Former Governor David Paterson has criticized Governor Kathy Hochul and Democratic colleagues for a strategy aimed at redrawing congressional districts to potentially decrease Republican-held seats.
Paterson, a Democrat himself, accused Hochul of endorsing this partisan initiative to amend the state constitution because she faces pressure from a predominantly Democratic legislature eager for such changes.
“They plan to create their own maps for partisan advantage,” stated Paterson, who once chaired the state Democratic Party, during a Sunday interview.
Paterson remarked that Hochul is seemingly at the forefront of this effort to preserve her alliance with the legislature, describing the situation as problematic on the “Cats Roundtable” program on 77 WABC.
Currently, Democrats hold 19 of New York’s 26 congressional seats.
This move is seen as a response to similar actions by Republican-controlled states like Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee, which have advanced congressional redistricting efforts—traditionally done post-census every decade—to secure 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.”
