How the lines tolled
First thoughts on New York's redrawn congressional maps
Last night, a bill was introduced to the New York State Assembly and Senate to delineate the congressional maps that will be used until 2032. These lines are not yet approved, but by all reasonable accounts and perhaps more due to the exhaustion of legislators over this two year process than pure confidence they are very likely to be approved.
The lines are relatively similar but not exactly the same as the lines proposed by New York’s Independent Redistricting Committee. As in 2022 the legislature has chosen to override those lines, first voting them down and now proposing their own map, though one far less ambitious in terms of partisan gerrymandering than the map which they passed and was struck down by the courts two years ago.
This entire process must be understood in relation to the chaos of the 2022 cycle, where the legislature passed an ambitious Democratic gerrymander of New York that was struck down in the courts, leading to an independent authority redrawing the districts. Downstream from Lee Zeldin’s strong performance in the Governor’s race, there were many upset races that swept Republicans into congressional office.
No doubt the embarassment from that has lead to Democrats in the legislature taking a far less ambitious approach. It would be wrong to say there were no partisan considerations here, but the days of the combined Park Slope-Staten Island district and the Bronx to Putnam County snake are over. Even the language of the bill itself reflects a great fear of a similar fiasco, including a section which asserts if a district in the map is challenged in court and found noncompliant with election law, only that district and the adjacent districts may be redrawn by a special master. To my knowledge such a provision has never been included in a bill and I make no claim to whether it is legally enforcable, only that it speaks volumes about the mood of the legislature that it is included in a bill with relatively fair districts.
I will be discussing this map district by district for most of the 26 districts in numerical order, so if there is a specific district you are interested in, scroll down to that district. I will not be mentioning districts where I am unaware of any changes or the changes are insignificant. For example, many minor changes have been made to draw the homes of incumbents into their district. I should also note that my initial analysis will get far more granular as we go further upstate, beginning with Jamaal Bowman’s NY-16. This is because I am writing this so early that we do not actually have manipulable maps of most downstate districts. The maps that I will use were made by me based on the text of the bill.
Without getting too into the weeds, the language of the bill in question refers to areas included in districts from the level of full counties to individual census blocks, census blocks which in many cases are the size of a city block. That means in NYC and Long Island where municipalities are large in population and there are no legal entities smaller than those municipalities, the bill often lists out the individual census blocks in said district. Given there are 350,169 of them in New York State, it is of course not reasonable to manually map them as I have for analysis of the upstate districts. The one exception where I have mapped out to that very granular level downstate is the Bronx portion of Jamaal Bowman’s district, given as I have previously written about he is in a competitive primary and the changes within the Bronx are very significant to his odds of winning.
As a final note, the software I use only gets as granular as census block groups, which are as it sounds groups of census blocks. For this reason, the maps I have drawn based on the bill are not precisely the same as the actual legal districts. With this said, the margin of error created by this technological limitation is quite miniscule and does not in any of the districts I cover have a significant impact on the character of the changes. With that disclaimed, let us begin!
District 1
Representative: Nick LaLota (R)
Likely Opponent: John Avlon (D)
City and State reports that New York’s 1st will lose parts of Huntington, more specifically Democrat leaning Cold Spring Harbor and Huntington Station which will be drawn into Tom Suozzi’s NY-3, shoring up the congressman who was elected just this month for November. While specifics have not been reported on, it has likely gained parts of NY-2’s South Shore to compensate for this loss of population. This will make it more Republican than last cycle. It seems LaLota is an excessive favorite for November.
District 2
Representative: Andrew Garbarino (R)
Likely Opponent: Rob Lublin (D)
As already mentioned, parts of Garbarino’s district have been given to NY-1. In addition, reporting suggests heavily Republican areas of NY-3 such as Massapequa have been transferred to Garbarino’s district though the specifics are not yet mapped. Garbarino is all but safe for re-election in November.
District 3
Representative: Tom Suozzi (D) formerly George Santos (R)
Likely Opponent: Mazi Pilip (R)
Given I have already mentioned the changes in Suozzi’s favor from the previous two districts, I will spare repeating them besides to say that given them and the fact Suozzi beat his opponent already once this month by a large margin, Suozzi is a heavy favorite in November.
District 4
Representative: Anthony D’Esposito (R) (not yet running for re-election)
Likely Opponent: Laura Gillen (D)
I have not seen reporting on changes to this district, and as such I assume it is unchanged. Given this district voted for Biden by an even larger margin than the district Suozzi just won, D’Esposito is probably as close to doomed as an incumbent congressperson in an unchanged district can be. With (not unfounded) allegations of gerrymandering under the original 2022 maps, I wonder if this and other districts were left untouched to assuage such allegations. This will be a recurring theme.
District 6
Representative: Grace Meng (D)
Likely Opponent: (no current opponent)
We have our first district with a before and after! Grace Meng’s district is swapping the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights with AOC for that of Corona. Do note that I only have the new map through the rejected IRC map, but I have not seen any reporting on revisions to it and thus assume it is identical. While the 2022 governor’s race margin is a bit close for comfort, there is no reason to think Meng is at risk of losing this seat anytime soon. I also want to note it is hilarious to me that they drew Citi Field out of my fellow Yankee fan AOC’s district. Moves exactly zero people, but this is the kind of hard-hitting revision we needed.
District 11
Representative: Nicole Malliotakis (R)
Likely Opponent: Sarah Blas (D)
This Staten Island-based district remains unchanged, though I mention it as it was the site of some of the most egregious partisan gerrymandering of the struck-down 2022 map, once snaking up to affluent and liberal Park Slope. This district is likely out of reach for Democrats this cycle and for the forseeable future.
District 14
Representative: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D)
Likely Opponent: Tina Forte (R)
As previously mentioned, Ocasio-Cortez’ district is swapping some territory with Grace Meng’s NY-6. Besides this and the headline of this map is that AOC will lose the neighborhood of Co-Op City to Jamaal Bowman’s district, a development I have hypothesized about before and will be discussed when we get to him. AOC’s district will gain some parts of the South Bronx to offset this loss of population from Ritchie Torres’ NY-15, though the specifics are presently unknown to me.
District 15
Representative: Ritchie Torres (D)
Likely Opponent: (no current opponent)
As previously mentioned, Torres will lose parts of the South Bronx to AOC. He will however gain parts of the neighborhood of Wakefield from Jamaal Bowman to account for his gain of Co-Op City.
District 16
Representative: Jamaal Bowman (D)
Likely Opponent: Madeline Brame (R)
I know what you’re here for. If you’re not very aware of the discussion of the past few months it may look as if little has changed, but Bowman has gained his golden goose: the neighborhood of Co-Op City. In a competitive primary with Westchester County Executive George Latimer, it has been ideal for his re-election that Bowman’s district take in more of the Bronx. While the partial loss of the neighborhood of Wakefield and lack of a cross Long Island Sound district has reduced the extent to which he could have gained in the Bronx, this still seems like a positive development towards Bowman’s re-election but nowhere near the slam-dunk tremendous edge he was hoping for.
While some reporting has suggested the lack of significant population gain in the Bronx has made this development a bit of a wash for Bowman, I’d like to push back slightly. While the demographics and population of these two portions of the Bronx are quite similar, the true benefit to Bowman comes in the form of turnout differential. Biden won both versions of the Bronx section of NY-16 by about 92-8, but despite there only being about 2,000 more people in the Co-Op City version, there were 4,720 more raw voters. In a hotly contested primary, that may well be the difference.
There is much more to be said here including analysis of primary turnout between the two and a recent surge in voters changing registration to the Democratic Party, but this is just the first look. We will go much further in our analysis at a later date.
District 17
Representative: Mike Lawler (R)
Likely Opponent: Mondaire Jones (D)
No changes were made to Lawler’s district, as with D’Esposito’s district this may have been intentional. While in better shape than D’Esposito, the partisanship of this district and presence of a former incumbent in the race makes re-election quite an uphill battle.
District 18
Representative: Pat Ryan (D)
Likely Opponent: Alison Esposito (R)
I may be biased in having lived in this district for most of my life, but second only to Bowman’s district the changes here are most intriguing to me. While the partisanship and demographics have barely changed, the composition of the district has changed very much. Incumbent Pat Ryan won this seat as Ulster County Executive against Dutchess County Executive in a very regionally polarized race, then in November of the same year won under the current lines against a State Assemblyman from Orange County. This district is to my perspective very much a tug-of-war between the favorite sons of its three composite counties.
If I add county lines to the same maps, you’ll probably see why this is so interesting to me. Ulster is the county in the upper left.
While it has gained some of the smaller and more liberal towns north of Kingston, a significant portion of Ulster County has been drawn out of the district. Under the IRC’s map however Ulster County actually gained towns, with Orange County in the bottom left losing some of its reddest towns.
Who was the first person in the NYS Legislature to object to the IRC maps? James Skoufis, State Senator from Orange County who called the maps an attempt to dilute the influence of Orange County and protect both Ryan and Molinaro. Given Pat Ryan has a vote in Congress and Skoufis one in the State Senate, take a wild guess whose interests won out. It’s hard to imagine Ryan is thrilled with this, but a climbing politician from Cornwall may have a different perspective.
As for this year, Lee Zeldin’s former LG candidate seems like an ideal recruit but has raised a downright shockingly low amount of money. Eyes appear to be more on the Republicans fighting for their political lives than the prospect of another flip.
District 19
Representative: Marc Molinaro (R)
Likely Opponent: Josh Riley (D)
This district has changed considerably physically, but is barely different in partisanship. This will likely be one of the most hotly contested districts in the state along with the next one. I am more bullish on Molinaro’s odds of re-election than most for reasons I will elaborate on in a future article. Beyond the Carhartt factor, he is an excellent retail politician. When I was a kid in Dutchess County when he was executive, I probably met him over a dozen times at various community events before I had any interest in politics. How much times do you think the median person has met their county executive? Not very many.
District 22
Representative: Brandon Williams (R)
Likely Opponent: (no clear favorite)
With the inclusion of Cortland and other small cities in the district, Brandon Williams enters the D’Esposito tier of incumbents who are heavy underdogs. Perhaps sensing this, there is a highly competitive Democratic primary taking place here for the right to be the person with a pulse and the Democratic nomination to face him in November.
Conclusion
As I’ve mentioned for many of these, there is plenty to be elaborated on and analyzed but I figured a relatively short summary for each district of particular interest was warranted at this time.
I held off on releasing several articles related to the Congressional races until we had these more or less final maps, so now that they are released I have quite a backlog I’m looking to release once a week for the month of March into April.
As I’ve mentioned in my notes, I am not intending to paywall any of them but if you’re a paid subscriber you’ll be getting an identical copy of the article two days earlier and access to a Drive folder of any data, graphs, spreadsheets, etc I collected or created for the purposes of that article. Hopefully this will strike a good balance between people who do this professionally/are able to support me and more casual readers. I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of paywalling my analysis given this is a hobby for me, but still want a way to show some gratitude to those who choose to financially support this content.
Here’s a sneak peek at the concepts for my upcoming articles, if any of them sound interesting to you, you can subscribe for free to get new articles emailed to you when they are released!
Calculating “left”-ness: a formulaic analysis of what the most progressive districts in New York are
Pieces on the political careers of Marc Molinaro, Pat Ryan, Mike Lawler
Analysis of Gen Z voter registration in NYS
Will the Zeldin swing materialize in 2024? Yes, but not in the way you think!