DRAWING THE LINE
State pols release new congressional map, shutting out Republicans
COURIER LIFE, FEBRUARY 4-10, 2022 25
BY BEN BRACHFELD
The New York State Legislature
on Sunday released
new maps for the state’s congressional
districts, showing
new lines that could nearly
shut out the Republican Party
in the state.
The new maps, brought on
by population changes found
in the 2020 Census, were released
by the Legislature after
the bipartisan Independent
Redistricting Commission,
made up of an equal number
of Democratic and Republican
appointees (intended to prevent
partisan gerrymandering).
The commission could not
agree on a combined map, and
thus threw responsibility to
the State Legislature, which
produced the gerrymandered
maps released this weekend.
State legislators are expected
to pass the map later
this week (when new maps for
the New York State Assembly
and Senate district maps
are also expected to drop) and
send it to Gov. Kathy Hochul
for her approval.
While the State has long
had gerrymandered congressional
maps, this one is the
fi rst in ages to be developed
entirely by a fully-in-control
Democratic Party — allowing
the majority to shape districts
to its whim with no check
from the minority.
“They’re defi nitely drawn
with a purpose,” said Steve
Romalewski, the legislative
mapping guru and head of the
Center for Urban Research’s
mapping service at the CUNY
Graduate Center, whose “Redistricting
& You” project
has digitized every newly proposed
legislative map since
the Census. “The legislators
are not gonna be in the business
of redistricting if they’re
not gonna draw the districts
with a purpose.”
The state lost a seat during
apportionment brought
on by the 2020 Census; Albany
Democrats, fully in control of
redistricting, responded by
taking an axe to upstate Republican
Rep. Claudia Tenney’s
district.
Elsewhere, the legislature
drew the maps in such a way
to heavily favor Democrats in
22 out of the state’s 26 seats, everywhere
from western New
York to right in our backyard.
The Swingin’ 11th
The 11th District, represented
by Republican Nicole
Malliotakis and which currently
includes Staten Island
and a chunk of southern
Brooklyn, has been redrawn to
shift its Brooklyn section into
more reliably Democratic territory.
The Brooklyn section
currently includes conservative
southern Brooklyn nabes
like Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights,
Bensonhurst, and Gravesend,
but the new maps shift the district
boundaries to the west, to
instead cover Bay Ridge, Sunset
Park, Gowanus, and Park
Slope.
That could potentially spell
trouble for Malliotakis: the
freshman rep was elected in
2020 after beating one-term incumbent
Democrat Max Rose
by about six percentage points
district-wide. While Malliotakis
cleaned up in the Staten
Island section of the 11th, she
narrowly lost in the Brooklyn
section. The new Brooklyn section
is far friendlier to Democrats,
and could allow a Democratic
challenger to run up
the numbers in Kings County
against a Republican with a
strong, but not impenetrable,
showing on The Rock.
The new 11th district also
saw a much higher Democratic
turnout in the 2020 presidential
race: the number of residents
who voted for Joe Biden
jumps by over 42,000 in the new
district compared to the old
one, while the number of Donald
Trump voters declines by
about 20,000, according to Redistricting
& You. That takes
the district from one where
Donald Trump won by 30,000
votes in 2020, to one where
Biden had the edge by 30,000
votes.
“It’s a substantial shift,”
Romalewski said. “Those
people are not necessarily going
to vote the same way for a
congressional representative
as they do for president, but it
defi nitely is an indication that
the lines were drawn for that
district in particular in a way
that would seem to favor Democratic
voters versus Republican
voters.”
A spokesperson for Malliotakis,
a former Staten Island
Assemblymember and candidate
for mayor in 2017, called
the new boundaries “a blatant
attempt by the Democrat leadership
in Albany to steal this
seat,” but nonetheless said
Team Nicole is confi dent that
she can still win reelection in
the new 11th.
“This is a blatant attempt
by the Democrat leadership
in Albany to steal this seat,
even after New Yorkers voted
twice by ballot referendum for
non-partisan maps,” said Malliotakis
campaign spokesperson
Rob Ryan in a statement.
“These are the same cynical
politicians that gave us the disastrous
bail reform, released
criminals from prison, and
raised our taxes. They know
Congresswoman Malliotakis
is popular and they can’t
beat her on the merits or public
policy, so they are changing
the boundaries to tilt the
scale. Regardless, Nicole Malliotakis
won this proposed district
handily when she ran for
mayor against Bill de Blasio in
2017 and will do so again.”
The seat has had fi ve holders
in the past 12 years, from
both parties. While controversy
is nothing new in the district,
Malliotakis has courted
considerable anger among the
district’s Democrats for voting
against certifying the 2020
presidential election results,
citing baseless claims of widespread
voter fraud.
Rose declared his 2022 candidacy
to retake the seat last
year, and while the new boundaries
would almost certainly
be a boon for him in the general
election, he said in a statement
that the lines are irrelevant
and his only focus is on running
Malliotakis out of Washington.
“Whatever the lines end up
being doesn’t matter to me. I’m
in this race because House Republicans
like Nicole Malliotakis
would rather tear America
apart than help tame infl ation,
defeat the pandemic, and protect
our democracy,” Rose said.
“Staten Island and Brooklyn
deserve so much more and
that’s why I’m running.”
But Rose will fi rst have to
get through a Democratic primary
against Brittany Ramos
DeBarros, a fellow combat
veteran, Afro-Latina, and
democratic socialist. And the
new addition of lefty Park
Slope and Sunset Park, both of
which have elected progressive
women of color to City Hall and
Albany in recent years, could
be a boon to her campaign.
“When I look at the new
lines, what I see are several
communities that also just
elected bold, working-class
women of color like me,” De-
Barros told Brooklyn Paper by
phone. “Because they also have
been underserved and hungry
for people who understand the
day-to-day struggle of struggling
to get by.”
“When we look at the maps,
we’ve always said we believed
that someone like me could
win in this district, even if the
lines stayed the same,” DeBarros
continued. “But it’s clear
that now, we have an even more
powerful opportunity to build
on the groundbreaking victories
that have happened all the
way up through Brooklyn.”
Elsewhere in Kings
County
Elsewhere in Kings
County, the newly redrawn
lines probably won’t affect
the makeup of New York’s
congressional delegation, but
many people will see a change
in who is representing them
in the nation’s Capitol. Nydia
Velazquez’s 7th district no longer
includes Sunset Park and
Park Slope, making up for it by
extending further into southeast
Queens. Yvette Clarke’s
9th district, meanwhile, is
largely the same except it is
now entirely east of Prospect
Park, and has its southern terminus
in Gravesend and Bensonhurst
rather than Sheepshead
Bay.
The small section of Brooklyn
represented by Carolyn
Maloney, in the 12th district, is
now even smaller, comprising
just a morsel of Greenpoint.
Meanwhile, the 8th district
of Hakeem Jeffries, one of the
top Democratic contenders for
Speaker of the House should
Nancy Pelosi retire, has barely
changed at all, only replacing a
section of East New York with a
section of Sheepshead Bay.
The most convoluted district
in Brooklyn is undoubtedly
Jerry Nadler’s 10th district.
In the last Congress, it
was gerrymandered in a nutty
fashion to capture Jewish
populations in both Manhattan
(the Upper West Side) and
Brooklyn (Borough Park), and
it still is, but the route it takes
is even more ludicrously circuitous:
in some sections, the
district is literally only a single
block wide.
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connects parts of the current CD11. File photo by Steve Solomonson