Redistricting and Reapportionment

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      Maloney vs. Nadler? New York Must Pick a Side (East or West)

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      New congressional lines have put two stalwart Manhattan Democrats on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary. Barney Greengrass is staying neutral.As he sat in the shade of Riverside Park on a sparkling recent weekday morning in Manhattan, Representative Jerrold Nadler tried to make sense of how two powerful allies suddenly found themselves at war.A court-ordered redrawing of New York’s congressional district lines had combined the East and West Sides of Manhattan into a single district for the first time since World War II, putting Mr. Nadler and Representative Carolyn Maloney, a longtime colleague, on a potentially disastrous collision course in the Aug. 23 Democratic primary.Attempts to broker a peace settlement were made, but Mr. Nadler, over a chilled Diet Coke, acknowledged that they were somewhat halfhearted.He recalled telling Ms. Maloney in a private conversation on the House floor in Washington a few days earlier that he would win, suggesting she run for a neighboring seat.“She said basically the opposite, and so it was an impasse,” Mr. Nadler said, “and we left it at that.”On an island known for Democratic infighting, Mr. Nadler, 74, and Ms. Maloney, 76, have managed to coexist more or less peacefully for three decades.They built parallel political machines and accumulated important committee chairmanships. Along the way, they had become powerful stalwarts — if not political mascots — in their districts: Ms. Maloney, a pathbreaking feminist and the widow of an investment banker, represents an East Side district so wealthy it was once christened the silk-stocking district; Mr. Nadler, a proudly opinionated old-school progressive, holds down the West Side.But their long truce came to a shattering end last week, when a state court imposed a significant revision on New York’s congressional map. The new lines have roiled Democrats across the state, but perhaps nowhere has the change been more disruptive than Manhattan.“I’d say it’s sad,” Ms. Maloney said in an interview near her Upper East Side home. “It’s sad for the city.”The primary matchup between Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney may be one of the most bruising political spectacles in living memory, a crosstown clash between two respected party elders in the twilight of their careers. And it will play out in one of the most politically influential pockets of the United States — home to financiers, media titans and entertainers, and the source of millions of dollars in campaign donations each election cycle.Not since Bella Abzug challenged fellow West Side representative William Fitts Ryan in a 1972 race pitting two liberal icons against each other has New York City faced a primary contest with the potential to be quite so fraught.“No one ever forgot that,” Harold Holzer, a historian and former aide to Ms. Abzug, said of the primary contest. “Maybe this will be more heartbreaking than it is infuriating. But for those who lived through the first one and remained pained by it for years, it’s history repeating itself.”Representative William Fitts Ryan beat Representative Bella S. Abzug in a 1972 primary. He died two months later.Stanley Wolfson/World Telegram & Sun, via Library of CongressAfter Mr. Ryan’s death, Ms. Abzug defeated his wife to retain a seat in the House.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesAnd yet neither Mr. Nadler nor Ms. Maloney has wasted any time working the phones to pressure union leaders, old political allies and wealthy donors — many of whom the two have shared for years — to pick sides.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.Allies of Ms. Maloney whispered doubts about Mr. Nadler’s health. (His aides say his health is good.) Mr. Nadler’s associates circulated old news articles about Ms. Maloney’s obsession with pandas, and suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is officially neutral in the race, really preferred him.For all their superficial differences, Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney have had broadly similar career arcs.Both came up through local New York City politics in the 1970s. Mr. Nadler was a precocious young lawyer who started a group of self-styled reformers, the West Side Kids, and won a State Assembly seat in 1976. Ms. Maloney, a former teacher, was a top legislative aide in Albany before winning a City Council seat in 1982. She was the first Council member to give birth while in office and the first to introduce legislation giving rights to same-sex couples.They arrived in Congress within two months of each other in the early 1990s. Mr. Nadler inherited his safely Democratic West Side seat when the incumbent died of a heart attack on the eve of the primary. Ms. Maloney had to work harder for hers, upsetting a long-serving liberal Republican, Bill Green, to win the East Side seat once held by Mayors John V. Lindsay and Edward I. Koch.Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney are among the House’s most progressive members and both lead prestigious committees. Ms. Maloney is the chair of the Oversight and Reform Committee, which most recently oversaw an overhaul of the Postal Service. Mr. Nadler leads the Judiciary Committee, a role that earned him national attention during President Donald J. Trump’s two impeachments.Neither lawmaker grew up in Manhattan. Ms. Maloney is from Greensboro, N.C. Mr. Nadler, the son of a one-time chicken farmer, was mostly raised in Brooklyn. Both have strongly rebuffed pleas to retire.“I’ve never been more effective,” Ms. Maloney said.Mr. Nadler, the city’s only remaining Jewish congressman, was even more direct: “No. No. No. No. No. No.”Ms. Maloney, center, at a 1992 reception for her and other incoming female House members.Laura Patterson/CQ Roll Call, via Getty ImagesMr. Nadler campaigning in the Bensonhurst section in 1994, when the area was in his district.Donna Dietrich/Newsday, via Getty ImagesMs. Maloney enters the contest with an apparent, if slight, demographic edge: She already represents about 60 percent of the voters in the new district. The spread narrows among Democratic primary voters, according to data complied by the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.Political analysts are warning that the outcome may depend on who casts ballots in a primary in late August, when many residents of the Upper East and West Sides decamp to the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley.A third Democrat, Suraj Patel, is also running. His premise is that it is time to give a younger generation a chance to lead. He came within four percentage points of beating Ms. Maloney in the primary two years ago. (Mr. Nadler, by contrast, has not had a close election in nearly 50 years.)“If you are satisfied with the state of New York, the country or the Democratic Party, they are your candidates,” Mr. Patel, 38 said.For now, predictions about which candidate will win appear to correlate with proximity to the Hudson and East Rivers.“The West Side votes heavily, that’s to our advantage,” said Gale Brewer, a former Manhattan borough president who now represents the area on the City Council. She added of Mr. Nadler, whom she is backing: “He’s got a brain that is frightening.”Rebecca A. Seawright, an assemblywoman from the Upper East Side supporting Ms. Maloney, said that the congresswoman has “endless energy” and an innate understanding of women’s priorities that her allies believe will resonate with voters in a year when the Supreme Court may strike down Roe v. Wade.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      How a Mapmaker Became New York’s Most Unexpected Power Broker

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      Jonathan Cervas, a former bartender from Las Vegas, radically redrew New York’s House district lines, forcing some Democratic incumbents to scramble for new seats.He is a postdoctoral fellow from Pittsburgh, a bartender turned political mapmaker. Now, Jonathan Cervas is suddenly New York’s most unforeseen power broker.Last month, a New York State judge chose Mr. Cervas to create new district maps in New York for the House and State Senate, after maps approved by state Democratic leaders were declared unconstitutional.Mr. Cervas’s new maps radically reshaped several districts, scrambling the future of the state’s political establishment for the next decade. Republicans were quietly pleased, and some anti-gerrymandering groups praised his work. But Democrats, who saw several potential pickups in the House of Representatives potentially evaporate, were outraged. Mr. Cervas’s decisions — the rationale for which he outlined in a lengthy explanation released early Saturday — have already caused vicious infighting and prospective primaries between some incumbent Democrats, including one pitting Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney against each other in Manhattan.For his part, Mr. Cervas, 37, insists he was just doing his job, the importance of which he says has been exaggerated by the fact that the state’s changes came so late in the 2022 election cycle.“People have made a narrative how the House of Representatives is going to be determined by one man who is from Pennsylvania; nothing could be further from the truth, ” he said in a lengthy interview this week, adding that “people still have to run” for office.“I serve the court, I serve democracy. That’s it,” he added. “If people want to make me important, so be it, but I just stick with my moral principles and things I’ve learned and apply the law as its written.”That said, the impact of Mr. Cervas’s circumscription has already been profound, creating the likelihood of highly competitive general-election campaigns from Long Island to upstate New York. Some races in the New York State Senate, where Democrats hold a comfortable majority, have also been upended by new lines.Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens, was particularly galled by the congressional changes, likening the new lines to “Jim Crow” laws — which restricted Black involvement in voting and other aspects of society — and skewering Mr. Cervas’s work as having “degraded the Black and Latino populations in five New York City-based congressional districts.”“The unelected, out-of-town special master did a terrible job, produced an unfair map that did great violence to Black and Latino communities throughout the city, and unnecessarily detonated the most Jewish district in America,” said Mr. Jeffries, who is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and the second-highest-ranking Black lawmaker in Congress. “That’s problematic and that cannot be excused or explained in any fair or rational fashion.”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.Mr. Cervas said that his map “fully reflected” how many of New York’s largest minority populations — including Black, Latino, and Asian groups — are “geographically concentrated.”As for Mr. Cervas’s political beliefs, they are somewhat hard to divine. He describes his political leanings as “pro-democracy,” rather than professing allegiance to any party, though he adds that belief happens “to align more closely with one party than another.” He is registered as an independent in Pennsylvania, where he lives, but he says he recently voted in a Republican primary there in hopes of electing moderate members of that party.What’s more, he says he hates politics, preferring institutions and policy to electoral battles.“I like governance,” Mr. Cervas said. “I don’t really like the bickering, the animosities, the games. Those types of things are uninteresting to me.”Ross Mantle for The New York TimesRoss Mantle for The New York TimesMr. Cervas was appointed as a so-called special master by Justice Patrick F. McAllister of State Supreme Court in Steuben County, who ordered new maps drawn up after a successful lawsuit from Republicans. Justice McAllister, a Republican, found that Democratic lawmakers in Albany had adopted lines that were “unconstitutionally drawn with political bias.”Mr. Cervas’s was appointed in mid-April, after Nate Persily, a Stanford law professor who helped draw New York’s current congressional map in 2012, turned down Justice McAllister. His previous work had been as an assistant on more limited redistricting cases in Georgia, Virginia and Utah. Last year, however, Mr. Cervas was hired for a statewide project, as part of a redistricting commission in Pennsylvania, where the chairman, Mark Nordenberg, said he proved invaluable as a redistricting specialist, as well as having “a deep knowledge of the law” and, of course, “technical, mapping skills.”“He approached everything we did in a fair and nonpartisan fashion,” said Mr. Nordenberg, the former chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, noting he “would hire him again if I had the opportunity.”That said, Mr. Cervas had never been a special master, particularly on such a tight deadline: about five weeks to deliver the final maps, including and incorporating revisions. He worked with several assistants and solicited comments from the public, both online and in a single, in-person hearing in Steuben County, about 275 miles from New York City.And while the remoteness of that location made court appearances cumbersome, some anti-gerrymandering advocates made the trip to voice support for the new maps.“I have to say I was pleasantly surprised,” said Jerry Vattamala, the director of the Democracy Program at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which was part of a coalition lobbying for more representation for people of color in New York City, adding that Mr. Cervas seemed responsive to the thousands of comments he received. “So the six-hour drive, I guess, was worth it.”In some ways, Mr. Cervas seems destined to have played an outsize role in Democratic woe: He was born, outside Pittsburgh, on Election Day in 1984, when Ronald Reagan humiliated the party’s nominee, Walter Mondale, winning a second term. His upbringing — in two swing states — was working-class: His father was a field service representative for Whittle Communications, his mother worked at Kmart.The family moved to Las Vegas in the early 1990s, and Mr. Cervas became interested in politics, eventually studying the topic at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and graduating with a degree in political science. He supported himself by working in a movie theater at a casino and eventually tending bar, a job he said helped him learn how to listen to divergent opinions.“It’s actually an education on how to be moderate,” he said. “When people say things that are inflammatory, you have to not take it too personally. ”Before working on New York’s lines, Mr. Cervas was a redistricting specialist for a Pennsylvania commission.Ross Mantle for The New York TimesIf there was a turning point in the road for Mr. Cervas, it may have come nearly a decade ago at a rock concert in Anaheim, Calif.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Tom Kean’s Strategy in Run for Congress: Say Less

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      Ahead of next month’s primary, Tom Kean Jr., running in New Jersey’s most competitive House race, hopes to avoid alienating moderate swing voters while facing challengers from the right.Tom Kean Jr., a New Jersey Republican locked in the state’s most competitive congressional race, has refused to debate his primary opponents.He has avoided talking to most reporters.And he has dodged questions about whether he agrees with the Republican National Committee’s characterization of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse.”Mr. Kean, the scion of a storied political family, has adopted what appears to be a core strategy as he tries to avoid alienating moderate swing voters while facing challengers from the right: to keep his mouth, basically, shut.“I’m calling it the vow of silence,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.Julie Roginsky, a Democratic political consultant, said a key question will be whether Mr. Kean’s strategy — however cynical — works.“Did Tom Kean figure out a winning formula in these kinds of swing districts? Which is to say nothing?” she said.“Then use the media’s castigation of you for keeping your mouth shut as a dog whistle to the base?” she added.Whether the political calculation works or not, the results of next month’s primary are likely to be seen as a measure of former President Donald J. Trump’s grip on the G.O.P. in a state better known for a moderate brand of Republican politics once epitomized by leaders like Mr. Kean’s father, a popular two-term governor.Most of Mr. Kean’s six primary opponents have tried to dent his credentials as a conservative as they compete for the attention of voters loyal to Mr. Trump.One opponent, State Assemblyman Erik Peterson, a leader among Republican lawmakers who staged a public challenge to a State House Covid-19 vaccine mandate, said Mr. Kean had “never been a conservative until this race.” Another, Phil Rizzo, a former evangelical Christian pastor who has promoted Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud and said he remained unconvinced of President Biden’s victory, has highlighted what he calls Mr. Kean’s “liberal voting record.”A former state assemblyman and senator, Mr. Kean, 53, has the institutional support of county and state leaders and a prime spot on ballots. The large field of candidates is expected to splinter the conservative vote, benefiting Mr. Kean, who has raised nine times as much campaign cash as his next closest opponent, Mr. Rizzo.If Mr. Kean wins the primary on June 7, he is likely to again face the incumbent, Tom Malinowski, a second-term Democrat who narrowly beat Mr. Kean in 2020.The primary may also offer hints about whether Republicans in vital swing districts will remain as energized as they appeared to be last year.Largely affluent and suburban, the Seventh Congressional District is filled with the type of well-educated swing voters who helped Democrats across the country flip control of the House in 2018 and who are seen as crucial to November’s midterm elections.Registered Democrats in New Jersey outnumber Republicans by more than one million voters. Yet Republican turnout surged in November, and Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, won a second term by a far narrower margin than expected. The Democratic Party retained control of the Legislature but lost seven seats, including one held by the powerful Senate president, Stephen M. Sweeney.Gov. Philip D. Murphy is the first Democrat to win re-election in New Jersey since 1977. But he won by a far smaller margin than expected. Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times“The question is going to be whether or not Republican enthusiasm continues to be at an elevated rate,” Professor Rasmussen said.Mr. Kean’s campaign said he was not available for an interview and said it did not provide his public schedules, while noting that he planned to attend several parades and events over Memorial Day weekend.Last weekend, at a large block party that drew candidates for state and federal races, Mr. Rizzo was filmed asking Mr. Kean, “We going to debate or not?” Mr. Kean did not respond, and Mr. Rizzo, 45, posted the video on Twitter.At the same time, Mr. Kean has actively played to the more conservative wing of the G.O.P., a fact the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has tried to exploit in regular email blasts.Mr. Kean stood with Kevin McCarthy, the polarizing Republican minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, to announce his candidacy. He traveled to the Mexican border to highlight his opposition to Mr. Biden’s immigration policy, even though it is not an issue that separates him from his primary opponents.Last year, on Jan. 6, Mr. Kean and a liberal former Democratic senator, Loretta Weinberg, issued a joint statement urging Capitol protesters to “go home immediately or face the full force of the law.”“What we are witnessing in Washington,” the statement read, “is not how our democracy is supposed to function.”But he remained silent earlier this year as other prominent New Jersey Republicans like former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Leonard Lance — who in 2018 lost to Mr. Malinowski — signed a letter calling the Republican National Committee’s stance on the Jan. 6 events “an affront to the rule of law, peaceful self-government and the constitutional order.”The state’s largest news outlet, The Star-Ledger, criticized his decision not to take a position in an editorial that ran under a headline that described Mr. Kean as a “cowering candidate.”The Seventh Congressional District takes in New York City commuter towns like Westfield, where Mr. Kean lives, reaches north into one of the most conservative sections of the state and west into well-heeled communities dotted with genteel estates.With a winning mix of college-educated voters and, in 2018, widespread anti-Trump fervor, it was one of four New Jersey congressional districts that flipped to Democratic control during the last midterm cycle.But Mr. Trump is no longer in the White House and Mr. Biden’s popularity is waning. 401(k) retirement plans have stopped their meteoric ascent. And gas prices are ticking toward $5 a gallon as affordability becomes the watchword among politicians.In 2020, in his third run for Congress, Mr. Kean came within 5,329 votes of toppling Mr. Malinowski.Then, late last year, Mr. Kean’s odds of winning got better: The district’s boundaries were redrawn to include more Republican-dominant towns in a process designed to reflect statewide demographic shifts in the 2020 census. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has since assigned the race a “leans Republican” rating.The Seventh Congressional District now includes Hunterdon and Warren Counties and parts of Morris, Somerset, Sussex and Union Counties.Morris County offers a vivid example of the type of political shift that contributed to Mr. Biden’s victory. It is roughly 70 percent white, more than half of its residents have four-year college degrees and the median income is $117,000.Republicans outnumber Democrats there by 21,000, but that advantage has narrowed since 2016, when the G.O.P. had a 39,000 voter edge, according to New Jersey’s Department of State.In 2016, Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 9 percentage points among voters in the portion of Morris County then included in the Seventh Congressional District, according to the Daily Kos. Four years later, Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden there by less than 1 percentage point.Ms. Roginsky said November’s elections will offer a window into whether the swing voters who cast ballots against Mr. Trump remain in the Democratic fold when the polarizing former president is not on the ballot or in the White House.“Whether that realignment is permanent — or whether that was just a reaction to Donald Trump’s presidency,” she said. “That to me is the biggest question mark of this election.”One unknown factor is abortion, and how a possible decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legal precedent that has for nearly 50 years given women a right to terminate pregnancies, might energize female voters. Another is an investigation by the House Committee on Ethics into allegations that Mr. Malinowski failed to properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock trades. Mr. Malinowski has blamed “carelessness on my part” for the lack of disclosure and said he regretted and took full responsibility for it.Assembly members Erik Peterson, right, and Brian Bergen, refused to comply with a State House rule requiring Covid-19 vaccination or a negative test.Mike Catalini/Associated PressMr. Rizzo and Mr. Peterson, who has been endorsed by New Jersey Right to Life, both said they do not believe abortion had factored heavily into the primary race against Mr. Kean, who voted against a bill that codified abortion rights in New Jersey.Mr. Rizzo, a real estate developer, does not live within the district where he is running, but said he and his family were in “a process of moving” there. He came in second in last year’s Republican primary for governor, and said the attraction voters have to people like him and Mr. Trump — whom he said he did not vote for in 2016 — was uncomplicated.“We have two parties in New Jersey: the political class and everybody else,” Mr. Rizzo said. “And nobody’s representing the everybody else.” More

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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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      Jeffries Fights New York District Maps: ‘Enough to Make Jim Crow Blush’

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      Hakeem Jeffries hopes to pressure New York’s court-appointed special master to change congressional maps that split historically Black communities.Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the second-highest-ranking Black lawmaker in Congress, has launched an aggressive effort to discredit a proposed congressional map that would divide historically Black neighborhoods in New York, likening its configurations to Jim Crow tactics.Mr. Jeffries is spending tens of thousands of dollars on digital advertising as part of a scorched-earth campaign to try to stop New York’s courts from making the new map final without changes later this week.As construed, the map would split Bedford-Stuyvesant in central Brooklyn into two districts and Co-Op City in the Bronx into three, for example, while placing Black incumbents in the same districts — changes that Mr. Jeffries argues violate the State Constitution.“We find ourselves in an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Mr. Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, said in an interview on Thursday. In the most recent ad, he says the changes took “a sledgehammer to Black districts. It’s enough to make Jim Crow blush.”Mr. Jeffries may be laying the groundwork for an eventual legal challenge, but his more immediate aim was to pressure Jonathan R. Cervas, New York’s court-appointed special master, to change congressional and State Senate maps that he first proposed on Monday before he presents final plans to a state court judge for approval on Friday.The stakes could scarcely be higher. After New York’s highest court struck down Democrat-friendly maps drawn by the State Legislature as unconstitutional last month, the judges have vested near total power in Mr. Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow from Carnegie Mellon, to lay lines that will govern elections for a decade to come.Mr. Cervas’s initial proposal unwound a map gerrymandered by the Democratic-led State Legislature, creating new pickup opportunities for Republicans. But it also significantly altered the shapes of districts in New York City — carefully drawn a decade earlier by another court — that reflected a patchwork of racial, geographic and economic divides.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.Mr. Jeffries was far from alone in lodging last-ditch appeals. The court was inundated with hundreds of comments suggesting revisions from Democrats and Republicans alike — from party lawyers pressing for more politically favorable lines to an analysis of the differences between Jewish families on the East and West Sides of Manhattan.A broad coalition of public interest and minority advocacy groups told Mr. Cervas this week that his changes would risk diluting the power of historically marginalized communities. They included Common Cause New York and the United Map Coalition, an influential group of Latino, Black and Asian American legal groups.The proposed map would divide Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Brownsville — culturally significant Black communities in Brooklyn — between the 8th and 9th Congressional Districts. Each neighborhood currently falls in one or the other.The northeast Bronx, another predominantly Black area that includes Co-Op City and falls within Representative Jamaal Bowman’s district, would be split among three different districts.The groups have raised similar concerns about Mr. Cervas’s proposal to separate Manhattan’s Chinatown and Sunset Park, home to large Asian American populations, into two districts for the first time in decades. Other Jewish groups have made related appeals for their community in Brooklyn.Most of the changes are likely to have little impact on the partisan makeup of the districts, which are safely Democratic. But Lurie Daniel Favors, the executive director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, said that cutting through existing communities would further dilute the political power of historically marginalized groups.“Now, when Bedford-Stuyvesant wants to organize and petition at the congressional level, they have to split their efforts and go to two separate representatives,” she said.The maps would also push four of the state’s seven Black representatives into two districts, forcing them to compete with one another or run in a district where they do not live. Under the special master’s plan, Mr. Jeffries and Representative Yvette Clark would live in the same central Brooklyn district, and Mr. Bowman and Mondaire Jones would reside in the same Westchester County seat.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Fearing ‘Extinction-Level Event,’ N.Y. Democrats Turn Against Each Other

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      Newly drawn congressional maps have led some House members to quickly lay claim to certain districts, even if it means challenging fellow incumbents.Two weeks ago, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney warned fellow Democrats in a private meeting that a ruling by New York’s highest court to invalidate a Democratic-leaning congressional map could prompt “an extinction-level event” for the party, according to people familiar with the remarks.Democratic incumbents, he feared, could either be shoehorned into more difficult districts or forced into primaries against one another.So on Monday, when the courts finally unveiled a proposed new slate of districts unwinding Democrats’ gerrymander, Mr. Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, knew precisely what to do.Just 25 minutes after the maps’ release, Mr. Maloney announced on Twitter that he would leave behind the bulk of his traditional Hudson Valley seat and run instead for a newly drawn 17th Congressional District rooted in Westchester County. Mr. Maloney lives within the new lines, which happen to offer a safer path for a Democrat than the district he currently represents.What might have seemed like an easy political decision for Mr. Maloney, however, has quickly turned into a political firestorm, replete with racial overtones, off-the-record recriminations and rare breaches of congressional decorum between staff of neighboring colleagues.Some Democrats saw the maneuver as an attempt to box out Representative Mondaire Jones, a first-term congressman who represents the vast majority of the district’s population, and force him to enter a primary against Jamaal Bowman, a fellow Black progressive, in the neighboring 16th District. Mr. Jones made no secret of his own feelings, though he has yet to say which Democrat he will challenge.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads-up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Mr. Jones tersely told Politico on Monday. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.”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.In a rare break from Congress’s genteel protocols, Mr. Jones’s chief of staff even shared a screenshot of an exchange with Mr. Maloney’s top aide, and accused the chairman of prioritizing his personal interests “rather than working to unravel this gerrymander” by the courts.The once-a-decade congressional redistricting process is almost always an exercise in raw political power, particularly in a state like New York, which this year must shed a seat overall to account for population losses.But if New York’s redistricting cycle began this year with an attempt by Democrats to marginalize Republicans, it now appears destined to end in intense infighting among Democrats as the Aug. 23 primary approaches — thanks to a ruling last month by the state’s highest court declaring the Democrat-led Legislature’s maps unconstitutional.“Can I just go on vacation through August and wake up in September?” said Maria Slippen, the chairwoman of the Cortlandt Democratic Committee in Westchester County, lamenting a potential Democrat on Democrat fight in her district between Mr. Maloney and Mr. Jones. “When we are put in a situation where we have to fight with each other, the Republicans win,” she added.Representative Mondaire Jones said Mr. Maloney failed to give him a heads-up on his election plan.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesThe replacement map, drawn for the court by Jonathan R. Cervas, erased outright gains that Democrats had counted on based on the Legislature’s map and made other Democratic swing seats more competitive. It also forced at least five pairs of incumbents together in the same districts from Brooklyn to Buffalo, leaving candidates to decide whether to retire, move or go head-to-head with another sitting House member.A few miles down the Hudson from Mr. Maloney, two powerful Democratic committee chairs who have served alongside each other for 30 years — Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney — were also gearing up for a potentially explosive primary fight that would pit the east and west sides of Manhattan against one another in the new 12th Congressional District.Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Yvette Clarke, two Black Democrats drawn into a single district in Central Brooklyn, expressed fury at Mr. Cervas, but indicated they were likely to still run for separate seats.The maps, which could still be tweaked before a judge makes them final on Friday, may simply leave other candidates without a natural seat to run in and create unexpected openings for candidates who had previously decided not to run in 2022.Alessandra Biaggi, a rising Democratic star in the State Senate, had hoped to run in a new seat — stretching from her home in Westchester County to Nassau County on Long Island — created under the State Legislature’s plan. But Mr. Cervas’s map removed Westchester from the district entirely.Rana Abdelhamid, a community organizer backed by Justice Democrats, had spent more than a year campaigning against Ms. Maloney in New York City, only to see her Queens neighborhood removed from the district.Suraj Patel, another Carolyn Maloney challenger, has yet to declare his intentions but lives close to the line separating the new 12th District from the 10th, the remnants of Mr. Nadler’s old seat. He could decide to run in the 10th, where State Senator Brad Hoylman, former Mayor Bill de Blasio and Carlina Rivera, a member of the City Council, are also seriously considering runs.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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

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      The court-drawn lines would increase competition for seats in Congress, and pit longtime Democratic incumbents against one another.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.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.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.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? 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      4 Summer Election Days? New York Faces Chaos in Voting Cycle.

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      Representative Tom Reed is resigning, Representative Antonio Delgado is taking a new job, and New York’s redistricting process is up in the air, muddying the election schedule.To understand the chaos upending New York’s election season, consider the plight of Marc Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive trying to run for Congress as a Republican somewhere near his home in the Hudson Valley.Just two weeks ago, the state’s highest court unexpectedly invalidated the new congressional district in which Mr. Molinaro had spent months campaigning, throwing the battlefield into limbo as a special master redraws it and every other House seat in the state.Then last week, his likely Democratic opponent, Representative Antonio Delgado, took a job as New York’s lieutenant governor. The departure will prompt a special election this summer to fill the district whose current contours will be gone by January, just months before November’s election on lines that do not yet exist.“I’m a man in search of a horse,” Mr. Molinaro said in an interview on Wednesday. “I have no district, no opponent, and a million dollars.”With control of the House of Representatives on the line, no one expected this year’s redistricting cycle to be an afternoon by the Finger Lakes. But to a degree few foresaw, New York is lurching through what may be the most convoluted election cycle in living memory, scrambling political maps, campaigns and the calendar itself.It only got murkier this week, when Representative Tom Reed, a Republican from the Southern Tier of the state, announced that he would leave his seat earlier than expected to work for a Washington lobbying firm, setting up a second special congressional election this summer. (Mr. Reed decided not to seek re-election last year in the face of a groping allegation.)What’s left behind is a fog of confusion over when people are going to vote, who is running in which districts and when Gov. Kathy Hochul will schedule two special elections that could have an immediate impact on the narrowly divided House of Representatives in Washington.For now, neither Mr. Delgado nor Mr. Reed has officially resigned from their seats, according to the governor’s office.Representative Tom Reed, who said last year that he would not seek re-election, announced on Tuesday that he would resign.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“We are working with the lieutenant governor-designate’s team on the transition and have not yet received Congressman Reed’s resignation,” Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hochul, said on Wednesday. “But when we do, the governor will call a special election as required by law.”It is not implausible that New York could hold Election Days for statewide and Assembly primaries on June 28; for congressional and State Senate primaries on Aug. 23; and for the seats of Mr. Delgado and Mr. Reed on separate Tuesdays in August. (Republicans believe that Mr. Delgado may be delaying his House resignation so that his district’s special election can coincide with the Aug. 23 primaries in an effort to boost Democratic turnout.)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.“I joked with our staff last night, maybe tomorrow the locusts will set in?” said Nick Langworthy, the state Republican Party chairman. “We just have so many catastrophes politically.”Some greater clarity may yet be on the horizon.The court-appointed special master is scheduled to unveil the new congressional and State Senate districts on Monday, and if they are approved by Patrick F. McAllister, a judge in Steuben County, candidates will be able to begin plotting summertime campaigns.On Wednesday, Judge McAllister, who is overseeing the redistricting case, shut the door on a related but belated attempt to strike down State Assembly districts. The judge also laid out the process by which candidates can qualify to run in the newly redrawn districts once they are unveiled.If Republicans tend to view the absurdities in a more humorous light than Democrats do, it is because each change has played out to their benefit.The lines passed by the Democrat-dominated Legislature in February, only to be struck down in late April by the New York State Court of Appeals, would have given Democrats a clear advantage in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts. While the new lines remain a mystery, they are widely expected to create more swing seats that Republicans could conceivably win.The departure of Mr. Delgado in the 19th Congressional District was another unforeseen gift to the Republicans. While the exact shape of the new district will matter, Mr. Molinaro’s prospects will be enhanced by not having to run against a popular incumbent with a track record of winning tough races.The district, which includes all or parts of 11 counties, has been one of the state’s most competitive, with tight races in 2016 (a Republican win for John Faso), and in 2018, when Mr. Delgado won his first term. Mr. Delgado won by a more comfortable margin in 2020 against Kyle Van De Water, a Republican and former officer in the U.S. Army.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More