The Dems trouble in blue New York

 Politico:

Democrats began the year clinging to New York state as a bulwark against GOP gerrymandering and a potentially brutal midterm. Instead, it’s become a giant headache.

A redistricting mishap and President Joe Biden’s lingering toxicity upended Democratic hopes of creating a seawall of deep-blue seats that could offset House losses elsewhere. They started the cycle thinking they could net at least three seats — now, in the worst-case scenario, they could lose as many as five. On top of that, their own party campaign chairman faces both a primary and a potential general election slog.

“We’ve gone from a map that looked like a slam dunk to just being slammed,” said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who once led the House Democratic campaign arm. “This is one of the most competitive environments that I’ve seen in New York at every level.”

The state is hosting a slew of competitive primaries Tuesday in heavily Democratic districts, including a dozen-candidate pileup for an open seat in Manhattan and Brooklyn and an incumbent-versus-incumbent battle between two veteran committee chairs. But primary voters will basically have the final say in those contests. In several purple-tinged seats, they will only finalize matchups in races that Republicans hope to contest in the fall in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island.

It’s an uncomfortable situation many New York Democrats feel was avoidable. The party used its control of state government to thwart a bipartisan commission tasked with drawing the new political lines, instead passing a map that could have yielded Democrats 22 of the state’s 26 districts. (After 2020, the delegation split was 19 Democrats to 8 Republicans. The state is set to lose a district due to reapportionment after the 2020 census.) But in one of the most consequential developments of the redistricting cycle, a Democratic-leaning court struck down the map as an illegal partisan gerrymander and imposed its own.

That court-drawn map, coupled with Biden’s still-low approval ratings and ominous historical trends, have Democrats across the state bracing for impact, particularly in any seat Biden carried by less than double-digits in 2020.
...

Local elections last year on Long Island ended in a rout for Democrats, with the GOP nabbing a slew of offices in Nassau and Suffolk counties after their candidates hammered Democrats on crime rates and the state’s new bail reform laws. Now, Democratic Reps. Tom Suozzi and Kathleen Rice are vacating House seats there, leaving Republicans a chance to build on their gains without having to take on well-funded incumbents.
...

There is much more.

The new bail law has been a disaster which has mainly benefited criminals who are back on the streets the same day they are arrested in most cases.  Politicians who supported that nonsense deserve to be beaten.  What the Democrats seem to be complaining about also is a failure of the party to rig the elections in more districts.