(John Ransom, Headline USA) New York Democrats remain in disarray after a ruling by the state’s top appellate court scuttled the gerrymandered map they hoped might help recoup congressional losses in the upcoming midterm election.
Despite losing a seat in the US census due to their radical taxation and authoritarian policies, Democrats doubled down, nonetheless, by adding four extra seats to their projected winnings. The election map created by the state legislature would have netted the party 22 out of the 26 US congressional districts, said Politico.
.@allymutnick @sarahnferris @mahoneyw write about the Dem fallout after New York’s highest court scuttled a map that “would have likely netted the party 22 of New York’s 26 seats in an election when they desperately needed every one of them”https://t.co/brbVNknVYv via @politico
— Marianne LeVine (@marianne_levine) April 29, 2022
With a red wave that is projected to rival then-President Barack Obama’s loss of more than 60 seats in the 2010 midterms, the recent court defeat in Albany makes it all the more certain that Democrats will lose control of the House in November.
Now, even loyal party members are breaking Democrats’ longstanding pact of unity on messaging to admit that anxiety is starting to take hold once more, just as the Left had begun to recover from its collective four-year struggle with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
“I don’t think anybody’s gonna have to go to therapy as a result of it—but let’s put it this way: It’s not the kind of news that the Democrats wanted,” former Rep. Steve Israel, a New York Democrat and the one-time leader of the party’s congressional campaign arm, told Politico.
As the left-wing election analytics website FiveThirtyEight noted, the map drawn by Democrats was way out of proportion with how New York actually votes.
“President Biden got just 61 percent of the vote there in 2020,” said FiveThirtyEight, while the Democratic maps tried to restrict Republicans to just 15 percent of the congressional districts.
New York was the centerpiece for Democrats in a nationwide strategy that looked to help keep control of the US House by using redistricting.
Previously the redistricting maps nationwide had added 11 seats to Democrats while subtracting six seats from the Republicans for a net of 17.
With the New York high court’s rejection of the Democrat map, it means that Democrats have only added seven seats nationwide and Republicans have added one seat for a net of six, said FiveThirtyEight.
Of the three other states in which maps have yet to be finalized (Kansas, Missouri and New Hampshire), it is unlikely that any will lead to a major windfall for either party.
Amazingly, the Democrats actually believed that the court would ignore a 2014 constitutional amendment that New York voters pass that prohibited this type of gerrymandering.
Instead, the court put the redistricting process in the hands of a special master who will draw the boundaries, according to the Associated Press.
“It’ll force bipartisan cooperation and that’s what the people voted for,” former New York Republican Rep. John Faso told reporters after the decision, according to the AP.
