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How NC's new legislative maps measure up
Explore the findings from a new WRAL News analysis examining whether the latest redistricting process in the N.C. General Assembly produced less gerrymandered maps.
What does gerrymandering look like?
In September 2019, North Carolina lawmakers gathered yet again to redraw the lines for the state's legislative districts. This time, they were under a court-ordered deadline to deliver new maps after a three-judge panel found that the old versions skewed too far in favor of Republicans.
To demonstrate the extent of the partisan gerrymandering, expert witness and Duke University Mathematics Professor Jonathan Mattingly used thousands of computer-generated maps to re-sort votes from several statewide elections. Each of those maps showed the number of Republican or Democratic wins, depending on how the districts were carved up.
Mattingly’s method helps demonstrate how the actual maps submitted by lawmakers perform compared to all of the other map combinations.
With those benchmarks in mind, WRAL News re-sorted votes from five 2016 statewide races to see how Republicans and Democrats would perform under the new maps.
These results don't aim to predict outcomes in 2020. Instead, the goal is to see how the latest round of redrawn maps fare when measured against the larger universe of possible maps that state lawmakers could have created.
Explore our findings
Select a chamber and a race below to see how the votes stack up compared to the previous version — and to thousands of others generated by Mattingly's team.
For more on how we performed our analysis, read our detailed methodology.
Results from a simulated election with new state House districts using vote totals from the 2016 presidential race.
Sources: N.C. State Board of Elections, N.C. General Assembly, Common Cause v. Lewis
Read the methodology // Get the data
Read the methodology // Get the data
