New York’s Redistricting Chaos Creates House Election Intrigue

Gregory Korte
6 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Following a chaotic court-ordered reshuffling of New York’s congressional districts, New Yorkers on Tuesday will vote in what have become some of the most contentious US primary election battles of the year.

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The litigation over the once-a-decade redrawing of political boundaries pushed back the primary to late August and created a high-stakes game of musical chairs, pitting long-time colleagues against each other and stirring up intra-party resentments among both Democrats and Republicans.

“The 2022 redistricting of the state did not go as planned,” said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Studies at the City University of New York.

Mollenkopf said Tuesday’s primary matchups will provide a “beautiful case study” of the fissures within the Democratic party, he said, with several elections revealing differences along lines of race, class, ideology and generations.

The process has also created unusually combative primaries in parts of New York that haven’t seen competitive congressional races in decades, as the demographics of the city have shifted considerably even as it’s become even more reliably Democratic. In New York City, where Democrats outnumber Republicans seven-to-one, primary winners in most cases are favored to win the November general election.

The result is a primary held in the dead of summer that’s likely to be marked by low turnout and come down to a small margin of votes. Only about 76,000 people cast ballots in early voting, which ended Sunday. That’s a 60% drop in turnout compared to the 2021 mayoral primary and a 12% decline from the June primary for New York governor, according to the New York City Board of Elections.

Among the more contentious races:

Midtown Showdown

Whatever happens in New York’s 12th congressional district, which now combines the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, Democrats will lose one of their longest-serving and most powerful members of Congress.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, 75, has served in Congress since 1992 and is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Carolyn Maloney, 76, has been there since 1993 and is chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee.

They’re now facing off in a newly formed Manhattan district that pits Maloney’s East Side base against Nadler’s on the West Side.

Both are relying heavily on key constituencies. Nadler is campaigning as the last remaining Jewish member of the New York delegation. Maloney’s first campaign ad highlighted her role as a pioneering woman in the House and ended with the tag line “You cannot send a man to do a woman’s job.”

Nadler snagged the influential endorsement of the New York Times and has led limited polling in the race. But there’s also a possible spoiler in the mix: Suraj Patel, 38, an attorney and former White House aide to President Barack Obama who ran against Maloney in 2020 and came within 3,500 votes of beating her.

Read More: New York Congressional Map Maintains Nadler-Maloney Matchup

Brownstone Battle

Representative Mondaire Jones was one of the incumbents left without a home when the dust settled on the new maps. Faced with the prospect of running against Representative Sean Patrick Maloney -- who’s heading up Democrats’ re-election efforts nationally -- he instead moved six districts away, from his Rockland County base to the 10th congressional district, which encompasses Lower Manhattan, Chinatown and brownstone Brooklyn.

The 35-year-old Jones -- among the first gay Black members of Congress -- faces a crowded field of 11 other candidates including Dan Goldman, 46, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. Goldman, a congressional attorney in the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, spent $2.2 million -- including at least $1 million of his own money -- on the race.

He got the Times endorsement and has led limited polling but many of the other candidates are far more established in the district. They include Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, 39, a Taiwanese-American immigrant elected to the state Assembly in 2016; Carlina Rivera, 38, a Manhattan City Council member of Puerto Rican descent, and former US Representative Liz Holtzman, 81, who served in Congress from 1973 to 1981.

Read More: NYC’s Most Diverse District Is Anything But at the Voting Booth

Progressive Revolt

When Sean Patrick Maloney elbowed out Jones for the 17th district in the Hudson Valley, the move energized the progressive wing of the party. New York State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, the 36-year-old granddaughter of 10-term New York Representative Mario Biaggi, jumped into the race, calling Maloney a “selfish corporate Democrat” who put his own political safety ahead of the party as a whole. New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez promptly endorsed Biaggi.

That attack hit all the harder because Maloney, 56, is no rank-and file Democrat. The five-term congressman is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the fund-raising arm of congressional Democrats.

But Biaggi’s challenge will test the limits that progressive candidates face in expanding their appeal to the suburbs. She’s had to back off of some of her earlier “defund the police” rhetoric, and Maloney said Biaggi’s views on socialized health care and taxes are out of step with the district’s constituents.

New York’s 17th district became a marquee contest over the direction of the party after a court-ordered redistricting shook up the uneasy truce among Democrats trying to manage the state’s loss of a congressional district.

Sean Patrick Maloney is no relation to Carolyn Maloney.

Read More: NYT Endorses Nadler, Goldman, Maloney in Democratic Primaries

Republican Faceoff

Republican developer Carl Paladino’s professed admiration for Adolf Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today” in a radio interview in February didn’t stop him from getting an endorsement from Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3-ranking Republican in the House and a top Trump ally.

The 75-year-old Paladino, the GOP nominee for New York governor in 2010, continued to court controversy as recently as last week when he told the conservative outlet Breitbart that Attorney General Merrick Garland “should be not only impeached, he probably should be executed” for authorizing the FBI search of Trump’s home. He later said he was being facetious.

He’s facing a primary challenge from Nicholas Langworthy, 41, the chairman of the state Republican Party, who has stepped in to run against Paladino to prevent what he called a “circus sideshow” for the GOP in November.

The western New York district is an open seat following the resignation of Representative Tom Reed in May. A separate special election Tuesday will determine a caretaker congressman to fill out the rest of Reed’s term.

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