New Congressional Districting Could Load NY-1 In Favor Of Democrats, Carve Out East Quogue, Westhampton Into New District

A proposed redrawing of New York’s congressional district lines would give Democrats a sizable electoral advantage in the 1st Congressional District and carve out a substantial portion of Republican-leaning western Southampton Town, where residents of East Quogue and Westhampton would now find themselves in the 2nd District.

According to the map of the proposed new districts sending legislators to the U.S. House of Representatives, which was released by the State Legislature’s Democratic majority on Sunday evening, all of Southampton Town west of Jones Road in Hampton Bays — including East Quogue, Quogue, Westhampton, Westhampton Beach, West Hampton Dunes, Remsenburg, Speonk and Eastport — would become part of the newly expanded NY-2, as the 2nd Congressional District is called.

While losing this large portion of its traditional East End constituency, the 1st Congressional District, or NY-1, would grow westward, becoming a sprawling behemoth that spans Suffolk County, stretching from Montauk and Orient all the way west into the town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County.

The district, which has long encompassed just the five East End towns, most of Brookhaven Town and part of Smithtown, would take in Democrat-heavy regions in Babylon, Huntington, Islip and Oyster Bay that are now in NY-2 or NY-3, while Republican-leaning neighborhoods in Southampton Town, southern Brookhaven Town and Smithtown would be cut out and lumped into NY-2 with other reliably Republican regions.

The result would be a heavily Republican NY-2, unlikely a threat for the Democrats to capture in 2022 — but a much more solidly Democratic NY-1, where Republican U.S. Representative Lee Zeldin has posted fairly comfortable wins in his four election victories.

“There are four districts that cover Long Island, and this map was clearly cut to concentrate Republican voters in NY-2 and make the other three districts, I would say, lean Democratic,” said State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. “It’s a substantial modification of an existing district and will be the first time that I’m aware of that parts of Southampton Town were not in NY-1.”

The State Legislature was expected to vote on the new maps on Wednesday, February 2, and with Democrats holding supermajorities in both houses — albeit by only one vote in the Senate — approval is likely.

Statewide, the Democratically drawn districts are expected to ensure the Democrats will capture as many as three congressional seats currently held by Republicans.

For Republicans in state government, the outcome is not a surprising one.

“I think that from the moment the process began we knew it was going to go this way, sadly,” said State Senator Anthony Palumbo, a Republican. “These lines were drawn many months ago. They had no intention of coming to a consensus map.”

Both congressional and state legislative districts are redrawn every 10 years following the decennial national census, to accommodate population shifts — and political winds. Gerrymandering — that is, drawing district boundaries to favor one political party or the other — is a legal outcome that has been widely upheld by courts, except when discriminatory factors, like racial demographics, are used to calculate the boundaries.

Thiele, a former Southampton Town supervisor who has been in the State Legislature since 1995 — his first several terms as a Republican and now a member of the Independence Party who caucuses with Democrats — has been through three redistricting efforts.

But this is the first time that the legislature has ever had one party control both the Assembly and the State Senate, giving it hegemony over the process.

The maps released on Sunday evening were drafted by the leadership of the Legislature’s controlling Democratic caucus after the bipartisan New York State Redistricting Commission, a panel created by voter referendum in 2014 specifically to keep gerrymandering out of the New York’s redistricting process after the 2020 federal census, failed to reach a consensus on new maps by the January deadline.

“When the independent redistricting commission went to work, the appointees from the Democratic majority folded their arms and stopped talking,” Palumbo said. “Clearly, they were not supposed to come to an agreement. It’s unfortunate since that was something requested by the voters.

Because the commission failed to do its job in its first go-round, the mapping is left to the legislature, but it requires a two-thirds supermajority to approve — requiring 100 votes in the Assembly and 42 votes in the Senate. The Democrats hold 107 Assembly seats and 43 Senate seats.

Thiele said he plans to vote in favor of the new maps as proposed. Palumbo said he plans to vote no.

As it is currently proposed, residents of NY-1 voted for then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 election at a rate 4 percentage points higher than they voted for President Joe Biden. But if the new district boundaries were applied retroactively, the district would have favored Biden by 11 percentage points.

The district is currently represented by Zeldin, a Republican who won election to a fourth term in 2020 but announced early in the term that he would be running for governor.

Several Republicans and two Democrats — Suffolk County legislators Kara Hahn and Bridget Fleming — have said they are running for the 1st District seat in this fall’s election.

Both NY-1 and NY-2 have historically been swing districts that flipped between Democrat and Republican representatives fairly regularly.

In NY-1, the seat in the House of Representatives has traded between Republicans and Democrats consistently since the 1950s.

The NY-2 seat had seen a consistent pattern of alternating between the parties, but usually when a new congressman took over he would hold the seat through several election cycles. U.S. Representative Andrew Garbarino, a Republican, broke the alternating pattern last year when he succeeded Peter King, who had served from 2013 to 2021 before retiring.

The district’s voters favored Trump in the presidential race in 2016 by 9 percentage points and by 4 percentage points in 2020. The district was also dramatically redrawn following the census in 2000 and 2010.

The Democrats have yet to release their proposals for state legislative districts. Thiele said his district is going to have to shrink, yet again, because of the growing population on the East End.

When he was elected in 1995, his Assembly district extended west all the way to Yaphank. Today, it ends in Shirley, and census data shows that the population of the district is more than 20,000 voters larger than the district size balancing rules dictate.