What Redistricting Looks Like In Every State

Just before midnight May 20, a New York state court approved a new congressional map drawn by a court-appointed neutral expert, Jonathan Cervas. Cervas’s map has an efficiency gap of D+6 and creates 16 Democratic-leaning seats, six Republican-leaning seats and four highly competitive seats. This represents an increase of one highly competitive seat, a decrease of one Democratic-leaning seat and a decrease of one Republican-leaning seat compared with the old map.

The new map pits some high-profile Democratic incumbents against each other in the New York City area, like Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler in the new 12th District in Upper Manhattan. Meanwhile, Rep. Mondaire Jones has announced he will run in the newly drawn 10th District (representing parts of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan) to avoid a primary against Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney in the district he currently represents. The state’s primaries will be held Aug. 23.

Cervas’s appointment came after the New York Court of Appeals struck down a previous map passed by Democratic legislators, which the court found to be an extreme Democratic gerrymander. That map was designed to give Democrats a huge advantage in the state and was largely approved along partisan lines in the legislature. The map had an efficiency gap of D+9 and created 20 Democratic-leaning seats, only four Republican-leaning seats and two highly competitive seats (both of which tilted toward Democrats themselves).

New York wound up with such an egregiously biased map only because of the weakness of New York’s new bipartisan redistricting commission. Under state law, the legislature may simply draw its own map after rejecting the commission’s first two proposals. Even worse, the commission didn’t even work as intended. Its first proposal was actually two maps (one favoring Democrats and one favoring Republicans), and it failed to come to any agreement on a second-round proposal, handing redistricting control to the legislature by default.