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It's been just over two years since New York's congressional districts were thrown into chaos by a judge's ruling, so obviously we're long overdue to reset the clock.
Late Wednesday afternoon, a state judge ruled in favor of a longshot lawsuit that claims New York's 11th congressional district, which encompasses all of Staten Island and most of Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and Bath Beach in Brooklyn, violates state laws against racial discrimination, by making the district's growing Black and Latine communities "systematically unable to influence elections."
The plaintiffs in the case, who included Democratic voters on Staten Island, and who were represented by the Elias Law Group (which was founded to help Democrats win redistricting battles), had argued that the easiest remedy would be for the judge to order that overwhelmingly-Democratic Lower Manhattan be switched from the 10th congressional district (currently represented by Dan Goldman and spanning Lower Manhattan to brownstone Brooklyn), to the 11th, making a traditionally right-leaning district suddenly an extremely competitive one—and giving New York Democrats the opportunity to pick up another House seat heading into the midterms.