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A day after rejecting a congressional map proposed by a bipartisan redistricting commission, Democrats in New York unveiled new district lines on Tuesday designed to help the party retake the House majority this fall.
Yet their plan exhibits surprising restraint. Although a pair of swing districts would become more Democratic, lawmakers in Albany left the partisan makeup of 24 of the state’s 26 districts largely intact.
The middle-ground approach reflected a desire to avoid another protracted court fight like the one in New York that helped swing control of the House to Republicans in 2022, while still better positioning Democrats in key districts.
The most salient changes would affect districts in Central New York and on Long Island. By shifting the districts three and four points leftward, the map would endanger Representative Brandon Williams, a Syracuse Republican, and make the seat won by Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, in a recent special election safely Democratic.
The Democratic map would also unwind changes proposed by the bipartisan commission that would have made the Hudson Valley district represented by Representative Marc Molinaro, a Republican, more conservative. The new district would look more like his current one, where President Biden won 52 percent of the vote in 2020.
Lawmakers in Albany were expected to vote to finalize the lines as soon as Tuesday, just hours after their overnight release. If enacted, they would govern elections through 2030.
Democratic officials predicted the map would likely yield 18 safe Democratic seats, six Republican seats and two tossups. When Mr. Suozzi is sworn in on Wednesday, the state will have 16 Democratic representatives and 10 Republicans.
One prominent House elections analyst, Dave Wasserman, called the proposal a “mild/moderate gerrymander.”
Two redistricting experts disagreed. Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard law professor who studies the issue, called it “pretty much a model of neutrality.” Samuel Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, said that the map seemed fair and that his group would likely grade it an “A” or “B.”
Privately, Democrats close to Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, sold the map as a targeted partisan improvement that they believed could withstand the kind of legal challenge that felled a more aggressive Democratic gerrymander in 2022.
“At this point, clarity of the lines becomes more important than perfection,” said Steve Israel, a former New York congressman who once led Democrats’ House campaign operation. “The map may be imperfect for Democrats, but it does give them a decent foundation to win back the House.”
Mr. Jeffries, who exercised outsize sway over the mapmaking process, would be positioned to become House speaker if his party took control. He declined to comment.
Other Democrats, though, called the outcome a stark disappointment, particularly after the party spent nearly two years remaking the state’s top court and fighting before judges for the chance to redo the current court-drawn lines.
“It’s hard not to look at these proposed maps and think, what was the point of all this?” said Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic consultant who works on House races in New York.
He pointed to Republican-led states across the country that have enacted aggressive gerrymanders with little regard for public opinion.
“When we find ourselves in the same position, we wuss out,” Mr. Roth Smith said. “It’s a shame.”
Republicans, who had loudly warned that they would sue to stop any map that was too partisan, privately offered a similar assessment to Mr. Roth Smith’s. Though no final decisions had been made, two senior Republicans involved in the process indicated the party would be unlikely to file suit after seeing the new lines.
The New York Constitution bans drawing district lines to help incumbents or a particular party.
Democrats argued that all the changes they proposed on Tuesday had either been approved by the bipartisan redistricting commission or could be explained by attempts to reunite counties or demographic groups that are currently split between existing districts.
Still, there was little doubt which party the map would benefit.
By proposing lines that would stretch the Syracuse district further south to pick up Cortland, a Democratic town, the Legislature’s map would change the district from one Mr. Biden won by 7.6 percentage points to one he would have won by 11.6 percentage points. Mr. Williams, the first-term Republican who represents the district, won by less than one point in 2022.
After Democrats spent $15 million to elect Mr. Suozzi and flip the state’s Third District this month, the new lines would likely mean that far less money and energy would have to expended to re-elect him this fall. The district would lose Massapequa, a Republican stronghold in Nassau County on Long Island, in exchange for more moderate North Shore communities in Suffolk County, changing Mr. Biden’s eight-point advantage in the district into a nearly 11-point one.
Mr. Molinaro’s district is unlikely to get much easier for Democrats, but the proposed contours keep a lane open for their candidate, Josh Riley, who has spent two years campaigning and raised large sums of money. The commission’s proposed lines were so much less favorable to Mr. Riley that he had been considering potentially running for the Syracuse seat instead, according to Democrats familiar with his thinking.
Democrats left two other Republican-held swing districts, Anthony D’Esposito’s 4th District and Mike Lawler’s 17th District, virtually untouched. Democratic challengers there were disappointed, but party leaders said they were already confident about their chances to flip both seats, where voters sided with Mr. Biden by double digits, in a presidential election year.
“Today, residents of the 17th District woke up to the only news that matters: They’re still being represented by an anti-choice enabler of MAGA extremism,” Mondaire Jones, Mr. Lawler’s Democratic challenger, said, adding that he was “confident that the voters of this district will wholeheartedly reject” Mr. Lawler.
Democrats declined to meaningfully improve the Hudson Valley district of Representative Pat Ryan, an endangered Democrat, or to take another shot at converting Representative Nicole Malliotakis’s conservative Staten Island seat into a Democratic pickup opportunity.
Justin Brannan, a member of the New York City Council who is said to be exploring a possible run for Ms. Malliotakis’s seat, did little to hide his feelings about the new lines. “When Republicans have the pen, they stab us in the neck,” he wrote on X.
Elsewhere in New York City, the Democrats’ map would largely copy changes proposed by the commission that have little partisan effect, but appeared to be designed to benefit some incumbents.
In one prominent case, Mr. Jeffries’s condo would be drawn back into his Brooklyn district.
In another closely scrutinized change, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat who represents parts of the Bronx and Westchester, stands to pick up Co-Op City, a large Black community in the Bronx that he lost when the new lines were drawn in 2022. Mr. Bowman and Mr. Jeffries had argued that the removal of Co-Op City had split a community of interest and degraded the Black vote in Mr. Bowman’s 16th District.
Allies of Mr. Bowman were ready to claim it as a victory on Tuesday as he faces a bitter primary fight against George Latimer, the Westchester County executive. But it was not immediately clear that the change would be enough to meaningfully tip the primary race in either direction, since Mr. Bowman would lose largely African American portions of Wakefield in the Bronx.
