I don’t see any mention of them involving themselves in redistricting in the article
A)Not cool!
B)I want to see THAT James Bond movie
What the deal with that 1944 race, DJ, new districts, Fish lost to a fellow Republican, who failed to beat him in the primary but won in November on the rat line and was himself defeated in the primary in ‘46?
In 1932, NY was awarded 2 additional House seats (since there hadn’t been a national reapportionment since 1912). Presumably, there must have been an impasse between Dem Governor Herbert Lehman and the Republican legislature, so the seats were both up as at-large for the entire state. Another decade passed and in 1942, they had elected Democrats to both seats until that year when a Republican woman (Winifred Stanley) managed to capture one and Thomas Dewey won the Governorship.
Presumably, Dewey and the GOP legislature were able to come up with a plan to redistrict the two at-large seats into 45 districts, hence the unusual 1944 redistricting. Dewey was not a fan of Fish and had his district chopped up into 3 districts, which forced Fish into new counties (Fish didn’t live in the new 29th, but in the 27th, which was stretched down to the Bronx, which wouldn’t have been hospitable to him). When liberal Republican Augustus Bennet couldn’t beat Fish in the primary, he had the Democrat line and used all the other party lines (except the miniscule Jeffersonian Party) to narrowly beat Fish (though he served as a Republican during his single term). Bennet, as you cited, would lose renomination as a Republican in 1946 to FDR’s first cousin, Katharine St. George, who would hold the seat until losing in the anti-Goldwater backlash of 1964.