But that’s way out of proportion with how New York usually votes for instance, President Biden got just 61 percent of the vote there in 2020. In other words, all else being equal, we’d have expected Democrats to win 22 of New York’s 26 House seats (85 percent) under the map. It also included two swing seats, but even those had slight Democratic leans (D+3 and D+4). The now-invalidated map included 20 seats with a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of D+5 or bluer and only four seats with a partisan lean of R+5 or redder. That’s because much of Democrats’ national redistricting advantage rested on their gerrymander in New York. But with the invalidation of New York’s map, as well as Florida’s recent passage of a congressional map that heavily favors the GOP,1 the takeaways from the 2021-22 redistricting cycle are no longer so straightforward. The decision was a huge blow to Democrats, who until recently looked like they had gained enough seats nationally in redistricting to almost eliminate the Republican bias in the House of Representatives. On Wednesday, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the congressional map New York Democrats enacted back in February was a partisan gerrymander that violated the state constitution and tossed it to the curb.
