Dem
47
GOP
53
Now that Florida has raised the gerrymandering stakes, another state is gearing up to join the party: New York. The state House delegation has seven Republicans and state Democrats think they can come up with a map that reduces that to three. The districts that the Democrats want to flip are on Long Island, on Staten Island, in the Hudson Valley, and one upstate.
However, the state Constitution makes it impossible to change the map for 2026, so the Democrats' focus, with urging from Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), is to aim for the 2028 elections. That will require a referendum in 2027, in which the voters will have to approve a constitutional amendment.
One complication is that the Assembly and Senate have somewhat different ideas about how to go about this and how permanent the new rules should be. The state legislators want to get it right this time. They made a mess last time. The initial map after the 2020 census was fought over in court. In the end, a judge threw out the official map and hired a special master to draw a new map. This allowed Republicans to gain seats in 2022. In 2023, The Court of Appeals made the state redraw the map again. The next year, another commission drew another map. So the legislators want to have a procedure and draw a map that will pass all the expected court fights.
New York isn't the only blue state that is going to go wild in 2028. Colorado currently has a 4D, 4R split. State legislators are going for 7D, 1R in 2028, but for legal reasons they can't do it this year. If every state goes for broke, that might actually make enough people so angry that Congress might be forced to address the American rotten boroughs problem. This is, of course, the outcome we are rooting for. (V)