New York’s congressional politics have been thrown into chaos by a recent decision of Patrick McAllister, a Republican trial judge in an upstate New York state court. His new claim to fame is that he approved a new congressional districting map in the intensely litigated reapportionment case of Harkenrider v. Hochul. New York needed a new district map because the state lost one congressional seat in the 2020 census and experienced population shifts that resulted in malapportionment, since the previous map had been drawn in 2012.

In the game of musical chairs that followed the loss of that seat, Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law in February 2022 an avowedly partisan map that left the Democrats with majorities in twenty-two of New York’s twenty-six congressional districts. The New York State Court of Appeals (the state’s highest) frowned on the map’s blatantly partisan nature, and kicked the matter back down to McAllister. The judge promptly enlisted Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University with expertise in map drawing, to prepare the new map. Cervas took testimony from all interest groups. He responded to criticisms, for example, that questioned the wisdom of breaking up a large black community in Brooklyn into two separate districts—a move that had been savagely attacked by Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn as “enough to make Jim Crow blush.”

McAllister approved Cervas’s map and immediately postponed the congressional primaries from June 28, 2022, to August 23, a move promptly upheld in federal district court. The final approval of the map set off rapid political maneuvers, as the new district lines departed sufficiently from the old ones to turn former allies into instant combatants. The highest-profile of these new contests pits Congressman Jerry Nadler, who has long represented Manhattan’s West Side, against Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who has long controlled the East Side. In a separate struggle fraught with racial overtones, Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney did not have to leave his Cold Spring home in the old 18th District to run again the black progressive Mondaire Jones in the new 17th District. But Jones instead chose to seek re-election in the new 10th District—which runs from Greenwich Village in Manhattan to the strong Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park in Brooklyn. So now it appears that Sean Maloney will have to run against progressive state senator Alessandra Biaggi, who plans to move to the new 17th District in opposition to Maloney, whom she brands “a corporate, selfish Democrat.”