The redistricting wars are a relatively new phenomenon across the country.

What began with President Donald Trump pushing Republican states to redraw their congressional boundaries to keep a Republican Congress has turned into a battle of political oneupmanship that New York just had to get in on. Of course, fighting about redistricting is nothing new in New York, which has seen the battles in the partisan warfare over congressional district boundaries take place far too regularly over the past 12 years for our liking. In our view the state’s political games take time and energy away from the actual work of governing – though perhaps the distractions are helpful to residents of rural areas like ours. Imagine what the Democrats who run New York state would do if they were focused on governing. But we digress.

Thanks to Trump, Republicans sounded a bit hypocritical last week pushing back against Democrats’ attempts to change the state constitution to allow Democrats to redraw congressional boundaries in 2028. State Republicans made the right arguments, but they ring hollow because everyone knows the partisan warfare began in earnest when Trump began asking states to redistrict. Democrats in New York who have been trying to circumvent the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission to gerrymander congressional seats in New York for the past few years weren’t going to dismiss an opportunity to take the moral high ground from Republicans in New York when it came to redistricting. An opportunity was served up on a silver platter and Democrats seized it.

The public has supported efforts to place redistricting above the partisan fray in New York. State residents liked the idea of independent redistricting when they passed a constitutional amendment in 2014 creating the commission. They reaffirmed that preference in 2021 when Democrats tried to change the state constitution to give the political majority more power in the redistricting process. In those fights Republicans had the moral high ground. Thanks to Trump they’ve lost that position. Now Republicans and Democrats are in a streetfight – and Democrats have the enrollment edge.

That means we have another year of a fight that Trump escalated, and it’s a fight that will have repercussions for New York Republicans long after Trump is no longer president. We hope a temporary majority in Congress was worth it.