Reapportionment could help Dems pick up more seats

’Tis far, far better to win election to the New York State Senate in which 160,000 votes were cast by a scant 3168 votes, as Michelle Hinchey did a month ago, than to suffer a razor-thin loss by 1369 votes out of about 140,000 cast, as Jen Metzger did. Luckily, there’s always another tomorrow.

The contests were so close that asking why one Ulster County candidate won while another lost is statistically meaningless, a bit like asking why a coin flipped once came out heads rather than tails. Still, some observations about the differences between the two senatorial districts and the candidates competing in them can be useful. 

Both districts were carved out in 2010 to increase the chances of success of Republican incumbents, in Hinchey’s case well-known businessman and then-assemblyperson George Amedore, and in Metzger’s case relatively moderate long-time Orange County politician John Bonacic. In both cases, artful gerrymandering was involved, resulting in sprawling districts which seemed to stretch from one end of creation to the other.

Amedore’s seat, held for two years in 2012 by Montgomery County farmer Cecilia Tkaczyk, a Democrat, seemed secure for the GOP. Amedore decided this year to join the many other senior Republican state senators declining for various reasons to run again. Rich Amedure, a retired state police officer from Montgomery County, became the GOP standard-bearer against Hinchey, a public-relations professional and first-time political candidate with an illustrious family heritage.

Incumbent Jen Metzger of Rosendale became a state senator in 2018, the year of the blue wave. As an elected officeholder in an electorally vulnerable district, she was the beneficiary of strong support from the Democratic caucus. Her colleagues made her chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, a significant responsibility for a freshman member, and she was liberally gifted with the perks and constituent-support services of her office. 

John Bonacic had been senator for that district for 20 years — ten two-year terms – and a state assemblyperson for nine years before that. With Donald Trump at the head of the ticket in a presidential year, voter turnout in Republican areas was very strong, and it had coattails. All three counties in the district other than Ulster – Orange, Sullivan and Delaware – supported President Donald Trump by comfortable margins in the 2020 presidential vote.

Metzger’s GOP opponent this year, Mike Martucci, was a well-known Orange County businessman, farmer, philanthropist whose main occupation has been as a school-bus contractor.  He describes himself as above all a devoted family man. Metzger too has a supportive family, and is best known for her relentless dedication on environmental and energy issues. 

The districts

The Amedore senatorial district consists starting from its most northwest point consists of all Montgomery County, parts of western Schenectady County, a portion of the suburbs of Albany, and that county’s sparsely populated hill towns, all Greene County, and much of eastern Ulster County south to Lloyd. Greene and Montgomery counties, each with populations under 50,000, are overwhelmingly Republican in enrollment. Ulster, of course, is now heavily Democratic, and has become more so in the decade since the district’s boundaries were set. Finally, the three towns of Schenectady County in the district lean toward the Democrats in enrollment but often vote Republican. The suburb of Guilderland out near Colonie is where the most Albany County voters in the senatorial district are concentrated.

In terms of voting, the Ulster County portion constitutes about a third of the population of the entire 46th Senatorial District, the Albany County portion about a quarter. The remainder is split fairly evenly into three smaller county areas: Greene and Montgomery counties and the part of Schenectady County in the district.

The 42nd Senatorial District is centered in Orange County, where slightly more than half the voters in the Martucci-Metzger race live, with an additional quarter in Sullivan County and most of the rest from Rosendale southward in Ulster County. The western Orange district extends south as far as Warwick. Population growth has brought a mix of New York City people in recent years, many still commuting there to blue-collar, service, and creative work. 

Martucci and Metzger appealed to them for different reasons. The story of the 2020 election is that Metzger’s popularity in her home county of Ulster wasn’t quite sufficient to offset Martucci’s modest vote margins over her in Orange, Sullivan and Delaware counties.

The reapportionment

With the drama of the 2020 national election fading slowly into the background, political junkies will soon be turning their attention toward one of the most important items of the next order of business: the 2020 reapportionment. By next month, the Bureau of the Census should release preliminary numbers outlining which states will be gaining congressional seats and which ones losing them. All the states will be grappling with the redistricting of their legislatures.

New York Republicans did well at the ballot box in this November’s congressional and legislative elections. When the 30 percent or so of absentee and mail-in votes were added, however, the GOP saw a large portion of their success vanish. New York State had a strange electoral calendar, with the earliest votes counted last. 

As in the Hinchey and Metzger races, the strongly Democratic early vote counted late was what made the races so close. The Hinchey organization watched with growing satisfaction as the count of county-run mail-in ballots transformed their candidate from an election-night loser into an eventual winner.

Meanwhile, Jen Metzger couldn’t quite manage the same political resurrection

Now the Democrats, again in control of the state legislature, are already scheming to take the GOP gains away from them. They’ll pay even closer attention to the subject that interests them most, the boundaries of their own districts. At the same time, expect conflict within the parties. In many one-party districts, the greater threat to incumbency comes from more conservative or more radical elements within their own party than from the other major party.

What might that mean for the 42nd and 46th State Senate Districts? The 2010 Republican redistricting concentrated the Democratic districts into State Senator Neil Breslin’s district, the better to give the GOP the advantage elsewhere. Redrawing the boundaries to give some of those voters to Michelle Hinchey wouldn’t damage Breslin’s dominant position 

Similarly, a case could be made for transferring a couple of Democratic-leaning Orange County towns in State Senator James Skoufis to a redrawn 42nd Senatorial District.

That may be the tomorrow the Democrats are planning.