“When a pig becomes a hog, it gets slaughtered.”
The common proverb warning against greed and overindulgence hit Albany Democrats hard when their gerrymandered New York congressional map was struck down in 2021.
And now, they’re back for seconds.
Tuesday evening’s decision by the state’s highest court requires the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) to take another stab at determining the boundaries and makeup of each of the state’s twenty-six congressional districts. On paper, the IRC should resolve much debate and result in fairer maps, absolving the courts of time-consuming litigation and removing the state legislatures with vested political interests from process altogether. Some states have effective commissions, such as Colorado, Arizona, and even California, which drew some of the fairer maps across the country.
Unfortunately, New York’s IRC is fantasy-league at best. The 2014 ballot proposition through which the IRC was created contained several trapdoors in which the state legislature could retake control of the process. The IRC’s failure to reach an agreement after the 2020 Census did exactly that, as their inability to agree on a compromise threw the process to the state legislature by default. All proposals by the IRC are essentially moot since the increasingly out-of-touch legislature – controlled in the supermajority in both chambers at the time of redistricting – can just reject the commission’s proposal and draw their own lines.
What resulted was unequivocally the most egregious gerrymander the country saw during the 2020 redistricting cycle. On top of packing Republicans into just four districts across the state – they previously had seven districts – Democrats took bold moves to shore up incumbents and swing districts. The most notable example was that of the Third District, a north shore district that Democrats spared no expense in gerrymandering to Westchester and back – literally. The 2010s iteration of the district stretched from Kings Park to northern Queens. Democrats redrew it to stretch from Setauket, across northern Nassau and Queens, hugging the Bronx border with the East River, to end in Westchester County.
The Republican stronghold of Staten Island – included in the Thirteenth District – was bunched up with liberal Brooklyn neighborhoods, while Upstate urban seats took on odd shapes to include formerly Democratic working-class suburban counties that have shifted to the right over the last several years.
Democrats took advantage of a flimsily-constructed commission to gerrymander the map to their favor. The excuse for gerrymandering not just in New York, but Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, and Oregon as well, was Republicans’ gerrymandered maps in Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, and Indiana. While the latter is true, it does not justify the former. Gerrymandering is highly subjective to begin with because every seat is drawn in some way that is advantageous to a political party, even if it’s not with the intention of diluting certain voting blocs or wiping out congressional delegations of one party. And because of the strict and numerous laws regarding line drawing on all levels of government across the country, people working hard enough to find an argument against a standing map will likely find one.
In other words, the gerrymandering battle has been one waged for centuries with no overall partisan advantage or culprit. Trying to justify an unfair action at the expense of the voters with an identically unfair action is the moral equivalent of standing in a bucket and trying to lift yourself up by the handle.
As far as this pertains to New York, however, Democrats are on the chopping block when it comes to fairness. Congresswoman Suzan DelBene of Washington state marked the ruling as a “win for democracy” and one in which a “new and fair” congressional map can be created.
First of all, our country is categorically not a democracy. We’re a blend of several different forms of government, but we align more under the status of a republic than we do a democracy. Ironically, the form of government in which DelBene serves is the more “republican” part of our government, as she serves as an elected official representing a portion of the population. Imagine not understanding the principle of your own job.
Secondly, DelBene’s comments assume the map drawn by the special master is unfair as it stands. Map drawing is an arduous and esoteric process that must be vetted by dozens of standards and laws. It’s almost amazing that the maps are drawn up in the first place.
Some people believe that a larger number of competitive districts makes the map fairer. While there is some basis to this – and on paper, we would want more competitive districts than not – it’s not the be-all, end-all of redistricting. New York’s old map had three highly competitive districts, with six others that could be considered competitive in certain years. The current map has four highly competitive districts, with seven seats that could be competitive in certain environments. The latter category saw two of those districts flip in 2022, the Fourth and Seventeenth Districts for Anthony D’Esposito and Mike Lawler, respectively.
Another metric is used called the efficiency gap, which measures the difference between “wasted votes” between the two parties in a first-past-the-post electoral system. The “wasted votes” refer to those that do not translate into an elected representative. While the efficiency gap is a decent metric, there are exceptions where it does not reflect the fairness of the map. In states like Ohio and Wisconsin, where Democrats have their voters highly concentrated in dense urban areas, and where Republicans don’t have as high a concentration in any other part of the state, Democratic votes are essentially “wasted” in two different parts of the state. The efficiency gaps for the old and current maps are not egregious in either direction.
Then there’s the median seat metric, which is the difference of the partisan lean of the state overall crossed with the partisan lean of the most neutral seat. New York’s median seat got a few points more Republican under the new map, but this is negligible when most seats in the state come from New York City, and are essentially a lock for Democrats.
In short, the map is fair, the process was fair – and legal – and there was no implication beforehand that this map would be a temporary one just for the 2022 cycle.
Democrats are scrambling to redraw the lines – and presumably to benefit their party – to not only bolster their national efforts of taking back the House in 2024, but to also pad their runtime stateside. Democrats dropped the ball in blue districts because they simply thought identity and ancestral politics would weather the storm against the Lee Zeldin-induced red wave last year. As a result, Democrats lost four seats of their own and missed out on flipping another easy win in the Syracuse area. Not only was it a humiliating night for them, but it also allowed one of the bluest states in the country to play a central role in the national balance of power. Additionally, Anthony D’Esposito’s Fourth District became the most Democratic district represented by a Republican. In a seat that went to Biden by 14.5 points, D’Esposito won it by almost four points – a nearly twenty-point swing in just a two-year period.
Democrats should have won all the districts they lost in 2022, and they could probably flip a couple more under the right circumstances, even the First District, which Biden narrowly carrowed in 2020. This isn’t about winning districts, however, this is about damage control and concealing just how much support the party is hemorrhaging.
Additionally, since five vulnerable Republicans are now incumbents, it will be much harder to knock them off in a good, clean race.
Democrats are also on notice not only due to Biden’s historically low polling numbers nationally, but also his low party enthusiasm in New York. Recent polls show him ahead of Trump by just high single-digits and low double-digits, a historical anomaly for Democrats who can usually collect 60% of the vote here with no problems.
Moreover, Democrats are trying to scramble the radars on just how much they’re hemorrhaging in New York. Instead of addressing the problems of crime, runaway cost of living, the ongoing migrant crisis perpetuated by Albany and Manhattan, and now the egregious vocal support of Hamas on the streets of New York, they would rather throw the wool over the eyes of the public and redraw the lines to obscure the obvious distaste for their policies in one of their “states on a hill.”
Democrats are also guilty of crying wolf since they had the opportunity to redraw the map afforded to them by the judge who struck down the gerrymander in 2021, a commonality in redistricting cases. They chose not to take that offer and instead now complain the process was unfair and are aggressively pushing for an altered map.
This only hearkens back to the Senate Democrats’ historic denial of a floor vote for Governor Hochul’s Court of Appeals nominee in Hector LaSalle last year. Deemed “too moderate” for the court, Senate Democrats played hard ball and demanded a more liberal pick.
The Court voted for the maps to be redrawn in a 4-3 vote, one that LaSalle might have prevented had he been given a fair hearing and vote.
Each state should have an independent redistricting commission devoid of legislative input. This could have been easily fixed by Albany several years ago, but we suppose the trapdoor left in the wake of the ballot proposition was just too good to resist.
