The New York State Senate has been in the news lately after Republicans attempted to seize control of the chamber in mid-session. We still don’t know how that struggle will play out, but a demographics expert at Queens College has studied long-term trends and come to an inescapable conclusion: no Republican majority is likely to survive 2010 redistricting.

“There is a very large population growth downstate in New York City and Westchester and a very large decline upstate,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, who conducted the analysis for The New York Times. “Basically, this is a rerun of 2000.”

(…)After the 2000 census, the Republican majority was able to minimize the impact of population losses in its upstate base in two ways, both of which survived legal challenges.

Generally, districts’ populations are not supposed to deviate by more than 10 percent. Inventive Republican mapmakers maintained their party’s edge in the 2002 election because when they redrew the district lines, they placed all the underpopulated districts upstate and most of the overpopulated ones in the heavily Democratic New York City metropolitan area. So they were able to cram more sparsely populated districts upstate.

In other words, faced with huge demographic shifts that favored Democrats, Republicans stretched their Senate gerrymander as far as they could in 2000 – and Democrats still took control by 2008. Ten years later, the very same demographic shifts still favor Democrats, but Republicans have run out of options for protecting their seats. Even if they regain control of the Senate, there simply isn’t a map that would keep them in power.

And with New York State investing millions of dollars to ensure an accurate Census count in the state (unlike in 2000, when urban centers like New York City suffered from chronic undercounting), it will be even more difficult for Republicans to cram Democratic voters into urban districts.