A day after Democrats in New York rejected a congressional map proposed by the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission, they unveiled new district lines on Tuesday designed to help their party retake the House majority this fall.
Yet their plan exhibits surprising restraint. Although a pair of crucial swing districts would become more Democratic, lawmakers in Albany stopped short of including drastic changes some party leaders demanded. They left the partisan makeup of 23 of the state’s 26 districts largely intact.
The middle-ground approach reflected a desire by Democrats to avoid another protracted court fight like the one in 2022 that cost them seats and helped swing control of the House to Republicans, while still better positioning Democrats to regain the majority in the fall.
The most salient changes, if adopted, would affect Central New York and Long Island. By shifting the districts three and four points leftward, the map would endanger Representative Brandon Williams, the Republican incumbent in Syracuse, and make the suburban seat that Representative-elect Tom Suozzi won in a recent special election safely Democratic.
The Democratic map would also unwind changes proposed by the bipartisan commission that would have made the Hudson Valley district represented by Representative Marc Molinaro, a Republican, more conservative. The new district would look more like his current one, where President Biden won 52 percent of the vote in 2020.
Lawmakers in Albany were expected to vote to finalize the lines as soon as Tuesday, just hours after their overnight release.
