On Thursday, an intermediate state appellate court in New York — the Appellate Division for the Third Department, based in Albany — ruled in Hoffmann v. New York State Independent Redistricting Commission that the state’s congressional map needs to be redistricted again. This is not the last word: The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, will undoubtedly weigh in. And it’s not clear yet whether any of this will actually result in a new map.

Anything that upsets the current status quo is bad news for Republicans. The GOP won eleven of New York’s 26 House districts in 2022, up from eight of 27 in 2020 (and six in 2018). Under the current map, Republicans flipped Democrat-held districts: the third (George Santos, with 53.7 percent of the vote) and fourth (Anthony D’Esposito, with 51.8 percent of the vote) in the center of Long Island, and the 17th (Mike Lawler, with 49.3 percent of the vote) in the lower Hudson Valley, centered in Rockland and Putnam Counties. Republicans also won narrow victories in the newly drawn 19th (Marc Molinaro, with 49.9 percent) and 22nd (Brandon Williams, with 49.5 percent), elected a new representative in the first (Nick LaLota, with 54.1 percent), and were highly competitive in the 18th, which is wedged between the 17th and 19th and was won by Democrat Pat Ryan (49.6 percent), fresh off defeating Molinaro in a close midsummer special election. Only three Republicans were in districts safe enough to clear 60 percent of the vote: upstate representatives Claudia Tenney (64.1 percent in the 24th) and Nick Langworthy (the former state party chairman, newly elected in the 23d with 62.9 percent) and Staten Island’s Nicole Malliotakis (61.7 percent in the eleventh). Democrats had begun the 2022 redistricting cycle hoping to wipe Tenney and Malliotakis off the map. By contrast, eleven of the 15 Democrats won with at least 60 percent of the vote, eight of those (all concentrated in New York City) with at least 70 percent, and five of those with at least 80 percent. Republicans are already going to have an uphill battle reelecting Lawler, Williams, and D’Esposito and defending Santos’s seat, while only Ryan and Joe Morelle (53.3 percent in the 25th district) are remotely plausible pickups; a more favorable map for Democrats could shift the ball a lot.

Why is this still being litigated? In a nutshell, because last spring’s decision in Harkenrider v. Hochul throwing out the Democrats’ effort at an extreme partisan gerrymander was only partly about the partisan unfairness of the resulting map; it was also about the process. New York’s constitution requires that boundaries be drawn by an independent redistricting commission — and under the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Moore v. Harper, the state constitution and the state court get to tell the legislature what to do. Commissions of this nature are often dysfunctional, and New York’s is no exception; it deadlocked and sent two options to the state legislature instead of settling on a map approved by a majority of the commission. The Court of Appeals found that the legislature violated the state constitution by drawing its own map instead, but with too little time to go back to the commission, the court instead sent the case back to the trial court’s appointed special master to impose a map. (This was also done for the state senate, where Republicans also made some significant gains in 2022, but the Third Department’s decision only affects the congressional map because the challengers gave up on the state senate map.) The Hoffmann court concluded that a short-term remedy didn’t fix the problem: “The [Independent Redistricting Commission] had an indisputable duty under the NY Constitution to submit a second set of maps upon the rejection of its first set. . . . The language of [the] NY Constitution . . . makes clear that this duty is mandatory, not discretionary. It is undisputed that the IRC failed to perform this duty. . . . Harkenrider left unremedied the IRC’s failure to perform its duty to submit a second set of maps.”

What happens next? Even if the Court of Appeals agrees, the ball goes back to the same commission that failed to reach agreement before. There’s no guarantee it will succeed this time.