With the national fight over mid-decade redistricting in high gear, Democratic leaders are trying to ensure that states under their party’s control work to create new congressional district lines to counter efforts by Republican-led states.
That push brought Representative Joseph D. Morelle of New York to the State Capitol in Albany on Tuesday to deliver a simple message for state lawmakers: They must urgently work to draw more favorable maps that help Democrats prepare for the 2028 elections.
Mr. Morelle, a Democrat who spent more than two decades in the New York State Assembly, met with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the leaders of the State Senate and Assembly. He returned to his old stomping grounds at the behest of his boss, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader who also represents New York and sees the state as a focal point in his plans for the next phase of the redistricting wars.
On Monday, Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Morelle announced the creation of the New York Democracy Project, a redistricting initiative meant to counter Republican redistricting in Texas and a recent Supreme Court decision that makes it more difficult to use the Voting Rights Act to challenge a legislative map on racially discriminatory grounds.
“I wanted to make sure that we underscored how important this is,” Mr. Morelle said, noting that the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais “is going to have wide-ranging impacts for Black Americans.”
Without the protections of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that effectively banned racial gerrymandering, a new era of aggressive partisan redistricting is set to begin. Already, states across the South are aiming to redraw their maps to give Republicans an advantage heading into elections later this year.
But the real battle over maps will ignite next year, with no state bound by the primary calendar and legislators given more time to try to work around state laws limiting their ability to gerrymander.
Aside from New York, Democrats in Colorado have already taken steps to explore redistricting their state for the 2028 cycle. Other states that Democrats are considering for the near future include Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington.
Despite Mr. Morelle’s call for urgency, change in New York seldom happens quickly — and, in this case, cannot for statutory reasons. Whatever officials decide, any redistricting bill would need to be first passed by New York State lawmakers in two consecutive legislative sessions, and then be approved by voters in a referendum. Leaders in New York are currently contemplating how far they want to go in changing the state’s Constitution, which currently includes a slew of anti-gerrymandering provisions.
“Our process is more cumbersome than other states,” said Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, who reiterated that New York cannot sit on the sidelines amid this national fight.
State Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader, and Assemblyman Micah Lasher, who is currently running for Congress, introduced a bill last year that would allow New York to redraw its own congressional lines mid-decade instead of every 10 years, linked to the U.S. census — if another state does so first.
Rather than empowering the Independent Redistricting Commission, their proposal would empower the State Legislature to draw the lines. One question now is whether elected officials want to make changes to how the commission works. There is a possibility that the Senate and Assembly pass multiple different proposals to give themselves a measure of flexibility next year when they have to pass the bill again, two people familiar with the matter said.
“The world has changed dramatically since that bill was introduced,” Mr. Gianaris said.
Mr. Lasher said there are active discussions about what a constitutional amendment should look like. He said it “must be something that the voters are likely to approve and that will enable New York to fight fire with fire.”
Informing this moment is New York’s own recent tortured history with drawing its congressional lines. The last process was heavily scrutinized and battled over in court extensively. In the end, a judge threw the maps out and appointed a special master who created maps that gave Republicans the ability to gain seats in 2022.
New York’s top court made the state redraw its congressional map again in 2023. The following year, a bipartisan state commission approved new maps that looked strikingly similar to the ones that helped Republicans in 2022. During that process, Mr. Morelle and Mr. Jeffries, keenly aware of the legal fights they had lost around redistricting, were reluctant to push for maps that would have maximized Democrats’ gains in the state.
Democrats currently hold 19 of New York’s 26 congressional seats and are eager to pick up at least one more this fall. Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican from Rockland County who is thought to be the delegation’s most vulnerable member, said in a social media post that this is purely a play by Democrats to “stifle Republican voices in the state.”
Mr. Morelle said that he was prepared to run in a district that was more Republican if a new map made it possible for more Democrats to win.
“We’re all prepared to sacrifice for the greater good,” he said. “We think there has to be a fair way of Americans expressing themselves.”