NC lawmakers choose new congressional map, approve other redistricting changes

Lawmakers in the state Senate settled on new congressional districts Monday that would give North Carolina Republicans a significant edge in upcoming elections for U.S. House seats.

Meanwhile, both chambers in the General Assembly continued debating voting lines for their own chambers. The maps, made public last week, appear likely to boost Republicans’ influence in Washington and Raleigh for years to come.

Facing criticism from Democrats, Republicans defended the changes, which would give their party a sizable advantage in future congressional elections, as legal and fair. The new maps would also help Republicans likely keep control the state legislature.

"Republicans can expect to continue to win supermajorities, even when the Democrats win more than 50% of the statewide vote," said Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford.

"These maps are not going to reflect the electorate of North Carolina," she added.

While critics slammed the maps as overly gerrymandered, Republicans pointed to a ruling earlier this year from the North Carolina Supreme Court that greenlit politically motivated gerrymandering.

“It is clear in this process that we used political considerations when drawing these maps,” top redistricting official Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, told Democrats Monday when they questioned why certain parts of the state will be divided by the new lines.

Democratic lawmakers alleged Monday that the GOP is trying to push out vocal political opponents and women from their seats in the legislature, while also limiting the influence of Black voters statewide.

Redistricting is supposed to happen just once every ten years, but in practice it has been a near-constant process in North Carolina as new maps have been challenged in court, struck down, redrawn and on and on.

The latest maps are highly similar to maps ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court just last year. But that was when the court had a Democratic majority; Republicans retook the majority in January after winning two Supreme Court races in the 2022 elections and almost immediately overturned that precedent. The new GOP majority ruled that the legislature should face little to no oversight from state courts when it comes to accusations of gerrymandering.

In addition to picking which version of a congressional map to proceed with, state lawmakers also made some minor tweaks to the maps Monday, to the congressional as well as state legislative lines. One notable change to the congressional map took Fayetteville out of a district that extended to the Outer Banks and instead kept it combined with Wilmington, as it is currently.

More changes could be on the way as lawmakers work to finalize the maps. A final vote is expected Wednesday.

In the state's U.S. House delegation, Republicans and Democrats hold seven seats each under the current maps. The new districts would be expected to give Republicans either a 10-4 or 11-3 advantage, even if the statewide vote remains nearly evenly split.

Likewise, Republicans would be expected to keep their majorities in the state legislature even if most voters cast their ballots for Democrats, according to an analysis by Duke University's "Quantifying Gerrymandering" project. And if Republicans won 50% or more of the statewide vote, the maps could give the GOP more than 60% of the seats in both the state Senate and state House — enough for a veto-proof supermajority.

The state Senate map would target four Democrats, two each in Wake and Mecklenburg counties. The state House map would either flip Democratic-held seats, or turn existing competitive districts into safe Republican seats, in north Raleigh, south Charlotte, Greensboro, Burlington, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Greenville, Concord and Asheville.

Republicans dismiss Democratic complaints

The state Senate map targets Democrats in Wake and Mecklenburg counties by putting their homes into newly drawn, Republican-leaning districts — or into districts that a different legislator already represents, a process known as double-bunking.

Raleigh state Sen. Lisa Grafstein said Democrats who don't speak up much at the legislature seemed to have mostly been kept in safe districts, while the most vocal ones seem to have been targeted — including herself and Sen. Natasha Marcus, D-Mecklenburg. Grafstein, the only openly LGBTQ member of the Senate, has spoken forcefully against recent laws limiting transgender people's rights.

"I try to be outspoken and not care about the consequences," Grafstein said Monday, adding that the new Senate map "sends a signal, certainly, that folks like myself and Sen. Marcus who are outspoken are being treated differently than other folks."

Sen. Dan Blue, D-Wake, the top Democratic senator, said the new maps target Black voters like him, as well as women. Every one of the Democrats targeted in the new maps is a woman, he said. In the state Senate, 13 of the 20 Democrats are women — compared to just four of the 30 Republicans.

"A reasonable person would have to conclude that there's some sort of animus you have against women," Blue told Republican redistricting leaders Monday.

Hise said Republicans weren't trying to kick women out of the legislature when redrawing the maps, nor were they trying to target Black voters.

"I feel very strongly that we have got maps together at this point to meet all the legal criteria and will be upheld by the courts," he said.

Beyond broad statements like that, Hise and other Republicans said very little about the maps or the detailed decisions that went into them.

They've previously said their lawyers have advised them not to talk much about the process, given the lawsuits that are almost certain to be filed once the maps become law.

Republicans approved a few changes to the maps Monday. Most were minor. The most notable was to help the top House Democrat, Rep. Robert Reives (D-Chatham), who represents all of Chatham County and part of Randolph County. House Republicans had originally drawn Reives into a competitive district that leaned narrowly Democratic; Republicans agreed to a change Monday that made it a safer Democratic seat. Other changes dealt largely with swapping territory between two solidly Republican or two solidly Democratic seats.

Any attempts by Democrats to make more substantial changes likely won’t be approved by GOP lawmakers — who have full control over deciding how the new districts will look, since redistricting plans may not be vetoed by the governor.

In a speech Monday evening Reives acknowledged that Democrats engaged in gerrymandering in past decades but said that's no excuse for Republicans to do the same now. He committed to making changes to end gerrymandering, if Democrats take back control while he's still in office.

"It is less about keeping any party in power, and it's more about trying to make sure that people are heard," he said. "I think when people are heard, they have faith in government. That's how it works."

Analyzing the congressional lines

For the U.S. House seats, lawmakers had proposed two potential versions of a new map. But only one passed out of committee Monday: Senate Bill 757. It has 10 safe Republican seats, three safe Democratic seats and a tossup district, so it could result in either a 10-4 or 11-3 split in favor of Republicans.

It would make winning re-election a likely impossible task for three Democrats — U.S. Reps. Wiley Nickel, D-Wake; Jeff Jackson, D-Mecklenburg; and Kathy Manning, D-Greensboro — by drawing them into new, solidly Republican-leaning districts. A fourth member, Rep. Don Davis, D-Greene, would be placed into a competitive district that could go either way but leans Democratic. It would be the only competitive district of the 14 seats, based on recent past election results.

The other map the legislature ultimately chose not to use would've been an 11-3 Republican map with no competitive seats.

"We felt the best thing to do is to introduce the two maps so that folks could offer their comments," Senate leader Phil Berger told WRAL Monday before the committee began.

Afterward Hise offered few details as to why they chose one map over the other. "It's what we thought ... would be the most likely map to pass," he said.

Once the lines are approved the districts will be used in the 2024, 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections — unless struck down in court first. Republican attorney Phil Strach, who for years has represented the legislature in gerrymandering lawsuits, was watching the action in person Monday. So too was voting rights attorney Ann Webb from the group Common Cause, an anti-gerrymandering group whose recent lawsuits against the legislature succeeded in getting new maps for the 2020 and 2022 elections.

The maps split up the state's main urban areas around Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro and Fayetteville more than is legally necessary — breaking up Democratic voters and combining the pieces of those metro areas with more far-flung rural parts of the state, in order to create more districts that will be winnable by Republicans in future elections.

Berger said that even though an 11-3 split in favor of Republicans might not appear to proportionately represent an evenly split swing state like North Carolina, he believes such an argument to be "a very simplistic view of things."

New districts opening up for GOP

Of the state's seven current Republican members of Congress, all but Rep. Dan Bishop are assumed to be running for reelection next year. Bishop has said he'll run for attorney general instead. Bishop's district stretching between the south Charlotte suburbs and Lumberton is now open and remains solidly Republican-leaning.

And it's not the only opportunity for Republican politicians hoping to become members of Congress. The new map, as it stands now, creates several other opportunities for GOP hopefuls in addition to Bishop's now-empty seat.

• District 6, which includes pieces of Greensboro and High Point, stretching to just outside Charlotte picking up Lexington, Salisbury, Kannapolis and part of Concord. Manning is the incumbent in this district, which would lean solidly Republican as drawn.
• District 13, which curves around the Triangle. It includes Caswell, Person and most of Granville counties, on the Virginia border, as well as parts of the Raleigh suburbs around Wake Forest and Garner, plus Franklin, Johnston, Harnett and Lee counties. There's no incumbent.
• District 14, which stretches from the Charlotte suburbs west to Gastonia, Shelby, Forest city and Morganton. There's no incumbent.

One of the new congressional maps had an open district with no incumbent that includes Berger's home of Rockingham County. There were rumors it was drawn for his son, Rockingham County Commissioner Kevin Berger, to run in. The elder Berger dismissed that rumor Monday, saying he speaks with his son daily, adding: "I do not anticipate him running for Congress at this time." About an hour later, the Senate passed the other version of the congressional map, which doesn't include an open district around Rockingham County.

District 14 in the western part of the state is also empty and includes Cleveland County, the home of House Speaker Tim Moore. Both versions of the maps included that same district, which Moore is widely expected to run for once the lines are made official. Moore hasn't made such an announcement himself, but he has said he won't seek reelection to the legislature next year.

WRAL state government reporter Travis Fain contributed to this report.