014 — would deliver a balanced, common-sense map.Instead, the commission stuck to party lines and was unable to reach consensus last month, kicking control of the process back to the State Legislature, where Democrats have amassed rare supermajorities in recent years. Those majorities, plus control of the governorship, gave them the power for the first time in decades to draw maps as they saw fit.Democratic leaders swiftly released their own maps in a matter of days, forgoing any public hearings and largely keeping even their own members in the dark about the new lines until they became public.Wednesday’s vote fell mostly along party lines, as Democrats limited defections to narrowly pass the map in the Assembly, 103 to 45, and the Senate, 43 to 20.The Legislature planned to proceed as soon as Thursday to pass state legislative maps drawn by Democrats divvying up State Senate and Assembly districts. Most notably, they were expected to help solidify Democrats’ hold of the State Senate in an election year when Republicans are trying to reclaim a chamber they controlled for all but three years between the mid-1940s and 2019.Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, is widely expected to sign all the maps into law in the coming days.But Republicans were already taking steps on Wednesday to prepare a lawsuit challenging at least the congressional lines as unconstitutional in state court. Several good-governance groups in the state said they agreed with the Republicans’ view, though it was unclear if they would sign onto a suit.“The congressional maps are clearly unconstitutional under the new anti-gerrymandering provisions,” said John Faso, a former Republican congressman who is helping coordinate the effort between Albany Republicans and the National Republican Redistricting Trust. “There is a decent likelihood that there will be litigation as a result of it, but when and where I could not say.”Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader, defended the Democrats’ redrawn maps as being fair and constitutional.Hans Pennink/Associated PressAny court case would likely hinge on how judges interpret language included in the same 2014 constitutional amendment that created the defunct redistricting commission and how Democrats actually arrived at their lines. The language has not previously been tested in court and says that districts “shall not be drawn to discourage competition” or boost one party or incumbent candidate over another.New York State courts have historically been reluctant to overturn plans passed by the Legislature. But Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said that could change this year based on the new anti-gerrymandering language and the example set by other states’ courts that have grown more comfortable blocking gerrymandered plans.“The provision is written in a strict prohibitory language,” Mr. Pildes said. “Proving that was what actually took place will inevitably trigger these debates about were these lines drawn to preserve particular communities of interest or a range of legitimate purposes.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      N.Y. Democrats Could Gain 3 House Seats Under Proposed District Lines

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      A new map drawn by legislative leaders would reconfigure state congressional districts to benefit Democrats in their fight to maintain a grip on the House of Representatives.ALBANY, N.Y. — New York Democrats on Sunday proposed a redesign of the state’s congressional map that would be one of the most consequential in the nation, offering the party’s candidates an advantage in 22 of the state’s 26 House districts in this fall’s midterm election. Party leaders in Albany insisted that the redrawn districts were not politically motivated, and they appeared to be somewhat less aggressive than many Democrats had wanted and analysts had forecast.But the proposed lines promise to be a major boon for the party for a decade to come, beginning with a hard-fought national battle with Republicans this year for control of the House of Representatives. With President Biden’s agenda hanging in the balance, Democratic gains in New York could help offset those Republicans expect to rack up in red states like Texas, Florida and Georgia. “With the stroke of a pen they can gain three seats and eliminate four Republican seats,” said Dave Wasserman, a national elections analyst with the Cook Political Report, who called the proposed lines “an effective gerrymander” by Democrats.“That’s a pretty big shift,” he added. “In fact, it’s probably the biggest shift in the country.”The new lines give Democrats opportunities to pick up seats on Long Island, in upstate New York and in New York City, where Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Staten Island Republican, would be drawn into a Democratic-leaning district. Republicans are likely to lose a fourth seat because New York, which had less population growth than some other states, must shed one district overall.The new boundaries will be in place for the next 10 years. Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesOther proposed changes could help shore up Democrats’ hold on swing districts on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley ahead of what is expected to be a punishing election season for the party overall.In 2014, New York State voters had empowered a bipartisan commission to draw the new districts, but the panel broke down on party lines and could not reach consensus. Its stalemate left it to Democratic leaders in Albany to redesign the map.“We did the best we could with a flawed process,” said State Senator Michael Gianaris, who chairs the legislative redistricting task force that took over the process from the commission. He added: “This is a very Democratic state, let’s start there. It’s not surprising that a fairly drawn map might lead to more Democrats getting elected.”Lawmakers plan to vote on the congressional map as soon as Wednesday. New maps for the State Senate and Assembly are also expected this week. Democrats dominate both houses, and the new maps offer the party a chance to maintain majorities, if not supermajorities, in the Legislature.Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has indicated that she supports using the redistricting process to help her party and is likely to approve the maps if they pass both chambers.Republicans are expected to oppose them en masse, but have little power to stop them legislatively. They accused Democrats of undertaking a blatant and unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to approve the new map if the Legislature passes it. In the last redistricting, she lost her seat when her Buffalo area district became one of the most conservative in the state.Libby March for The New York TimesNick Langworthy, the chairman of the New York Republican Party, blasted the map as a “textbook filthy, partisan gerrymandering” and hinted that Republicans could challenge the proposed district as unconstitutional in court.“These maps are the most brazen and outrageous attempt at rigging the election to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker,” he said, adding that Democrats “can’t win on the merits so they’re trying to win the election in a smoke-filled room rather than the ballot box.”Republicans were not the only interested parties alarmed by Democrats’ swift action. Lawmakers are poised to vote this week without convening a single public hearing, drawing the ire of good governance groups and community leaders. Even rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers only saw the proposed lines for the first time in the last few days, leading to last-minute changes.The redistricting stakes could scarcely be higher. Democrats control the House of Representatives by the thinnest of margins and are preparing for stiff challenges to their hold on Albany as well. Midterm elections are often difficult for the party in power, and with Mr. Biden’s approval rating at about 40 percent, Democrats are on the defensive.Around the country, battles over redistricting have become increasingly bare-knuckle, with high-stakes brawls between ruling Republicans and disempowered Democrats in North Carolina, Alabama and Ohio landing in state court. In some cases, the pitched battles reflect the tensions not just over party representation, but over race and voting rights at a time when states across the country are advancing laws concerning the right to vote: some expanding it, and others restricting it.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      In North Carolina, a Pitched Battle Over Gerrymanders and Justices

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      A fight over who is fit to hear a redistricting case highlights what experts say is the growing influence of ideology and money over state supreme courts nationwide.It is the state that put the hyper in partisan politics, setting the blunt-force standard for battles over voting rights and gerrymanders that are now fracturing states nationwide.So it is unsurprising that North Carolina’s latest battle, over new political maps that decisively favor Republicans, is unfolding in what has become an increasingly contested and influential battlefield in American governance: the State Supreme Court.The court meets on Wednesday to consider whether a map drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature that gives as many as 11 of 14 seats in the next Congress to Republicans — in a state almost evenly divided politically — violates the State Constitution. Similarly lopsided state legislative maps are also being contested.But for weeks, both sides of a lawsuit have been waging an extraordinary battle over whether three of the court’s seven justices should even hear the case. Atop that, an influential former chairman of the state Republican Party has suggested that the legislature could impeach some Democratic justices, a move that could remove them from the bench until their fates were decided.The central issue — whether familial, political or personal relationships have rendered the justices unfit to decide the case — is hardly frivolous. But the subtext is hard to ignore: The Supreme Court has a one-justice Democratic majority that could well invalidate the Republican-drawn maps. Knocking justices off the case could change that calculus.“I think we’re at the brass-knuckles level of political fighting in this state,” said Michael Bitzer, a scholar of North Carolina politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. “It is a microcosm of the partisan polarization that I think we’re all experiencing. It’s just that here, it’s on steroids.”It also is a reminder that for all the attention on the U.S. Supreme Court this week after Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced his retirement, it is in Supreme Courts in states like North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio that many of the most explosive questions about the condition of American democracy are playing out.State Supreme Courts have become especially critical forums since the U.S. Supreme Court said in 2019 that partisan gerrymanders were political matters outside its reach.In North Carolina, the justices seem likely to reject calls for their recusal. The court said last month that individual justices would evaluate charges against themselves unless those justices asked the full court to rule.But the high stakes reflect what may happen elsewhere — and in some cases, already has. In Ohio, Justice Pat DeWine of the State Supreme Court rebuffed calls last fall to recuse himself from redistricting lawsuits in which his father — Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican — was a defendant. Days later, the state Republican Party urged a Democratic justice, Jennifer Brenner, to recuse herself because she had made redistricting an issue when running for office.Nationwide, 38 of 50 states elect justices for their highest court rather than appoint them. For decades, those races got scant attention. But a growing partisan split is turning what once were sleepy races for judicial sinecures into frontline battles for ideological dominance of courts with enormous sway over peoples’ lives.The U.S. Supreme Court issued 68 opinions in its last term. State Supreme Courts decide more than 10,000 cases every year. Increasingly, businesses and advocacy groups turn to them for rulings on crucial issues — gerrymandering is one, abortion another — where federal courts have been hostile or unavailing.Campaign spending underscores the trend. A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, at New York University, concluded that a record $97 million was spent on 76 State Supreme Court races in the most recent election cycle. Well over four in 10 dollars came from political parties and interest groups, including the conservative nonprofit Judicial Crisis Network, which has financed national campaigns backing recent Republican nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.Most interest group spending has involved so-called dark money, in which donors’ identities are hidden. Conservative groups spent $18.9 million in the 2019-20 cycle, the report stated, but liberal groups, which spent $14.9 million, are fast catching up.The money has brought results. In 2019, a $1.3 million barrage of last-minute advertising by the Republican State Leadership Committee was credited with giving the G.O.P.-backed candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Brian Hagedorn, a 6,000-vote victory out of 1.2 million cast.Liberal groups have not matched that success. But they have outspent conservatives in recent races in Michigan and North Carolina.“Two things are happening,” said Douglas Keith, a co-author of the Brennan Center report. “There are in-state financial interests that know these courts are really important for their bottom lines, so they’re putting money toward defeating or supporting justices to that end. And there are also national partisan infrastructures that know how important these courts are to any number of high-profile issues, and probably to issues around democracy and elections.”How important is easy to overlook. It is well known, for example, that President Donald J. Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were rejected by every court where he filed suit, save one minor ruling. But when Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution scholar and president of the nonpartisan Governance Institute, analyzed individual judges’ votes, he found a different pattern: 27 of the 123 state court judges who heard the cases actually supported Mr. Trump’s arguments.Twenty-one of the 27 held elected posts on State Supreme Courts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Both Michigan and Wisconsin are among the top five states in spending for Supreme Court races, the Brennan Center study found.Mr. Keith called that a red flag, signaling the rising influence of money in determining which judges define the rules for political behavior.North Carolina is another top-five state. Of $10.5 million spent on the state’s Supreme Court races in 2020, $6.2 million was devoted to a single race, for chief justice. Both figures are state records.The court has become increasingly partisan, largely at the Republican legislature’s behest. Legislators ended public financing for Supreme Court races in 2013, and made elections partisan contests in 2016.Anita Earls is one of three justices accused of conflict of interest in the redistricting case.Julia Wall/The News & Observer, via Associated PressBut Dallas Woodhouse, a former state Republican Party chair and columnist for the conservative Carolina Journal, said blame for the current tempest lay not with Republicans, but their critics. They kicked off the recusal battle last summer, he said, when the state N.A.A.C.P. sought to force two Republican justices to withdraw from a case challenging two referendums for constitutional amendments.Mr. Woodhouse crusaded against the demands in his columns, and the Supreme Court left the decision up to the justices, both of whom said this month that they would hear the case.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More