New U.S. House map shuffles area towns

By MAURY THOMPSON
Contributing writer

 

Voters in northern Saratoga County and nearly all of Rensselaer County will find themselves in new congressional districts when they head to the polls this year, thanks to a revised political map that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law on Feb. 28.

The new map is the end result of months of partisan wrangling and legal challenges that began two years ago when the boundaries of the state’s U.S. House districts were last redrawn based on 2020 U.S. census data.

But while the changes may cause confusion for some area voters, the consensus of nonpartisan analysts as well as area Democratic and Republican leaders is that the new map won’t significantly change the competitiveness of area House races.

Nor is it expected to substantially shift the state’s political playing field in a year when New York’s swing districts could play a big role in determining whether Republicans retain their razor-thin majority in the House.

“It was a long and convoluted process to get to the same place,” said Washington County Democratic Chairman Alan Stern.

Republicans had been bracing for the possibility that leaders of the Legislature’s Democratic majority, who controlled the final drafting of the new map, would engage in aggressive gerrymandering to tilt the map in their party’s favor. But GOP leaders ultimately said they would not challenge the final map, which will now be used in congressional elections through 2030.
“I don’t think in any material respect it changes the political realities in any district,” said John Faso, a lawyer and former congressman from Kinderhook who advised Republicans on redistricting litigation.

Locally, the new map shifts northern Saratoga County, which since 2022 has been part of the 20th Congressional District now represented by Rep. Paul Tonko, D-Amsterdam, into the 21st district represented by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Schuylerville.

And the bulk of Rensselaer County, which had been part of the 21st district for the past two years, will now be divided between the 20th district and the 19th district, which currently is represented by Rep. Marcus Molinaro, R-Catskill.

Across the state, the new map still leaves three House seats now held by Republicans, including Molinaro’s, that are rated as tossups in this year’s election by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Based on the new district lines, the Cook report’s analysts changed their rating only for the Syracuse-area seat of GOP Rep. Brandon Williams, which had been considered a tossup and is now rated as one Democrats are slightly favored to win.

 

Two years, many maps
The legal battles that led to New York’s newest congressional map began in 2022, the first year the state’s political maps were supposed to be drawn by the new Independent Redistricting Commission, which was created by a constitutional amendment voters approved in 2014.
After Democrats and Republican on the new panel deadlocked and produced two separate maps, the Legislature took charge and adopted a map that was widely seen as maximizing the potential for Democrats to win more seats.

Republicans successfully challenged the Legislature’s map in court, and a state Supreme Court justice appointed an independent expert to draw a new map that emphasized the creation of more competitive districts. That map was used for the 2022 election – and Republicans benefited. After the 2022 vote, the GOP wound up controlling 11 of the state’s 26 House seats, compared with 8 of 27 seats previously. (The state lost one seat based on 2020 census data.)
Last year, Democrats prevailed in court when they argued that the redistricting expert’s maps were only intended to be effective for the 2022 election cycle. That set the stage for a new round of redistricting.

On Feb. 15, the bipartisan redistricting commission, by a 9-1 vote, approved a “compromise” plan that made only minor changes to the 2022 map. Then the Legislature rejected the commission’s plan and adopted its own, but its version made only minor adjustments to what the commission had recommended.

Faso said the Legislature avoided going too far because Democrats were afraid of continued litigation by Republicans.

“That was a credible threat,” he said.
But Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political strategist in New York City, said it was not so much fear of litigation, but instead a fear of voter backlash, that prompted legislative Democrats to tread lightly in revising the district lines.

Sheinkopf said Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic minority in the U.S. House, was concerned that lingering controversy over redistricting would overshadow other issues in this year’s congressional elections.
“There’s only so far one can go,” he said.

 

Handicapping a new map
Voter enrollment statistics for the new congressional districts had not yet been released as of March 20, but a variety of political leaders and independent analysts predicted that the new map will not by itself change the political calculus in this year’s congressional races.
“New York has more competitive districts than any other state,” Faso said.

The Associated Press concluded that the new map gave Democrats “a slight edge” overall when compared with the 2022 map.

But ABC News concluded, based on voting patterns in the 2020 presidential election, that the latest congressional map flipped the partisan tilt in only one of the state’s 26 congressional districts — the 1st district on Long Island. There, the 2022 configuration of the district would have supported President Biden by 0.02 percentage points, while the newly configured district would have supported Donald Trump by 2 points.

By this measure, no district had a change in voting patterns of more than 4 percentage points as a result of the latest redistricting.

Locally, in the 19th district, where Molinaro is the incumbent, Biden would have won by 5 percentage points under the 2022 boundaries compared with 4 points under the new boundaries.
Molinaro’s district was redrawn to exclude Tioga County, while taking in larger portions of Otsego and Herkimer counties as well as the Rensselaer County municipalities of East Greenbush, Grafton, Nassau, Petersburgh, Schodack, Stephentown and most of Brunswick. The Cook Political Report still rates the 19th district, which stretches westward from Columbia County to Binghamton and Ithaca, as a toss-up seat.

Faso, who represented an earlier version of the 19th district in 2017-18, said the latest changes do not substantially change its competitiveness.

And Sheinkopf, the Democratic strategist, said the change is not enough to deter Democrats from targeting Molinaro.

“The Democrats are probably going to drop a lot of money into that district,” he said.
Democrat Josh Riley, a lawyer from the Southern Tier who lost to Molinaro in 2022, is running again.

 

Tonko, Stefanik stay safe
The reshaped 20th Congressional District, where Tonko is the incumbent, retains a significant Democratic advantage.

Under both the 2022 boundaries and its new configuration, Biden would have carried the district by 19 percentage points based on his vote tallies from four years ago.

This year, Alexander Dubois and Jonathan Locke are seeking the Republican nomination in the 20th district, while Democrats Mason Brown and Emmanuel Jorge-Garcia, a chemical engineer, aim to challenge Tonko in a primary.

The new 20th district will include a larger portion of Rensselaer County as well as part of Montgomery County, including Tonko’s hometown of Amsterdam. Rensselaer County municipalities in the new 20th district are Hoosick, Pittstown, Schaghticoke, North Greenbush and Troy.

At the same time, the Saratoga County towns of Hadley, Day, Edinburg, Providence, Greenfield, Moreau, Saratoga and Northumberland, as well as the northern half of Wilton, have been moved from the 20th district into the 21st district, where Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Schuylerville, is the incumbent.

The hometowns of Stefanik, and Jill Lochner of Greenfield, who aims to challenge Stefanik in a Republican primary, are among the Saratoga County communities moved into the 21st district.
Voting patterns suggest an increased Republican advantage in the reconfigured 21st district.
Under its 2022 boundaries, Trump would have carried the district by 12 percentage points based on his 2020 performance. Within the new district lines, he would have carried it by 16 points.
The new 21st district no longer includes any towns in Rensselaer County, where Stefanik currently has a district office in East Greenbush.

Steven Holding, a retired Army colonel from Camilus, and Paula Collins, a cannabis tax lawyer who recently moved from Manhattan to Canton, are seeking the Democratic nomination to run in the 21st. The Working Families Party has endorsed Collins, and Scott Phillip Lewis of Lake Placid has announced plans to run as an independent.

Stern, the Washington County Democratic chairman, said he would have preferred a more significant redrawing of boundaries.

Stern said he testified at a recent Independent Redistricting Commission hearing that many residents of Warren and Washington counties work in either Saratoga or Rensselaer counties, and that Warren and Washington counties have more in common with counties to the south than to the north.

“I just felt we would be better suited with [district] 20 instead of 21,” he said.
Others have argued that Warren and Washington counties share with northern counties the unique challenges of being located in the Adirondack Park, although only three of Washington County’s 17 towns lie at least partly within the park’s boundary.

New calls for reform
Although many politicians expressed satisfaction that the new congressional districts don’t significantly change the balance of power or the competitiveness of individual districts, public interest groups decried the process —especially the Legislature’s decision to take over the final round of map-making.

The Legislature “has once again undermined the intent and promise of the constitutional amendment establishing the Independent Redistricting Commission,” the League of Women Voters of New York State said in a press release.

Blair Horner, executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, has said that before the 2030 census launches the next cycle of redistricting, the state should overhaul its process by creating a commission that operates with total independence from the Legislature.
New York’s current redistricting process is not what public interest groups had hoped for when voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2014 that led to the creation of the Independent Redistricting Commission.

A coalition of reform groups had pushed unsuccessfully for the state to create an independent, nonpartisan body to draw the state’s political maps. Their goal was to foster a more open and transparent map-making process that would be insulated from partisanship.

Instead, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders proposed a commission whose members were appointed by the state’s political leaders. That plan, which also gave the Legislature the right to reject the independent commission’s proposals, won voter approval in 2014.