In North Carolina, New Political Maps Don’t End Old Disputes

When a North Carolina state court struck down the state’s legislative political maps nearly two weeks ago, it said the maps had been drawn “with surgical precision” to keep Republicans in control of both chambers.

On Tuesday, state legislators approved new electoral maps — drawn under a court directive to ignore partisan considerations — that appear to give Republicans a slight political edge, some experts said.

Republican legislators dismissed the early assessments as sour grapes. Democrats who sued to overturn the old maps always sought “a Democratic judicial gerrymander that ensures a Democratic majority,” state Senate Leader Phil Berger, a Republican from south-central North Carolina, said in a statement. “It’s not about fair maps and never has been.”

The state court that threw out the original maps will have the final say this fall and will rule on their fairness after an analysis by a Stanford University expert.

A preliminary analysis of the maps by PlanScore, a nonpartisan group that analyzes the political and demographic leanings of maps nationwide, suggested that the maps were an improvement over their predecessors.

“The House and Senate maps are both substantially less biased toward Republicans than the plans the court invalidated,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a University of Chicago law professor and expert on gerrymandering, said in an email. “Both maps, however, retain a modest pro-Republican skew, with the House map performing somewhat worse than the Senate map.”

Stephanopoulos added, however, that the analysis of the maps did not account for the advantages of incumbency. And that advantage was responsible for much of the skepticism voiced by some Democrats on Tuesday.

A three-judge panel of the state court unanimously ordered the redrawing after Democrats and voting-rights advocates had challenged parts of the old maps, arguing that they violated the state constitution’s guarantees of free speech and free elections. The decision was a major blow to Republicans, who control the Legislature in one of the nation’s most bitterly divided states, and indicated that state courts could act to rein in patently partisan electoral maps after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June, by a 5-4 margin, that federal courts could not.

Many legal experts said they anticipated that a spate of similar lawsuits will follow in state courts across the country. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court cited provisions of its constitution in striking down the state’s congressional map in January 2018.

The final votes in North Carolina on the new maps followed days of drafting by legislative committees from the two chambers, their work displayed on hearing-room screens and livestreamed online to meet a court requirement that the process be conducted entirely in public.

Leaders of both parties called the process the most transparent in state history; Republicans had drawn the invalidated set of maps in secret, relying on advice from a Republican Party expert on gerrymandering.

Sen. Dan Blue, the leading Democrat in that chamber, said the drafting of the Senate map had been “a remarkable experience, especially when you consider the current political climate” in the critical swing state.

Republicans who controlled both mapmaking committees made an elaborate effort to underscore the nonpartisan nature of the work, which began with a lottery-style selection of two randomly generated political maps as templates for redrafting. The maps were taken from thousands that plaintiffs in the court case had produced to make a statistical case against the Republican gerrymandering.

Critics quickly noted, however, that the Senate baseline was taken from a set of random maps that accounted for incumbency in a chamber where nearly 6 in 10 incumbents are Republicans. The House baseline did not consider incumbents — but a central principle of the drafting process was to allow incumbent legislators, 55% of them Republicans, a chance to draw their own district boundaries.

The House baseline was further complicated by the fact that it “double-bunked” a number of Democratic legislators in the same districts, forcing them to divide the districts’ Democrats among themselves to increase their chances of reelection. Only a handful of Republicans faced the same problem.

The court order had stated that mapmakers could consider incumbency in setting boundaries but did not require it.

“Legislators being legislators, they were doing things to benefit themselves,” J. Michael Bitzer, a scholar of North Carolina politics at Catawba College, said in an interview. “You try and protect incumbents because they have the highest reelection percentages.”

In the House, Democrats noted that Republicans had declined a request by the chamber’s Democratic leader to serve on the redistricting committee, opting instead for legislators who had not previously drafted political maps. The committee was also criticized for failing to hold a public hearing on its map until the map had been drawn and approved by the full House.

Republicans said the Senate would be able to make changes suggested by the public when it took up the map. In the end, no changes were made.

Rep. Robert Reives, a Democrat on the House redistricting committee, said he was not saying that Republicans had engaged in “some intentional kind of tomfoolery.” But he said he believed that, in the end, Republicans nonetheless retained an edge.

Common Cause North Carolina, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the redrafting, will submit a formal comment on the maps later, its deputy director, Brent Laurenz, said in an interview.

“We were a little disappointed in the lack of public engagement in the process,” he said, and legislators in the House appeared to have tweaked some districts “more than needed.”

“You still had politicians walking up there carving up their own districts to their advantage,” he said. “It was illuminating, I guess, to see them go up there.”