Democrats make surprising inroads in redistricting fight

NEW YORK (AP) — Democrats braced for disaster when state legislatures began redrawing congressional maps, fearing that Republican dominance of statehouses would tilt power away from them for the next decade.But as the redistricting process reaches its final stages, that anxiety is beginning to ease.For Democrats, the worst case scenario of losing well over a dozen seats in the U.S. House appears unlikely to happen. Now Democrats have a supermajority in both houses.The New York Legislature already rejected the commission’s first attempt at maps, and can seize control if it rejects the second one, due by Tuesday.“The Democratic leadership and those on the far left that run the show in Albany, they’re hellbent to take this process over to derail the commission, and to have the the party bosses in Albany draw the maps,” said Nick Langworthy, chairman of the New York GOP. “We are not scared of districts where voters decide the outcome.”Joel Wertheimer, a Democratic civil rights lawyer and analyst for the liberal group Data for Progress, has predicted for months that redistricting will shift the typical congressional district from about two percentage points to the right of the national vote to the five-point margin of Biden’s 2020 popular vote victory.He credits it to a change in the mindset of Democrats willing to risk bigger losses for an eventual better shot at the 218 seats needed to control the House.“I think the calculation that Democrats are making is, do we care if we have 180 or 190 seats?” Wertheimer said.