Dem
47
GOP
53
If there is a state that is a better poster child for the abuses of gerrymandering than North Carolina, we can't imagine what state that might be. By PVI, the Tar Heel State is R+1. In last year's presidential election, Donald Trump took 51% of the vote to 48% for Kamala Harris. And yet, the state's U.S. House delegation is 10R, 4D (i.e., 71% Republican), its state Senate is 30R, 20D (i.e., 60% Republican) and its state Legislature is 71R, 49D (i.e., 59.1% Republican).
Under these circumstances, and with the national gerrymandering derby well underway, North Carolina Republicans have decided that when it comes to those 14 House seats, they want more, more, more. And so yesterday, the leaders of the state legislature announced that they will soon vote to adopt new district maps. Speaker of the North Carolina House Destin Hall (R) explained:
President Trump earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican Congressional seat. Our state won't stand by while Democrats like Gavin Newsom redraw districts to aid in their effort to obtain a majority in the U.S. House. We will not allow them to undermine the will of the voters and President Trump's agenda.
Hmmm... Trump won North Carolina by 3 points. He won the popular vote nationally by 1.5 points. Hall's dictionary must have a different definition of "mandate" than ours does.
Hall & Co. have not provided specifics as to what they hope to achieve with the new maps. However, a quick gander at the state's four Democratic districts pretty much tells the tale. NC-02 is D+17, NC-04 is D+23 and NC-12 is D+24. Those three would appear to be beyond reach; there are only two double-digit Republican districts in the state (NC-03 and NC-08), and both of those are just barely double-digit, at R+10. If Democratic voters were moved out of the three deep-blue districts, they would have to go somewhere, and anywhere they went, they would put one or more of the red districts at greater risk.
This means that there's only one real target, and that is NC-01. It covers northeastern North Carolina, meaning it's got a fair number of rural, Black voters, and also some portions of the research triangle. It is R+1, and is currently represented by Don Davis (D), who is Black. North Carolina is 20% Black overall, which implies there should be three districts that are plausibly winnable by Black candidates. Right now, there are. If NC-01 gets whitened, then there will presumably be only two. How that might play out in court, when the inevitable lawsuits come, we do not know, because we have no idea how the current rules established by the Supreme Court work. We're not sure even the Supreme Court understands.
To make NC-01 red enough to put an incumbent member of Congress at risk, the NC legislature will need to get it to R+5 or R+6. It's directly north of NC-03—i.e., one of the R+10 districts—so some of the Republicans can come from there. But again, the state's district map is already aggressively gerrymandered, and with little protection against a blue wave. Trying to lay claim to NC-01 will make the GOP even more vulnerable to that possibility, and in a year with a key U.S. Senate contest, when Democrats are going to be out in force. We wonder if, once cooler heads take a look at the lay of the land, the Republicans in the state House might think better of their plan.
Meanwhile, one can only hope that all of these gerrymandering shenanigans, in red states and in blue, will lead to national, bipartisan sentiment for some sort of Congress-mandated, nonpartisan map-drawing process. Recall that Democratic voters are generally anti-gerrymandering, and many Republican voters are, too. So, it's not impossible. Not likely, but not impossible. (Z)