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Democrats seized control over drawing New York’s congressional districts on Monday, rejecting a map proposed by the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission in favor of drafting new lines that could make key swing seats more Democratic.
On a day of high drama inside the State Capitol in Albany, party leaders argued that the Senate and Assembly had no choice but to reject the commission map in lopsided votes because it improperly split counties, broke up naturally occurring communities and favored incumbents.
But in private conversations, they made little effort to hide their true objective. With the battle for control of the House likely to run through New York this fall, Democrats here and in Washington are determined to use their supermajority in the State Legislature to tilt the playing field against Republicans from Long Island to Syracuse.
The exact contours of the replacement districts remained to be seen Monday afternoon. State lawmakers were expected to release a draft of the replacement map as soon as Monday evening, teeing up a vote to approve it later this week.
Behind closed doors, Democrats were still haggling over a complex set of legal and political concerns that could determine how aggressive they would be. The choices included a dramatic redraw that would give Democrats an advantage in 22 of the state’s 26 districts; another option would only make slight alterations to a handful of swing seats.
People familiar with the talks said that a middle ground was most likely, offering Democrats enough seats to offset gains that Republicans expect to reap from a fresh gerrymander in North Carolina — ideally without running afoul of New York’s ban on partisan gerrymandering.
The competing pressures were intense after two years of near incessant fighting over New York’s maps. Democrats under the leadership of Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York most recently spent millions of dollars in legal fees fighting for the chance to redraw the maps, a move that could help make Mr. Jeffries speaker.
But they cannot afford a repeat of 2022, when the Legislature overplayed its hand and watched in humiliation as the state’s top court struck down its map as an unconstitutional gerrymander. The court proceeded to put in place a neutral replacement map that helped Republicans flip four seats.
“It’s a big fork in the road,” said Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst with the Cook Political Report. “The more aggressive their play, the bigger potential reward in seats, but the higher risk courts could step in again to block it or preserve the status quo.”
Republicans forcefully opposed Democrats’ maneuver. On Monday, almost every Republican voted in favor of the nonpartisan map, hailing it as a rare opportunity to inspire public confidence. But their votes were not enough to overcome Democrats’ vast advantages.
The final tally mostly broke down on party lines, with the map being voted down 40 to 17 in the Senate and 99 to 47 in the Assembly, where two Democrats broke with their party.
Republicans warned that the majority party was once again marching toward a gerrymander that violated both the State Constitution and its purported commitment to electoral fairness across the country.
“For a party that claims they want to protect democracy and put people over politics, they sure have a funny way of showing it,” said Representative Mike Lawler, one of the Republican incumbents nervously awaiting the new House map.
Ronald S. Lauder, the Republican billionaire who helped finance the successful court challenge to the 2022 map, said he was prepared to quickly go back to court if needed.
“I’ll fight to stop them both in the courts and in the court of public opinion,” Mr. Lauder said. “And I’ll win.”
Democrats in Albany bristled at the insinuation, insisting that they were acting squarely within the law that gives the Legislature ultimate authority to draw legislative maps in New York.
“If we come up with a map that respects communities of interest, deals with keeping political boundaries intact and deals with some of the issues that we think are flawed in the map that was presented to us, hopefully the courts will agree,” Michael Gianaris, the No. 2 Democrat in the State Senate, told reporters.
He flatly said that lawmakers were “prohibited” from drawing a map designed for partisan gain.
But Democrats were simultaneously preparing to take additional steps that some party officials privately worried could complicate their case if it ends up in court.
Lawmakers appeared poised, for instance, to repeal or simply ignore a state law that says no change to the map adopted by the redistricting commission can affect more than 2 percent of any given district’s population.
Democrats in the Senate and Assembly also took steps on Monday to expedite legislation to prevent Republicans from “judge shopping” in redistricting cases. In 2022, Republicans brought their initial lawsuit in a rural county where a Republican judge heard the case.
Under the proposed new law, challenges to legislative maps would only be allowed in Supreme Court in Manhattan or Albany, Westchester and Erie Counties, all more liberal jurisdictions. Republicans skewered the change as blatantly self-serving on Monday.
Democrats have another significant reason to be more optimistic the courts will be on their side this time. Retirements have helped reshape the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. Last year, Senate Democrats successfully fought to install a new chief judge, Rowan D. Wilson, who dissented from the majority opinion faulting the Legislature in 2022.
The stage was set for the current fight when the reconfigured Court of Appeals reopened the mapmaking process in December. Prompted by a Democratic lawsuit, it ordered the 10-member bipartisan commission, created by a constitutional amendment, to guide the process to draft a new plan.
As details of the commission’s proposal began to leak out earlier this month, influential Democrats in Albany and Washington initially signaled they might be willing to accept the newly proposed district lines as an imperfect but acceptable compromise.
Though the precise reasons remain unclear, by the time the panel voted 9 to 1 to adopt its plan on Feb. 15, sentiment had begun to swing hard in the other direction among prominent Democrats who wanted to kill the bipartisan commission’s map.
When Mr. Jeffries issued a statement through a spokesman criticizing the commission plan the next day, many in Albany read it as a foreboding declaration of intent.
The spokesman, Andy Eichar, said the commission map “ignores or exacerbates” concerns from watchdog groups about how the current lines slice up so-called communities of interest. He also singled out changes to the 19th District in the Hudson Valley that were “gratuitously designed to impermissibly benefit an incumbent,” in that case Mr. Molinaro.
“That would be a clear violation of the New York State Constitution,” he wrote.
Mr. Gianaris took up that argument on Monday, though unlike Mr. Jeffries, he acknowledged the apparent incumbent protection was bipartisan.
Mr. Jeffries has relied on two Democratic congressman with deep ties to state politics, Joseph Morelle of Rochester and Gregory W. Meeks of Queens, to serve as intermediaries with state leaders in crafting a possible alternative.
They fielded a broad range of partisan and parochial concerns, but appeared to be coalescing around a map that split the difference, according to three Democrats familiar with the potential map. They were granted anonymity to discuss the private negotiations, and cautioned its contours could change.
They said the legislative map would probably maintain the commission’s minor changes to the Syracuse area, endangering one Republican incumbent, Representative Brandon Williams, while unwinding tweaks that benefited Marc Molinaro, a Republican in the Hudson Valley.
Lawmakers would then move some heavily Republican communities on Long Island, like Massapequa, from Representative-elect Tom Suozzi’s Third District to the Republican-held Second District. The result would clear an easy path to re-election for Mr. Suozzi, who won a hard-fought special election this month. It was not immediately clear how the change would affect the area’s First District, a Republican-leaning swing seat.
Democrats appeared poised to leave at least two closely watched areas untouched: the right-leaning Staten Island district represented by Republican Nicole Malliotakis, and suburban Westchester County, where Democrats are locked in a bitter primary over the 16th District and hoping to defeat Mr. Lawler in the 17th District.
Grace Ashford contributed reporting.
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