Case Study 02 — The 2022 New York Democratic Gerrymander

The setup

If Case Study 01 documents the largest-scale Republican gerrymander of the modern era, Case Study 02 documents what the comparable Democratic effort looks like, complete with the legal challenges and political dynamics that defined New York State's 2022 redistricting cycle. The story matters not because the New York map was as historically extreme as the Wisconsin or Pennsylvania 2010 maps — by quantitative measures, it was less so — but because it demonstrates that Democrats gerrymander when given the chance, that state courts can constrain Democratic gerrymanders just as they can Republican ones, and that the political dynamics around such constraint are themselves messy.

The 2014 amendments and the 2020 process

In 2014, New York voters approved a constitutional amendment establishing an Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) with a deliberately complex structure: ten commissioners, four chosen by Democratic legislative leaders, four chosen by Republican legislative leaders, two chosen by the previously appointed eight from a pool of unaffiliated applicants. The commission was designed to require cross-party agreement: maps required seven of ten commissioner votes, and at least one vote from each appointing-leader faction. If the commission failed to produce a map, the legislature could draw its own — but only by supermajority (two-thirds of each chamber).

The 2014 amendment was, in 2020, widely interpreted as making New York one of the more reform-oriented states. The amendment's drafters anticipated cross-party negotiation and were not naïve about the politics; they expected the commission to deadlock occasionally and the legislature to step in occasionally, but they expected the procedural barriers (supermajority) to constrain partisan extremes.

The expectation collapsed in 2021. The IRC, predictably, deadlocked along partisan lines, producing two competing draft maps that the legislature rejected. Under the constitutional provisions, the legislature was empowered to draw its own map by supermajority. Democrats, holding well above the supermajority threshold in both chambers (the Senate at 43-20, the Assembly at 107-43), passed a congressional map drawn by Democratic legislative staff with Democratic legislative leadership as the principal architect.

The map

The 2022 Democratic-drawn New York congressional map (S.8172A) produced a delegation expected to be approximately 22 Democratic and 4 Republican, in a state where statewide partisan-vote splits run roughly 60–40 Democratic. The math was aggressive: New York's 26 House seats (down from 27 after the 2020 reapportionment) were drawn so that even in a substantially favorable Republican year, Democrats would likely retain 18–20 of them.

Specific design choices:

• Long Island was redrawn to spread Democratic voters across multiple districts, weakening the Republican-leaning suburban districts.
• The 1st and 2nd districts on Long Island were drawn to be more competitive (Democratic-leaning) than the previous lines.
• The Hudson Valley was redrawn to consolidate Democratic majorities in formerly competitive districts.
• The Staten Island-based 11th district, a longtime Republican-leaning swing district, was redrawn to add more of Brooklyn's Democratic-leaning neighborhoods, making the district significantly more Democratic.
• The 19th district in the Hudson Valley/Catskills region, a swing district, was redrawn to be more Democratic.
• The 22nd district in the Mohawk Valley/central New York was redrawn to be more competitive.

Quantitative measures: efficiency-gap calculations under the Democratic-drawn map estimated a partisan bias of approximately 7–9 percentage points favoring Democrats. Princeton Gerrymandering Project simulations placed the enacted map in the most-pro-Democratic 1–2% of computer-generated alternatives meeting the same legal constraints. By those measures, the New York Democratic map was a recognizable partisan gerrymander, comparable in scale to the more-aggressive 2010-cycle Republican maps in Wisconsin and North Carolina (though shorter-lived).

The court challenge

A group of Republican voters, supported by the National Republican Redistricting Trust, filed Harkenrider v. Hochul in state court alleging that the map violated the New York Constitution's anti-gerrymandering provisions (added in the 2014 amendment) and the procedural requirements of the IRC process. The case proceeded through state courts on an unusually fast track because the 2022 elections were imminent.

The trial court in Steuben County struck down the map. The Appellate Division (Fourth Department) affirmed in April 2022. The New York Court of Appeals (the state's highest court) affirmed in Harkenrider v. Hochul in April 2022, in a decision that:

1. Held that the legislature had violated the procedural requirements of the IRC process by drawing its own map without first allowing the IRC to complete its work properly.
2. Held that the resulting map constituted an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander under the New York Constitution.
3. Substituted a court-appointed special master (Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon) to draw the 2022 map.

The court-appointed map was used in the November 2022 elections. The result: a 15–11 Democratic delegation, far closer to proportional than the originally drawn map would have produced. Republican gains in Long Island and the Hudson Valley contributed to the GOP's narrow 2022 House majority.

The 2024 redistricting attempt

After the 2022 election, with New York Democrats acutely aware that the special master's map had cost them House seats they had drawn themselves to win, the IRC re-engaged for the 2024 cycle. The commission, again, deadlocked, but this time produced a unified bipartisan compromise map that was significantly less aggressive than the 2022 Democratic legislative map. The legislature, dominated by Democrats, rejected the IRC compromise.

Democratic legislative leaders then drew a new map (LDA-2024) for the 2024 cycle that was less aggressive than the 2022 map but more Democrat-favorable than the special master's 2022 map. The 2024 map was challenged in court but upheld; the New York Court of Appeals declined to extend its 2022 reasoning to the new map, holding that the procedural defects of 2022 had been cured and that the new map's partisan tilt did not exceed the threshold the 2022 decision had identified.

Under the 2024 map, the November 2024 elections produced a 19–7 Democratic delegation — a four-seat Democratic gain over 2022. Several factors contributed: the new map's design favoring Democrats, candidate-quality differences in specific races, and broader political dynamics in the state. The aggregate effect: New York shifted from contributing to the Republican House majority in 2022 to contributing significantly to Democratic gains in 2024, with the redistricting process being a central, though not exclusive, driver.

The political dynamics

Several political-process features of the New York case deserve attention.

The IRC was, in practice, ornamental. Its deadlock-and-fall-back-to-legislature design meant that whichever party held a legislative supermajority could simply override it. Democrats held that supermajority in 2021–22; the IRC's existence did not constrain them. This is a design lesson for redistricting reform: bypass procedures need to be more difficult, or the IRC needs binding authority.

The New York Court of Appeals was a meaningful constraint in 2022. The court was, at the time, considered moderate and not aligned predictably with either party. Its decision struck down a Democratic-drawn map in a Democratic-leaning state, demonstrating that state-court constraints on partisan gerrymandering can operate in either direction. The 2024 decision allowing the new map to stand was less politically charged but reflected the court's unwillingness to extend the 2022 doctrine to a less-aggressive map.

Democratic constituencies were divided. Some progressive groups (the Working Families Party, several reform-oriented organizations) opposed the aggressive 2022 Democratic map on principle, arguing that Democrats' best long-term interests were served by genuine reform rather than tactical gerrymandering. Other Democratic groups (state party leadership, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, several senior elected officials) supported the aggressive map as necessary in a national environment where Republican states were drawing aggressive maps. The disagreement maps onto a broader Democratic-coalition tension between procedural-reform Democrats and tactical-advantage Democrats.

The 2024 map's legal survival reflected the limits of state-court partisan-gerrymandering doctrine. State courts can strike down extreme outliers, as the 2022 map was; they have less appetite for second-guessing more-modest partisan tilts, as the 2024 map's survival demonstrated. This means state-court doctrine is not a comprehensive solution to partisan gerrymandering — it constrains the worst cases without policing the rest.

Comparison to the 2010-cycle Republican gerrymanders

How does the New York 2022 case compare to the 2010-cycle Republican gerrymanders documented in Case Study 01?

Scale. The 2022 New York map was aggressive, but quantitatively less extreme than the 2011 Wisconsin or 2011 Pennsylvania maps, and the New York map operated for one cycle (2022) before being replaced. The 2010-cycle Republican maps in multiple states operated for 4–6 cycles each, producing cumulative seat-share advantages over the decade that exceeded the New York case's brief seat-share effects.

Party. The 2010 cycle was a unified Republican effort across multiple states (REDMAP-coordinated funding, shared mapping consultants, strategic coordination through RSLC). The New York case was a single-state Democratic effort, not part of a coordinated multi-state campaign comparable to REDMAP. The Democratic counterparts to REDMAP — the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee — exist and operate, but did not in 2022 produce a coordinated multi-state outcome at the scale of the 2010 Republican cycle.

Legal outcome. The New York map was struck down by the state's highest court within months of enactment; the 2010-cycle Republican maps mostly survived federal-court challenges (the Florida and Pennsylvania state-court strike-downs were the major exceptions) and operated for most or all of the decade. State-court constraints applied to both parties' aggressive maps, but the Republican maps operated in more states with state courts less aggressive on partisan-gerrymandering claims.

What the New York case teaches

Three lessons. First, Democrats gerrymander when they have unified state-government control and the legal opportunity to do so. The 2022 New York case demonstrates this in close detail. The political-science literature documenting bipartisan willingness to gerrymander (Cain 2012; Levitt 2008) is supported by, not undermined by, the New York case.

Second, state courts can constrain partisan gerrymanders in either direction, and the New York Court of Appeals demonstrated this in 2022 by striking down a Democratic map. After Rucho foreclosed federal partisan-gerrymandering claims, state courts became the principal forum, and the New York case is among the strongest examples of state-court constraint operating on a Democratic gerrymander.

Third, the asymmetry between the parties' gerrymandering activity is real but contingent on political and procedural conditions, not on essential differences between the parties. Democrats had fewer opportunities than Republicans in the 2010 cycle because they controlled fewer state governments; in the 2020 cycle, with more Democratic state governments and aggressive court losses, the asymmetry narrowed. New York 2022 is one of the cases where the narrowing happened. Whether the asymmetry will continue to narrow in the 2030 cycle depends on which party controls more state governments after the 2030 elections, which state courts have what compositions, and what federal-level legal and legislative changes occur.

The honest assessment: the New York case is not an excuse for the 2010-cycle Republican gerrymanders, and it is not equivalent in scale or duration. It is also not an aberration — it is what Democratic gerrymandering looks like when Democrats have the means and the will. Both parties do most of the things political parties do, including drawing maps to advantage themselves when permitted. The institutional remedy, as Chapter 38 will argue, has to be applied to both parties' incentives, not to one.