Political district maps on their way to adoption in the North Carolina General Assembly show clear indications of partisan gerrymandering, according to a political scientist who has covered state politics for decades. And not a whole lot can be done to stop them.
A Congressional map approved along party lines in the state Senate on Tuesday would give Republican candidates at least a 10-4 edge over Democrats in U.S. House races next year, said Prof. Michael Bitzer of Catawba College. Bitzer, author of Redistricting and Gerrymandering in North Carolina: Battlelines in the Tar Heel State, said based on past election data, including the 2020 presidential, U.S. Senate, and state Attorney General races in North Carolina, Republicans could go from a 7-7 split with Democrats to 10-4.
Key to the Republicans' strategy this year is a change to the makeup of the North Carolina Supreme Court. In 2022, in response to litigation challenging the constitutionality of GOP-slanted maps, a 4-3 Democratic majority of justices ruled the legislature's Republican super majority had violated the state constitution's free elections clause by gerrymandering maps with excessive partisan bias.
Under court order, lawmakers redrew maps and the two major parties split the state's 14 Congressional seats 50-50. But Republicans won the two state Supreme Court seats up for grabs in the midterm elections and now hold a 5-2 majority on the bench.
Partisan gerrymandering is a 'political question,' NC Supreme Court's GOP majority has said
The court's new GOP majority then revisited the issue of partisan gerrymandering and reversed the previous majority's year-old ruling.
And, Bitzer recalled, the new court majority said, "'No, this is really a political question that the courts can't determine, it's best left up to the legislature.'"
Bitzer said that allowed Republican lawmakers to re-engage in aggressive gerrymandering for the Congressional map, using the technique known as "packing" and "cracking." That means either packing Democratic voters tightly into as few districts as possible where Democratic candidates could garner as much as 75 percent of the vote, and cracking, or breaking up, areas with high concentrations of Democrats and spreading them out by moving them into districts with higher numbers of Republican-leaning voters.
"That cracking helps to dilute Democratic votes and makes those districts reliably Republican," Bitzer explained.
Bitzer said the U.S. Congressional map gives strong indications Republicans broke up areas with more concentrated Black populations in Forsyth and Guilford counties - home, respectively, to High Point and Greensboro - into multiple districts. Bitzer said those diluted urban districts then "got paired with surrounding suburban counties and, particularly, rural counties," which lean red.
As for state legislative districts, Bitzer said Republicans have drawn maps that have a strong chance of preserving their veto-proof super majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Bitzer noted that constitutional provisions, like requiring legislators to keep counties whole when drawing state legislative districts, make it more difficult for lawmakers to gerrymander these maps more aggressively.
Republican redistricting chairs did not use racial data to draw new maps
Republican Sen. Ralph Hise, a co-chair of the Senate's redistricting committee, maintained that the maps were drawn applying traditional redistricting criteria, such as maintaining equal population across districts and minimizing the splitting of municipalities and precincts.
Racial data were not used, Hise argued, because doing so would violate the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.
"To be clear, the chairs did not believe that the use of racial data would be helpful in reaching any political or other legislative redistricting goal," Hise told his fellow senators.
Once the proposed maps were completed, Republican lawmakers instructed non-partisan legislative staff to make the statistical packs used in drawing the new plans available to all lawmakers and the public--packs that include past partisan election data--and to include racial data so that Democrats and voting rights advocates could raise objections if they believed the GOP-drawn plans could violate federal Voting Rights Act protections. Such protections are meant to preserve the voting power of Black and minority communities, protections recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in an Alabama case known as Allen v. Milligan.
Hise and another redistricting co-chair, Republican Sen. Warren Daniel, told fellow senators they reviewed arguments submitted after the racial data were released and that they concluded there was no evidence that the maps needed to be altered to protect minority communities' voting power.
"So, here's the truth," Daniel said, defending the new state Senate district map in floor debate on Tuesday, "Democrats in North Carolina have blamed their electoral failures on so-called gerrymandering for over a decade instead of looking in the mirror and understanding that voters have time and time again rejected their out of touch far-left policies."
In 2022, voters across North Carolina cast a total of only about 4.4% more votes for the 14 Republican candidates for the U.S House than they did for their Democratic opponents.
In the 2010s, federal and state courts have rejected GOP drawn maps for being both unconstitutionally gerrymandered on the basis of race and partisanship.
Republicans fell one state House seat short of an outright super majority in 2022. But Mecklenburg Rep. Tricia Cotham then switched parties, leaving Democrats and joining Republicans. After the switch, the GOP overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's veto of legislation that restricted abortion access and a bill that restricted transgender rights in terms of health care and participation in scholastic sports.
Republicans using gerrymandering to 'penalize me for doing my job,' Democratic state senator says
One casualty of the new GOP maps could be state Sen. Natasha Marcus, a Democrat, whose current district covers the northwest corner of Mecklenburg County and includes part of the Town of Davidson. Under the new state Senate district map, Marcus, who has been outspoken in her defense of progressive issues, would have to run in a more conservative area against an incumbent Republican. On Tuesday, she called the GOP gerrymandering efforts "undemocratic."
"I fight hard for the things that they sent me here to fight for," Marcus said. "Reproductive freedom, public education, environmental protections, clean energy, equality."
She added, in comments aimed at the Republican majority: "And now you are using gerrymandering to penalize me for doing my job, for representing my constituents."
In another key party-line vote on Tuesday, the state Senate gave preliminary approval to a new map for North Carolina Senate districts. Under that plan, it's likely the GOP will hold onto a super majority in the state Senate.
The state House approved its own legislative district map along party lines on Tuesday. The maps will cross over to the opposite chambers on Wednesday for final votes. Under North Carolina law, the governor has no veto power over district maps.
