The GOP was just dealt a rather crushing blow in the quest to secure enough seats in 2026 to hold the House.
The one seat that the GOP could count on in New York was just taken away.
State Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Pearlman just ruled that the 11th District, currently held by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), is unconstitutional and must be redrawn.
New York currently uses the Independent Redistricting Commission to draw its congressional maps.
This has never sat well with Governor Kathy Hochul, who has for some time expressed an interest in disbanding the commission.
Hochul, in August 2025, stated, “I'm tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back. With all due respect to good government groups, politics is a political process.”
She continued, “The reason we are able to draw the lines is that we're Democrats, because the majority of people in the state elected us to be leaders, and when we say that we can't use that power to the fullest, then we're abdicating the responsibility that we all have.”
The battle Hochul was referring to was Trump ordering Republican governors to do a mid-decade redrawing of the maps to gerrymander them in favor of Republicans in an effort to defy history, so he could hold the House in the mid-term elections.
This started with Texas, then started to expand to other states, with Trump trying to snag every seat he possibly could.
That, however, triggered a response by Democrat governors to start to redraw their maps, the most significant being California. The new California maps completely offset any gains made by Texas.
The problem, as I noted very early on this war, was that the Dems had more seats to grab than the GOP did. I stated upfront that I thought it was foolish for Trump to go down this road, not to mention flat-out wrong. We have complained for years about Democrat gerrymandering, and now an order to do the same was coming from the White House.
New York is already a tough state for Republicans, with there literally only being one seat that was locked in, at least during recent years, for Republicans, and now it is gone.
The suit was filed by Democrat attorney Marc Elias’ law firm to challenge the district, and the party got the exact outcome it had hoped for. Elias Law Group Partner Aria Branch stated, "We are pleased that the court correctly recognized that the current district lines have systematically diluted the votes of Black and Latino Staten Islanders, despite decades of demographic growth in those communities.”
Ed Cox, chairman of the New York State Republican Committee, responded, "This entire exercise is a cynical attempt to enact an illegal partisan gerrymander under the guise of a voting rights case. It is shocking that the Governor and Attorney General did not defend the law that the legislature passed and the Governor signed in 2024 - they are clearly colluding with the plaintiffs in this case."
I agree with Cox, but this has been the way this has worked all along. The outcome of the case generally depends upon the judge and their ideology, which is why I have always stated we need to come up with a better fix for drawing congressional maps. If not, they will always be gerrymandered, and one side will always try to offset the other when they redraw their maps. This particular system is broken beyond repair at this point.
