Buffalo, N.Y. - You could call Mark Gristanti the accidental senator.
His huge upset win over Antoine Thompson in 2010 gave Republicans control of the state senate by just one seat.
Under the proposed new district map released by Senate Republicans on Thursday, Grisanti's seat would go from Grand Island in the north all the way down to Brant in the south.
Republicans call it a "waterfront district."
But starting near the Small Boat Harbor in Buffalo, Grisanti's district contains nothing but a long stretch of vacant land between Furhmann Boulevard and the water.
By law, every district must be contiguous, meaning it connects from one end to the other, and so in order to have Grisanti's district connect from Buffalo to Hamburg, the only piece of Lackawanna Grisanti has is the old abandoned Bethlehem Steel site, which of course has no voters.
In addition, Grisanti's district includes Orchard Park, certainly not a waterfront area, but Orchard Park does have a significant number of Republican voters.
If you take Grisanti's proposed district and turn it on its side, it kind of looks like a camel.
I spoke with a member of the New York Public Interest Research Group about this.
Scott Brown: "Are these crazy shaped districts all that unusual when it comes to protecting incumbents?"
Bill Mahoney, NYPIRG's Research Coordinator: "No, each of the districts in the state looks like a rorschach test. I think for some of them, they (legislators) may just have well taken a bottle of ink and scattered it across the map of the state of New York, because these (new districts) don't look like any shapes previously known to man."
In addition, Grisanti's current seat has all of Buffalo's East Side, but under the new map, that part of his district would be eliminated.
And that means the percentage of black voters in the district would decrease from 37% down to just 5%.
Scott Brown: "People are going to say this district was cut to give you a better chance of winning re-election."
Senator Mark Grisanti: "I don't look at it like that and I hope people don't look at it as being some issue of black and white. Whether there's an 'R' a 'D' a 'C' or an 'I' in front of my name, we accomplished a lot in working in a bi-partisan fashion with the governor this past year. Whatever my district is, I'll always put people first and not politics, and that's how i'll continue to govern myself."
Grisanti says he had no input into what his proposed new district looks like, that it was strictly a function of Republican leadership in the senate.
Governor Cuomo has called the Senate map, as well as the Assembly map, which was put together by Democrats, as "unacceptable."