Erie County would be split among three congressional districts under remap
The latest efforts to redraw New York’s congressional maps would essentially preserve a Buffalo-centric district in the territory now represented by Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, left. Rep. Chris Jacobs, R-Orchard Park, right, could run in either a new Southern Tier district or another new district stretching from Lewiston all the way eastward to Watertown.
WASHINGTON – Erie County would be split among three congressional districts – not two, as it has been for two decades – under a reapportionment plan proposed Sunday by the State Legislature’s Democratic majority.
One district, the 26th, would be Buffalo-based and similar to the current 26th District represented by Rep. Brian Higgins, a Buffalo Democrat. But another district, the 24th, would stretch from Lewiston eastward all the way to Watertown and would include Lancaster, Clarence and other towns in eastern Erie County. And an expanded 23rd District in the Southern Tier would include southern Erie County – and would stretch from the Pennsylvania border on the west all the way to Broome County in the east.
While the Buffalo-based district would be largely Democratic, the other two districts including parts of Erie County consist largely of smaller communities and rural territory and are most likely to be represented by Republicans.
The new map, which must be approved by the State Legislature, poses a dilemma for Rep. Chris Jacobs, an Orchard Park Republican. His current district is more similar to the new 24th District to the north and east of metro Buffalo, but Jacobs’ home is in the expanded Southern Tier district, which will be vacant because of the pending retirement of Rep. Tom Reed, a Corning Republican.
Jacobs could move into the new 24th District, but he moved to Orchard Park from Buffalo only two years ago when the current 27th District seat became vacant after the resignation of then-Rep. Chris Collins.
What’s more, the new 24th is a gigantic and oddly-shaped district that combines parts of Western New York with points east that are utterly unlike metro Buffalo – such as Fort Drum near Watertown, the state’s largest military base. While it would take more than 3 1/2 hours to drive from Lewiston in the district’s west to Watertown in the district’s northeast, the district dwindles at a point near Canandaigua where it appears to be only a few miles wide.
The proposed map ignores a scenario pushed by Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the Hudson Valley Democrat who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In apparent hope of shrinking the number of Republican-leaning seats in the state to only three, Maloney last week proposed recreating the infamous “earmuff district,” a gerrymandered district from the 2000s that linked parts of Buffalo and Rochester via a narrow corridor of land along Lake Ontario.
The commission’s divisions foreshadow the fact that the Democratic State Legislature is likely to take over the process.
Higgins and Rep. Joe Morelle, a Rochester-area Democrat, objected to that plan. And in the end, Higgins and Morelle – both former state assemblymen with friends in Albany – got their way.
Morelle would run for re-election in the new Rochester-based 25th District, which would be heavily Democratic and similar to his current district. The new 24th District would wrap around the Rochester-based district.
The new map appears to have four Republican-leaning seats: the two in Western New York, a massive one encompassing the North Country and including rural territory on three sides of the Capitol District, and one on Long Island.
Joe Sempolinski of Canisteo is running for the 23rd District seat being vacated by Rep. Tom Reed, a Corning Republican.
Eight Republicans currently serve in the New York delegation, but Albany Democrats have been under pressure by their Washington counterparts to maximize the number of heavily Democratic seats in the remap to preserve the party’s chances of retaining control of the House in this fall’s election.
While the map doesn’t go quite as far as Maloney wanted, it bolsters several seats into Democratic strongholds. For example, the Long Island seat now held by Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Republican candidate for governor, would go from a district that voted Republican by four points in the 2020 presidential election to one that voted Democratic by 11 points.
Those statistics come from Dave Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report.
“This is a 22D-4R gerrymander – and a pretty effective one,” Wasserman said on Twitter. “It’s a brutal map for Rs.”
If New York had counted just 89 more people in the census, Minnesota would have lost a seat and New York would have continued to have 27 members of the House.
The proposed map appears to pose a particular challenge for Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Utica-area Republican. Her district ended up being the one the legislature’s map-drawers decided to eliminate as they trimmed the number of congressional districts in the state from 27 to 26, as they were required to do as a result of population changes in the 2020 census.
Tenney could chose to run in the new 22nd District, which will be vacant thanks to the pending retirement of Rep. John Katko, a Syracuse-area Republican. But the new 22nd District combines Syracuse and Ithaca and looks to be heavily Democratic.
Then again, Tenney could run in the new 19th District against Rep. Antonio Delgado, a Hudson Valley Democrat. But that district, which includes Utica and Binghamton, also appears to favor Democrats.
It’s also possible that Tenney could decide to move to Western New York, given that either the Southern Tier district or the Lewiston-to-Watertown district will be vacant, depending on where Jacobs decides to run.
The heavily Democratic State Legislature plans to vote on the new congressional map later this week and is expected to pass it, but that may not be the end of this year’s reapportionment battle.
Nicholas A. Langworthy, the state Republican chairman, said late Sunday that the party might sue to try to stop the Democrats’ plan.
“For all of their phony protestations about transparency and fairness in elections, what they’re doing is textbook filthy, partisan gerrymandering that is clearly in violation of the New York State Constitution, and we are reviewing all of our legal options to protect the voices of millions of New Yorkers,” Langworthy said.
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