The district numbers don’t tell the history of a seat necessarily. They’re often renumbered every decade. NY once had 45 Congressional districts, but has lost seats in every census since 1953, now down to 27 seats, and probably to 25 in 2023. They used to be small and compact seats, but have had to be augmented because of the losses.
Nadler has never represented Westchester, only a chunk of NYC (presently the West Side of Manhattan and a chunk of Brooklyn). His seat is presently the 10th (2013-, it was the 8th from 1993-2013, it was the 17th from 1983-93 (when he was first elected in 1992). The original “heart” of the district, its ancestral section (which was between 86th-125th Streets in Manhattan’s Upper West Side) has not elected a Republican since the 1920 GOP landslide when Walter Chandler represented it (then the 19th). When Chandler lost in 1922, the GOP has never won it back. Other parts of the present district have had GOP members, but the basic core of the seat has been uninterrupted Dem for 97 years.
The Westchester District (now including Rockland County) when it was the 20th in the 1980s, briefly had a Conservative Republican when the seat was more GOP-leaning (Joe DioGuardi) from 1985-89, but when the suburbs started trending moonbat, Nita Lowey defeated DioGuardi in 1988 and has held it with little problem since (aside from an underwhelming 56-44% margin in 2014, the last time a Republican bothered to run).
FYI
12 DEMS are running for this seat. Farkas won’t win.
The Rockland side of what’s now NY17 was, until 2006 part of Ben Gilman’s district, since then it’s been hopelessly Dem. You really can’t go home again. My old stomping grounds really went down the tubes