[A new congressional map takes the Tar Heel State from having one
of the fairest maps in the country to its most biased — and voters
of color are among the big victims.]
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ANATOMY OF A NORTH CAROLINA GERRYMANDER  
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Michael Li, Peter Miller, Gina Feliz
October 27, 2023
Brennan Center for Justice
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_ A new congressional map takes the Tar Heel State from having one of
the fairest maps in the country to its most biased — and voters of
color are among the big victims. _

, AP

 

When states redrew congressional maps after the 2020 census, North
Carolina was one of the nation’s big success stories. That’s not
because lawmakers drew fair maps — they drew what would have been
one of the most extreme gerrymanders in the country. Rather, North
Carolina was a success because a majority of the North Carolina
Supreme Court, relying on state law, ruled that drawing maps to
entrench the party in charge violated the state constitution.

The result of the ruling was adoption of a court-drawn map that was
one of the fairest the Tar Heel State has seen in decades, with
Democrats and Republicans each winning seven seats in the 2022
midterms — a result in line with North Carolina’s status as one of
the country’s most hotly contested electoral battlegrounds.

But that win for voters has proven short lived.

After Republican candidates won two seats on the North Carolina
Supreme Court in the 2022 midterms, giving the court a conservative
majority, Republican lawmakers wasted no time in asking the court to
reverse earlier rulings that partisan gerrymandering violated the
state constitution.

The court’s new majority obliged, handing down a
controversial opinion
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late spring that abruptly abandoned any role for state courts in
policing gerrymandering, declaring that gerrymandering claims were
non-justiciable “political questions
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off limits to the judiciary.

With overtly partisan line drawing no longer illegal, Republicans
began preparing to undo the balance that had been established in the
maps. The question wasn’t whether the maps would get worse — it
was by how much.

The answer came this week: much worse. Under the new congressional map
rushed through the legislature on a party-line vote, a balanced,
50–50 map that reflected North Carolina’s purple state politics
was transformed into one that could elect as many as 11 Republicans
and just 3 Democrats. (North Carolina’s governor does not have the
power to veto election maps.)

By Brennan Center calculations, the new map easily ranks, along with
Texas’s, as one of the two most extreme congressional maps currently
in place. Indeed, the Republicans’ new North Carolina gerrymander is
so durable that even an exceptionally strong Democratic wave year
(think 2018) would not dislodge it. Even under the rosiest of
foreseeable scenarios, Democrats win at most 4 of 14 seats. Put
another way, Democrats could win a solid majority of the ballots cast
for Congress, but their candidates would win less than 30 percent of
seats thanks to Republicans’ carefully engineered gerrymander.

The Republican gerrymander has three components.

First, three compact, comfortably Democratic seats in the Piedmont
Triad (NC-06), metro Charlotte (NC-14), and metro Raleigh (NC-13) are
dismantled and converted into solidly Republican districts that spill
across multiple regions of the state.

Next, three urban Democratic districts — two in the Raleigh-Durham
region (NC-02 and NC-04) and one in metro Charlotte (NC-12) — are
made even more Democratic through the packing of additional
Democratic-leaning voters into them. Under the redrawn map, Joe Biden
in 2020 and Democratic Senate candidate Cheri Beasley in 2022 not only
win the districts but do so by overwhelming margins — in some cases
by nearly 50 percentage points.

Finally, in eastern North Carolina, the heavily rural but
Democratic-leaning First District is transformed through swapping of
counties into a Republican-trending tossup district that Beasley lost
by six points in 2022 race and that Biden barely carried in 2020.

The fallout from the new map has been swift. Democrat Rep. Jeff
Jackson, who currently represents the 14th District,
quickly announced
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would forgo a run for reelection in a radically redrawn district that
former President Trump would have carried by more than 16 points in
2020, but instead would seek election as North Carolina’s attorney
general.

And not surprisingly, in a state where politics and race are often
joined at the hip, many of the voters most impacted by a map that
discriminates against Democrats are voters of color.

In particular, Rep. Don Davis, a Black Democrat who represents the
First District, could face increasingly difficult electoral prospects
as the decade goes on if the rural portions of his district continue
the steady drift of recent years toward Republicans. And should Davis
retire, a non-incumbent Black Democrat would likely find the district
even harder to hold given the region’s pronounced racially polarized
voting and the lack of any incumbency advantage. In either case, the
redrawn map could mean the end of a performing district where Black
voters have successfully elected a Black Democrat since the 1990s.

The new map also divides Black communities in the Piedmont Triad (as
the cities of Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point are known)
between three different districts, all of which sprawl across
different regions of the state and all of which are very solidly
Republican. Under the old map, they had been kept together in the
Sixth District, a Piedmont Triad-centered district where a diverse,
multiracial coalition elected Democrat Kathy Manning to Congress.

Voters of color in Charlotte, likewise, are packed into the
overwhelmingly Democratic 12th District, which becomes more than 60
percent non-white, while neighboring 14th District sees its non-white
voting age population fall from nearly 40 percent to under 30 percent,
helping to transform the district into a strongly Republican seat.

Voters and advocates will almost certainly challenge the new map in
court. And recent wins in Alabama
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just this week in Georgia
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that it is still possible to win relief under federal law from
discriminatory maps.

But advocates also will enter the fight over North Carolina’s new
maps having to rely on a legal toolbox that has become decidedly
threadbare. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted key protections of the
Voting Rights Act, and in 2019, it ruled that federal courts could not
hear partisan gerrymandering claims. Congress has yet to step in to
provide a remedy.

Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to pass the Freedom to Vote Act
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Voting Rights Advancement Act
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two bills that together would have banned partisan gerrymandering by
statute and strengthened the Voting Rights Act. They passed the House
only to die in the Senate due to the failure of enough senators to
agree to changes to archaic filibuster rules.

If recent wins against gerrymandering in state courts
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the country provided a feeling that perhaps nothing more was needed
from Congress, North Carolina is a warning. In the fight against
gerrymandering and racially discriminatory maps, it is not enough to
rely exclusively on state courts. State courts and state constitutions
are important tools for protecting democratic rights, but, as North
Carolina illustrates, they can be subject to fickleness of state
politics. To make sure Americans have protections against
discriminatory line drawing, Congress also must act.

* North Carolina
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* elections
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* Gerrymandering
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