Democrats’ best hope for redrawing New York State congressional lines to their advantage ahead of the 2026 midterm elections rests on a lawsuit being heard in a Manhattan courtroom this week.
The case centers on the 11th Congressional District, which includes Staten Island and parts of South Brooklyn and is represented by New York City’s only Republican in Congress, Nicole Malliotakis.
A law firm closely allied with the Democratic Party claims that the district disenfranchised Black and Latino voters and is proposing a new district that would combine Staten Island and a sizable slice of Lower Manhattan.
Lawyers for those suing are seeking to prove that the current lines ensure that the preferred candidates of the district’s growing Black and Latino population, usually Democrats, typically lose. Republicans defending the lines have pointed out that Ms. Malliotakis is herself of Hispanic heritage. (She is half Cuban American and half Greek American.)
On Tuesday, in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, lawyers debated — at times heatedly — questions of geography, whether the race of voters or of candidates was most relevant and how many people commute on the Staten Island Ferry.
The suit, filed by the Elias Law Group, comes after Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, vowed retribution for Republican redistricting actions in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri and Ohio. President Trump has explicitly called upon Republican state leaders to gerrymander districts in the upcoming midterm elections to ensure the House of Representatives remains under Republican control.
Democrats in New York have relatively few options under the current map; the party’s success in flipping seats on Long Island and upstate in 2024 puts them in a somewhat defensive posture. Republicans hold only seven of the state’s 26 seats.
And Democrats are expected to face an uphill battle in the case as they contest the lines drawn and approved in 2024 by the Democrat-dominated State Legislature.
If they succeed, the 10th Congressional District, which Daniel Goldman represents, would also be redrawn. The resulting shuffle could theoretically push Mr. Goldman, who is facing primary challenger Brad Lander, the former city comptroller, to run in a newly redrawn 11th Congressional District, which would include his home near Battery Park.
The case will be decided by Acting Justice Jeffrey H. Pearlman, a Democrat first appointed to the bench by Ms. Hochul. The Republican respondents argued that he should bow out because of his history of working for Democrats, including Ms. Hochul, for whom he served as special counsel.
Justice Pearlman denied the motion last month, writing in his ruling that he had never advised the governor nor any other party on the issues at stake in the case.
A decision is expected after the trial’s conclusion, in time for petitions to be filed for 2026 midterm campaigns.
In court on Tuesday, Maxwell Palmer, a political scientist at Boston University, testified about a report he wrote, which found that there was racially polarized voting in the Staten Island congressional district.
Candidates favored by Black and Latino voters won in five of the 20 elections studied by Mr. Palmer, the basis of his conclusion that those candidates were “usually defeated.” Andrew M. Braunstein, a lawyer for those defending the lines, including Ms. Malliotakis, questioned whether “usually defeated” was a defined term in social science research.
“Losing three-quarters of the time means not having a high success rate,” Mr. Palmer retorted.
In other testimony, a demographer, William Cooper, explained how he drew the map of the proposed new districts.
Mr. Cooper argued that though his lines stretched across the bay to include parts of Lower Manhattan, his proposed district was compact and strove to keep neighborhoods with ethnically similar communities together.
“There are no voters between Staten Island and Manhattan,” Mr. Cooper said. “From the voters’ perspective on the ground, the districts are compact and easy to understand.”
The map was met with some skepticism, however. In an effort to hammer home the differences between the areas being joined together, Bennet J. Moskowitz, another lawyer for those defending the lines, asked Mr. Cooper whether neighborhoods like the East Village, which he called “a hub of counterculture,” were “culturally similar” to Staten Island.
“Do you know what St. Marks Place is,” Mr. Moskowitz asked. “Do you know what CBGBs is, or was?”
The maps in dispute were drawn after a protracted redistricting skirmish among Democrats, Republicans and the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission, whose actual lack of independence has made it the target of derision.
After the commission’s failure to reach a decision in 2021, Democrats in the State Legislature redrew many Republican districts to favor their own party, including Ms. Malliotakis’s district on Staten Island. Republicans sued and ultimately succeeded in having those maps redrawn by a court-appointed special master.
After Democrats challenged the special master’s maps and won, the job fell once again on the Independent Redistricting Commission, which once again failed to reach a consensus, passing the buck to the Democratic majority in the Legislature.
It was then that Democrats did something surprising: They drew a map that played few favorites. Gone were the most aggressive gerrymanders, including efforts to create a district that would lead to Ms. Malliotakis’s defeat.
The maps received grudging approval from both the Democratic minority leader of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, and the Republican minority leader in the State Assembly, Will Barclay. “We are in a blue state, and I think these could actually be worse,” Mr. Barclay said.
But now, Democrats are arguing that the map fails to account for the Black and Latino population of Staten Island, which has grown from 11 percent to 30 percent over the past 40 years.
They are also hoping to persuade the judge to apply the state’s new John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which provides a lower standard for remedying racial vote dilution than federal law does.
The venue of the trial — in Manhattan, rather than in Richmond County on Staten Island — was also a result of machinations of Albany Democrats. Several years ago, they passed legislation requiring all redistricting cases to be filed in a preselected set of jurisdictions. Republicans argued that the gambit was an effort to avoid trying these cases before judges in more conservative parts of the state, where the G.O.P. had previously had success.
Respondents have marshaled their own experts to argue that the existing maps, which combine Staten Island with a conservative portion of South Brooklyn, are in fact fitting.
One of those experts, Joseph Borelli, a Republican and minority leader on the City Council, wrote in a submission to the court that the suit ignored the racial diversity of Staten Island and the elections there of officials of Black, Asian and Hispanic descent.
Ultimately, he argued that the current maps represented the geographical reality of the island, which is connected by bridges to South Brooklyn and New Jersey, but not Manhattan.
“Staten Island remains solely connected to Brooklyn,” he wrote, “with no prospect of ever connecting to any other part of New York on the horizon.”
Grace Ashford covers New York government and politics for The Times.
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