Ex-Gov. David Paterson rapped Gov. Kathy Hochul and fellow Democrats for a planned power grab that will allow them to carve up congressional maps — and try to reduce the number of Republican-held seats.
Democrat Paterson claimed Hochul championed the partisan move to amend the state constitution because she is “completely outnumbered” by Democrats in the legislature clamoring for the change.
“They’re going to draw their own maps [for partisan gain],” Paterson, a former state chairman of the state Democratic Party, said Sunday.
“She’s [Hochul] almost taking a lead on it just to maintain that relationship [with the legislature’]. It’s a real problem,” Paterson said on 77 WABC’s the “Cats Roundtable” program.
Democrats now control 19 of New York’s 26 congressional seats.
It’s part of a tit-for-tat with Republican-led states including Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee that moved up congressional redistricting — which traditionally takes place after the census every 10 years — to try to win more GOP seats in the 2026 Midterm elections.
New York joins like-minded Democrats in California and Virginia, where politicians pushed for their own partisan gerrymandering for their state’s congressional maps in a counter offensive.
The proposed New York amendment, if approved, would remove the state’s ban on gerrymandering and allow the map to be changed mid-decade, opening the door for new House districts for the 2028 presidential elections.
The amendment would also:
- Keep New York’s bipartisan redistricting commission in place, but give a simple majority of both houses — the state Senate and Assembly — the ability to override a proposed map from the panel. A two-thirds majority is currently required, which allows Republicans to block such a move.
- Remove language dictating that districts “shall not be drawn to discourage competition,” effectively allowing political gerrymandering
Democrats, who control both houses of the state legislature and hold a more than 2-to-1 voter enrollment advantage over Republicans, would need New Yorkers to approve the measure on their November 2027 election ballots.
Democratic lawmakers in the Assembly and State passed a bill to launch the constitutional amendment last week before ending the 2026 legislative session, and must do so again next year before presenting it as a referendum to voters.
Partisan redistricting, known as gerrymandering, is “dividing our country almost the way it was before the Civil War,” Paterson said.
He said it’s a pox on both Republicans and Democrats.
“It’s interfering with one of the most fabled ways that we have moved ahead of other countries by really having a democratic process, where people vote their conscience and not their party,” he told host John Catsimatidis.
He lamented that the partisan warfare in red and blue states is damaging the country.
“We’re moving toward a society that is going to be Balkanized. We’re not going to really understand each other. We’re not going to work with each other,” Paterson told host John Catsimatidis.
“We’re going to make presumptions about people or ideas that are really going to injure the process of a country that for so many years has led the world in terms of invention, in terms of opportunity, in terms of a way to run a government without people being abused by it,” he added. “If we’re unlucky and this continues for too much longer, we’re going to be in a dire, dire situation.”
