Gov. Kathy Hochul said she remains open to a constitutional amendment that would clear the way for Democrats to redraw New York’s congressional districts as soon as 2028.
The Democratic governor told reporters Tuesday that major Democratic wins across the country in last week’s elections wouldn’t necessarily derail her party’s push to change the state constitution to allow for mid-decade redistricting in the Empire State.
But Hochul also didn’t commit to moving ahead with the plan, which was first put into motion last year as Republicans in Texas, North Carolina and other states began redrawing congressional districts to benefit their party.
The Republican efforts — backed by President Donald Trump — either backfired or didn’t matter, with Democrats easily picking up enough seats across the country to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Those newly drawn lines [in other states] are still there,” Hochul said at her Manhattan office. “And while it didn’t have an effect on this year’s election, there’s always another election every two years.”
The governor continued: “You can't assume that there's going to be the same outcomes every two years, and so I want to look at it long-term.”
In New York, the state constitution requires a bipartisan panel to redraw congressional lines after each once-a-decade Census, with lawmakers getting final approval. But it doesn’t provide a mechanism to change the districts during the intervening years.
That hasn’t stopped Democrats from trying.
In March, the U.S. Supreme Court halted a lower court’s order that would’ve required redrawing New York’s 11th congressional district, a Republican stronghold that includes all of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn. The order was spurred by a Democrat-led lawsuit that argued the current district disenfranchised Black and Hispanic voters. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican who has held the district since 2021, was re-elected last Tuesday.
In June, state lawmakers gave preliminary approval to a constitutional amendment that would open the door to mid-decade redistricting. The amendment would also remove a prohibition on gerrymandering — drawing district lines to benefit a particular party or candidate — and make it easier for the Democrat-dominated Legislature to make changes to the map on its own.
But a constitutional amendment has to be passed by consecutively elected Legislatures before it goes to voters for final approval. So lawmakers would have to approve the amendment again next year to have any chance of drawing new lines by 2028.
If lawmakers do approve it again, it would set up a statewide referendum on the ballot as soon as Nov. 2027.
Former Rep. John Faso, a Hudson Valley Republican who has helped fight the Democratic redistricting effort, said Democrats would be making a “big mistake” by going ahead with the amendment in New York.
Faso noted voters approved the current redistricting process in 2014 and roundly rejected a prior Democrat-led effort to make changes in 2021. The state Court of Appeals also rejected a Democrat-drawn map in 2022 for violating the anti-gerrymandering provision.
“It’s a terrible affront to the voters of our state,” he said of the proposed amendment. “It basically is attempting to rig the districts to benefit one party over the other, and I don't think the voters will go for it.”
Hochul has no formal role in the amendment process. But she pushed for the change as the de facto head of the state Democratic Party, with support from Brooklyn Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next House speaker.
State Sen. Shelley Mayer, a Yonkers Democrat who heads Senate Democrats’ reelection efforts, said it’s “premature” to say whether lawmakers will take up the amendment again next year.
“ I do think it's clear that the efforts that Republicans [in other states] made were a fool's errand, because we won many of the seats that they sought to redistrict to their advantage,” Mayer said. “That being said, there's a lot in this amendment that we should review that goes beyond mid-Census redistricting, and I think we need to have a thoughtful conversation about it.”
Rep. Joseph Morelle, a Rochester-area Democrat who serves as Jeffries’ point man on New York redistricting efforts, told POLITICO he will urge state lawmakers to move ahead with the amendment.
Hochul acknowledged that the “political landscape has changed” since lawmakers first approved the constitutional amendment earlier this year.
“I’m going to take that into account,” she said. “I'm going to talk to Leader Jeffries, and I'm going to talk to the two [state] legislative leaders about where we want to go with this.”
The state Legislature is set to return to the Capitol in January. Democrats will have a two-thirds supermajority in both the Senate and Assembly when they begin the 2027 legislative session, which runs through June.
