New York Democrats Confront Brutal Redistricting Referendum Math

ALBANY, New York – New York Democrats prepping a 2027 referendum to redraw the state’s congressional map will need to confront a bizarre reality about next year’s electorate: There might be more voters in the upstate city of Utica than in the sprawling borough of Manhattan.

Democrats have started the process of placing a question on the ballot that would remove state constitutional restrictions on gerrymandering, letting them join the national redistricting wars and giving them the ability to gain up to four seats. November of next year is the earliest possible date for the amendment — and the only option that would allow for new maps before the 2028 elections.

But 2027 is poised to have the least favorable electorate for the left of any year in the past decade. And so even as Democrats pin their national hopes on New York — and plan to sink tens of millions of dollars into the vote — they’re about to find themselves in an unprecedented situation: Rather than starting with a big lead they simply need to avoid squandering, Democrats will need to dig themselves out of a deep hole.

There will be almost nothing else on the ballot next year driving turnout in New York City. The state’s top races will be county executive contests in places like Erie, Onondaga and Suffolk. These purple counties will not give Democrats the built-in turnout advantage they usually enjoy in the blue state.

“We can’t expect the results of this referendum to ride successfully on the back of executive elections,” State Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs said. “We have to inspire voters all over the state.”

Republicans in Texas, Florida, Tennessee and beyond have used redistricting this year to build a congressional firewall they hope will thwart Democrats from winning control of the House despite serious political tailwinds boosting their chances. Democrats have faced major legal setbacks in their own efforts to draw more friendly maps and are now looking to the next election cycle in blue states like New York, Maryland and Colorado to tilt the electoral landscape back to a more level playing field.

Early polling on the New York referendum hasn’t been favorable. A Siena University survey last month found that only 21 percent of registered voters said it’d be “good for New York” while 44 percent said it would be “bad.” Even among Democrats, barely one in four expressed support for the idea.

“There’s a lot of work to do for those who want to get this amendment passed,” Siena spokesperson Steve Greenberg said.

But even that poll might skew too favorably toward Democrats. That’s because it was part of a standard statewide survey measuring the electorate’s mood. The breakdown of registered voters polled — 46 percent Democrat, 22 percent Republican, and 29 percent other — was about what one would expect in a gubernatorial contest.

There won’t be a governor’s race next year, though. And as a starting point for expectations, before any eight- or nine-figure ad campaigns try to convince people to care about redistricting, the turnout breakdown will be a lot closer to a 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats’ 30-0 winning streak in statewide contests in New York since 2004 has been made possible by running up the numbers in New York City. The Big Apple usually accounts for about a third of the state’s electorate, meaning Democrats’ commanding margins there give them plenty of breathing room even if they underperform in purple suburbs and get trounced in red rural counties.

But in years where there’s no mayoral, gubernatorial or presidential contest driving turnout, New York City’s weight vanishes. The five boroughs accounted for 34 percent of the statewide electorate in the 2024 presidential election, but only 22 percent in 2023.

And even that 2023 turnout was atypically high. New York City Council members were elected to two-year terms, a fluke caused by the timing of the city’s redistricting. They were on the ballot again for regular four-year terms in 2025, so won’t be running again next year.

The most recent occasion when there was a statewide referendum and a barren New York City electoral landscape was 2007. New York City accounted for only 10.6 percent of the statewide turnout that year. There were fewer ballots cast in Manhattan, with its population of 1.6 million, than in Utica’s home of Oneida County, with a population 235,000. Turnout in Brooklyn was less than 6 percent.

Barring a surprise special election, there will be no local races on the ballot poised to increase turnout above those numbers.

District attorney contests in the Bronx and Queens are scheduled for 2027. The most recent time a Republican was elected to either of those offices was in 1920, so it seems reasonable to predict neither of these contests will be nail-biters that drive voter engagement.

There’ll also be a district attorney’s race on Staten Island. Incumbent Michael McMahon ran unopposed in 2019 and 2023, so the safe money at this point isn’t on an extremely competitive election. And even if there was, surging turnout on Staten Island might not be what Democratic strategists are hoping for given its red-ish tint.

And so next year’s Democratic campaign won’t just need to make the unpopular amendment popular. Even if the state’s Democratic voters are swayed that the amendment is a good idea, they’ll also need to be convinced it’s so important that they should take the time to cast a ballot in a year they weren’t otherwise planning to show up to the polls.

Party leaders are hopeful voters can be sold on the idea.

“If you said to those same voters, ‘Do you think what they did in Texas was fair and fine?’ I think they’d be alarmed,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said about the recent Siena poll. “And if you follow up the question and say ‘Do you think New York should also be in a position to respond to what is happening so that one party doesn’t just take over the country for forever?’ … That’s how you have to start to inform voters as to why it’s important.”

An additional curveball to next year’s electoral math is recent legislation that begins rescheduling most town and county elections for even-numbered years.

That means some parts of upstate and Long Island will have fewer races on the ballot in 2027 than they did in 2023. There could thus be lower turnout — some people who have voted in the past when a county legislative seat and village offices were on the ballot might not show up if only the village races are contested — boosting New York City’s relative share of the vote.

But it’s too soon to say how that’ll play out in practice. And that unpredictability, on top of the expected low turnout in key parts of the state, means the amendment is far from a guaranteed win for Democrats.

“In order to be successful, it’s going to need to be a robust, well-funded campaign,” Jacobs said. “You know Republicans and Trump and Trump allies are going to do everything they can to stop it, so we have to do what we can to educate voters as to why it’s so important.”