Outgoing Rep. Mondaire Jones on Sunday blamed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and leading Democrats in Albany for Republicans flipping four Congressional seats during Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Jones, during an appearance on CNN, said the state’s redistricting process, as managed by state party leaders, propelled New York and the country into a “nightmare scenario.”
“New York [is] a deeply blue state where we could have gotten it right in the way that so many other blue states did,” Jones said.
New York turned a lighter shade of blue than the Democratic party would have liked this election cycle. Gov. Kathy Hochul held on in a tight race against Rep. Lee Zeldin, winning by less than 6%. Jones himself opted not to run in his newly drawn district, paving the way for his senior Democratic colleague, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, to lose his general election against Republican Mike Lawler.
Although Democrats will retain control of the U.S. Senate, many of the House races are still undecided. If the House flips red, a variety of issues — from the codification of abortion rights to student loan debt forgiveness — could stall in Congress. And New York’s Democratic leaders wasted little time in blaming each other.
Jones said the reason Democrats lost so many seats this election cycle is two-fold: One, because of redistricting, and two, because of a U.S. Census undercount that led to a lost congressional seat. He blamed the former governor on both counts.
“Redistricting in New York was an incompetent disaster. And it started by the way, like many of the recent horrible things in New York, with a guy by the name of Andrew Cuomo” Jones said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Jones said Cuomo withheld funds from the Legislature to boost participation in the Census, leading to the undercount. He said New York then lost its 27th congressional seat by just 89 votes.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for former governor Cuomo, pointed out that the Census Bureau actually published data saying New York overcounted its population in the 2020 census.
“It’s ridiculous and bizarre and they keep telling the same lie over and over again until they think it's the truth,” he said.
An additional blow to state party leaders this election cycle came when a federal court denied their proposed redistricting maps, saying they were gerrymandered by state Democratic leaders, violating state laws.
That scrambled Jones’ own district and gave him a reason to be doubly irked by Maloney, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which was partly responsible for the rejected maps.
“You’ve had the chair of the DCCC in coordination with Democratic leaders in Albany push through an aggressive gerrymandering that the court of appeal struck down as blatantly illegal,” said Jones. Jones ended up running in a crowded primary in New York's 10th Congressional District, but lost to Dan Goldman.
He went on to hint that Cuomo was to blame in this process as well. It was Cuomo who created the state’s redistricting process in the first place. After the 2012 census, Cuomo created an Independent Redistricting Commission made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. That created a deadlock that led to lawmakers drawing more partisan maps.
Cuomo’s spokesperson said the onus was on the lawmakers, rather than the former governor.
“I'm contending that they are trying to blame everybody and anybody and, and to the fact that most of them still have Cuomo Derangement Syndrome, it makes it easy,” said Azzopardi.
