Draft Map of NY Redistricting Looks Really Bad for Dems

BUCK: We have just seen the map, the latest congressional redistricting map for the state of New York, where I am, and I think this is really interesting. Clay and I have been going back and forth on this one. It’s a draft map of congressional districts that has dropped but it’s the first real look at what’s gonna happen here by the intervention of a court-appointed special master.

So a special master has been appointed to decide what the congressional districts for the state of New York will be, and the map is very different from what Democrats wanted it to be. The Democrats were hoping, Clay, that they would probably get, of the 26 congressional seats… Obviously, New York is a big population state, a lot of the congressional seats at play. Of the 26 seats, Democrats thought if they went the full gerrymander, right? Our friend Gerry of gerrymander, he’s from, what was it, we found, Boston not Baltimore? Wasn’t that it?

CLAY: I said Maryland. Yeah. He was actually from Massachusetts.

BUCK: Massachusetts. Sorry. Massachusetts, not Maryland. But the Democrats are hoping for a 22. This new map indicates, if it becomes the actual congressional map, that it could be more like 15-11 or 16-10 based on the current pulse. Huge difference! This is Dave Wasserman analyzing the numbers here. Where is he? New York Post? And, Clay, also — this is my favorite one — Jerry Nadler may have to square off against Carolyn Maloney, my former congresswoman when I grew up in New York. That would be quite… Those are two Democrat congressional heavyweights.

CLAY: This is seismic when you talk about what’s going to happen in the House of Representatives races. There’s only five seats that could flip the difference. New York alone, Buck, the draft version that New York tried to get through would have given them a 22-4 lead and now it could down to 15-11. There are six competitive districts. And given how favorable these 2022 trend lines are right now, I would think Republicans would be favored to at least split in the six competitive districts, if not do better.

And this is massive, right, because you are going back to… The numbers are out there where you could have a 2010, a 1994-like red surge, and if that ends up happening, there’s not really going to be any protective walls that have been able to be created so much from redistricting. New York was one of the bulwarks that they were trying to get through, as you well know, and it’s now fallen because the Democrats tried to gerrymander to too much of an extent. I’d like to apologize to everyone in Massachusetts for getting that wrong. Elbridge Gerry, Massachusetts is where we got gerrymander from so we got that fixed up.