Democrats in New York moved on Monday to reject congressional district lines proposed by the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission and seize control over the high-stakes mapmaking process.
The State Senate was the first to vote down the commission plan, splitting along party lines Monday afternoon. The Assembly was expected to quickly follow suit, according to three other Democrats briefed on its plans.
With House candidates set to begin gathering petitions to get on the ballot this week, Michael Gianaris, the No. 2 Democrat in the State Senate, said lawmakers would move swiftly to try to enact a replacement map before the week’s end. But they were still working late Monday to find agreement on the new district contours.
The choice could have major consequences for the national battle for the House. With only a handful of tweaks, Democratic state lawmakers could effectively stack the deck against Republicans in as many as six swing seats from Long Island to Syracuse.
Democrats briefed on the negotiations said the Legislature was closing in on a middle-ground approach that would expand on modest tweaks proposed by the commission but not pursue the kind of aggressive reconfigurations in New York City and its suburbs some senior Democrats had contemplated.
A spokesman for Speaker Carl E. Heastie did not immediately comment on Monday.
The party was trying to navigate intense competing pressures after two years of near constant 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 in court fighting for the chance to redraw the maps to help make him speaker.
But they also cannot afford a repeat of 2022, when Democrats in the Legislature overplayed their hand and watched in humiliation the state’s top court struck down their map as an unconstitutional gerrymander. The court proceeded to put in place a neutral replacement map that helped Republicans make stark gains.
“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.”
Democrats insist any changes they might consider to the district lines are motivated by reuniting so-called communities of interest split between districts.
“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,” Mr. Gianaris said.
Democrats made the same argument in 2022 when lawmakers last drew the lines, and watched it backfire to a dire extent.
Ronald S. Lauder, who helped finance the last successful legal challenge, accused Democrats on Sunday of once again plotting “the worst kind of hackery.” He said he stood ready to 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 appeared to be taking their own steps to try to blunt any legal challenge. On Monday, they fast-tracked 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. But under the proposed new law, challenges to legislative maps would only be allowed in Supreme Court in Albany, Manhattan, Westchester or Erie Counties, all more liberal jurisdictions.
The stage was set for the current fight when a separate lawsuit waged by national Democrats prompted a reconfigured State Court of Appeals to reopen the mapmaking process in December. With a new, more liberal majority in place, it ordered the 10-member bipartisan commission, created by a constitutional amendment, to guide the process to draft a new plan.
As the contours of the commission’s proposal began to leak out earlier this month, influential Democrats in Albany and Washington signaled they might be willing to accept the newly proposed district lines as an imperfect but acceptable compromise.
The commission’s map would make minor changes to the Syracuse area, endangering one Republican incumbent, Representative Brandon Williams. It would also slightly rearrange Hudson Valley district lines, helping one frontline Democrat, Pat Ryan, and one Republican, Marc Molinaro.
The proposal made no changes to battleground areas on Long Island or in Westchester, where Democrats covet three swing seats represented by first-term Republicans.
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.
Notably, though, Mr. Jeffries’s statement made no mention of the neighboring 18th District. There, similar changes to the ones he denounced had the effect of protecting Mr. Ryan.
Mr. Jeffries has been relying 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.
Whether they can find a replacement capable of winning the votes necessary to pass both legislative chambers in Albany and please Mr. Jeffries should become clear by the end of Monday.
Grace Ashford contributed reporting from Albany, N.Y.
