As an ex-New Yorker, I have been looking forward to drawing a redistricting map the moment the partisan data became entered into the Redistricting Application. Here are the fundamentals I assumed while drawing this map, not necessarily in any particular order:
1) One Democratic seat will be sacrificed in the NYC area due to relative population loss, and one Republican seat will be sacrificed Upstate. In time honored custom, this will mean two Democrats will be paired together and two Republicans will be paired together. This is how Albany politicians have always handled bipartisan redistricting since the 1980s and I suspect that it won't change this time around, either. On the other hand, if the courts end up drawing the map, as nearly happened in 1982 and 2002, and did happen in 1992, the typical thing the court master does is pair an incumbent of each party in "fair fight districts." In such a scenario, King/Ackerman and Owen/Hanna are probably the only fair fights you could actually draw. We won't know for sure until next June-July; New York State has the latest filing deadlines of any state in the country encouraging redistricting to be dragged out the very last possible moment.
2) Although the state legislature is split, like every other time since the 1970s, the state GOP is fighting for its political life. They saw a 38-24 margin over the State Senate, which they attained in late as 2002, slowly fall away to the point by just 2006, they held 32-30, and in 2008 they lost control entirely. Now, because of a corrupt Democrat in the Buffalo area, we lost a seat that was designed to be a Democratic vote sink, and the GOP controls the State Senate 32-30.
3) This means two things I believe. On the one hand, it means that the Democrats cannot screw the GOP out of total oblivion (although demographic trends in the state might be doing that already). The GOP could decide between now and next year that they would rather blow up the negotiating process and risk a court-drawn map, which might be favorable to them congressionally (particularly in LI). That would discomfit Shelly Silver's iron-clad control over the State Assembly and it would discomfit several important Democratic members of the state congressional delegation (Hinchey and Israel, both on Appropriations, come most to mind here).
That being said, the GOP is in a position of major negotiation weakness here and we know this above all by their reticence thus far to take Cuomo up on the offer of a nonpartisan commission. They HAVE to play nice with Silver and Cuomo; otherwise no State Senate map that is stacked in their favor to have any chance at all of holding control of that body on any long-term basis, let alone through the next election cycle. New York is a state where we play hardball politics; politics isn't beanbag. The GOP is fighting for its political life, and the stench can be smelled a mile away.
4) For this very reason, I believe dismantling the Syracuse-based district currently held by Buerkle (being at D+3) would be a non-starter with the Assembly Democrats because it is patently not an even trade with Democrats being forced to give up a safe seat of theirs downstate. Furthermore, because Democrats have far less to lose by blowing up the whole negotiations and letting the courts draw all the maps, congressional as well as legislative, there are very clear limits to what the GOP can demand. This is not going to be an even-steven negotiation in the end, I believe, unless Shelly Silver is a bad negotiator. Nothing that I have observed in all my years living in NY lead me to believe that he is.
Instead it seems clear to me that either Rep. Hanna's or Rep. Gibson's districts will be dismantled - I opted to get rid of the old NY-20 because you can easily cannibalize its most Democratic parts and feed them to Tonko and Owens to shore up both seats, while placing the most Republican parts into Hanna's district. And merging these two ancestral GOP seats together is an even enough trade for the drop of a Queens-area white Democrat (either Ackerman or Wiener I believe in the end will be axed).
5) The map will be largely status quo, I believe, for the districts not eliminated, with the following exceptions:
a) The Democrats will want to do something to help out their newest member of the congressional delegation, Hochul, without endangering either the Higgins or the Slaughter seats. They might also want to help out Owens and Bishop, although it really isn't possible to help out Bishop without hurting Israel, and Israel has the far more clout of the two. Still, I remove Smithtown and substitute parts of Islip Township for Bishop, removing at a stroke the home address of Bishop's 2010 GOP challenger. This kind of thing gets done all the time in New York State redistricting time; back in 2002, the North Country seat got Madison County so that then-moderate GOP congressman Sherry Boehlert didn't have a conservative primary opponent in his district anymore.
b) The GOP, scared for its life, will insist in exchange, that at least two, perhaps three, of their new 2010 congressional members gain safe seats (safe in NY meaning McCain-carrying and by more than just one or two points). The Assembly Democrats might think three is a bridge too far, so I think in the end of the day they agree to make two safe GOP seats upstate: Reed's and the Hanna/Gibson seat while leaving Hayworth as swingy.
c) Otherwise upstate, they will agree to status quo ante: 4 solid Democratic seats (Tonko and Hinchey at 59% Obama, Higgins and Slaughter at 58%), 4 swing seats (Owens, Hochul, Buerkle, and Hayworth, ranging between 56% Obama to 51-52%), and then the 2 safe GOP seats just mentioned.
d) Downstate, it is now possible to create a compact VRA Hispanic-majority seat out of the NY-7. Such a district will likely have to be drawn for the map to gain preclearance (I believe Queens is one of the counties in NY that must gain preclearance by the DOJ). Conversely, it is still not possible to get higher than 49% Hispanic for the Velasquez seat, and it is barely possible to maintain two African-American seats in Brooklyn (mine are just barely over 50% A-A each). The Meeks's district is no longer African-American majority - 46% African-American was the most I was able to accomplish without sneaking over the LI/Queens line to grab African-Americans. Likewise, the Harlem-based district represented for a very long time by Charlie Rangel is no longer even close to being an African-American VRA seat; following the trend in mapmaking over the past two decades, I have simply snaked the district further south on the West Side (the current district covers a lot of this area already) and simply embraced its eclectic minority-majority nature. Maloney then slides a bit further into Queens and Nadler a bit further into Brooklyn. Otherwise, status-quo ante.
Although Ackerman lives out on the North Shore of LI and, thus, has technically been merged into the NY-4 with McCarthy, in reality the two districts I merged together were Ackerman's old NY-5 and Wiener's old NY-9 by crafting instead an Eastern Queens district pairing Weiner's home and base with Ackerman's former base. Interestingly, the moment I decided that a Hispanic-majority NY-7 could meet the Gingles criterion, and thus was probably necessary now, that led to an interesting "Asian opportunity" district being created in my new NY-6. This district is now only about 38% white and 39% Asian, with the remainder Hispanic and other ethnic/racial groups. I know Strickland doesn't protect such districts, but what a wonderful thing to draw for Queens, NY - the most diverse county in the United States. And I believe it even looks neat.
6) Oh, and in New York custom whenever we lose congressional seats, I simply renumbered the districts starting in LI, then going through NYC, then finally upstate before ending in the Buffalo area. I don't know why other states cannot simply do something similar, instead of having district numbers jumping all over the place!
Thank you for reading through this extensive background. Follow me over the jump when I discuss the map with nice pictures.
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