Molly Jong-Fast: If Democrats Lose the House, Andrew Cuomo Might Be to Blame

[Celerity]

In 2012, the now-disgraced former governor negotiated a deal that helped bring about this year’s disastrous redistricting.

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/wait-what/62ebe476da4cea0020f2d3d3/andrew-cuomo-gerrymandering-midterm-elections/

https://archive.ph/BuEnB



If Democrats lose control of the House of Representatives in November, there will be plenty of blame to go around. But one villain in that disaster surely will be former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. To understand why, you need to go back to 2012. The political world was somewhat more normal then, and Cuomo, a centrist Democrat with long-term presidential ambitions, made a Faustian bargain, as Chris Smith described earlier in the summer in Vanity Fair. He claimed that he was seeking to end years of gerrymandering by creating a nonpartisan commission to draw the state’s congressional maps. Instead—in a short-sighted, last-minute, politically opportunistic move—he allowed legislators to file a redistricting plan shortly before midnight on a Sunday in March, and put off a potential state-constitutional amendment to create an independent commission until after the 2020 census.

This year, after that commission stalemated in its plans, the New York Court of Appeals threw out the Democrats’ proposed congressional-district map in April and brought in a “special master” named Jonathan Cervas to redraw it. The final map—released on May 16 and approved later that week—may well have ended any chance Democrats had of keeping control of the House. At least that’s what David Wasserman, the senior editor at The Cook Political Report, thinks. “The New York Court of Appeals’ decision to strike down Democrats’ gerrymander likely drove a stake through the heart of any remaining chance Democrats had to hold the House majority in 2022,” he told me. For 2022, The Cook Political Report now identifies 162 blue seats as safe, compared with 191 safe red seats.

Jack O’Donnell, a Democratic strategist who once worked for New York Senator Charles Schumer, agrees that the redistricting is a disaster for Democrats. And he lays the blame at the former governor’s feet. “Cuomo wanted to avoid the ire of editorial boards, so he proposed an independent redistricting commission,” O’Donnell told me. “The language governing redistricting was vague and imprecise, while the commission, with an equal number of Republican and Democratic allied members, was born to fail … The proposed constitutional amendment gave Democrats, Republicans, and Cuomo cover to do whatever they wanted in 2012 while postponing any real test until 2022.”

After the New York state legislature drew new congressional lines in 2012, O’Donnell explained, Democrats were optimistic that the blue state would be a counterweight to the blatantly partisan redistricting processes happening elsewhere. But, he added, that hope was built on a shaky foundation. And the responsibility for the state-constitutional amendment that created the redistricting commission was clear. Former New York State Assembly Speaker and convicted felon Sheldon Silver and former New York State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos “were the sponsors of the proposed amendment,” O’Donnell said, “but the architect of it was Governor Cuomo.”

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[ColinC]

1. In the grand scheme of things it was the right thing to do.

In the shorter term, it creates a less favorable situation eelctorally.