Republican leaders propose new NC congressional districts that could strengthen GOP's power

North Carolina Republican lawmakers proposed new congressional districts Wednesday that, if approved, would likely unseat several Democrats and shift the state’s balanced representation in the U.S. House well to the right.

North Carolina’s 14-seat congressional delegation currently consists of seven Democrats and seven Republicans. State Republican lawmakers, who are tasked with redrawing the districts, unveiled two proposed maps that are to be debated by legislative committees on Thursday.

The newly drawn districts would flip as many as four U.S. House districts from blue to red in the 2024 elections — a boost to national Republicans, who control a shaky majority of just a few seats in the House, as illustrated by recent unsuccessful attempts by Republican members of Congress to pick a permanent Speaker of the House.

All told, North Carolina — where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans and unaffiliated voters make up the largest voting bloc — could be represented by up to 11 Republicans and as few as three Democrats in the House.

New maps for the state’s 50 Senate districts and 120 House districts were also made public Wednesday. Preliminary analysis indicates the newly proposed legislative maps would maintain Republican majorities in both chambers and could result in continued supermajorities.

Maps that give the GOP such lopsided victories don't match  the overall political makeup of North Carolina, where recent statewide races for president, governor and U.S. Senate have often been nearly tied, separated by only a small margin.

"These maps were created for one purpose only: to ensure Republicans win more House seats so that they can maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives," Greensboro Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning, who would face a tough path to reelection under either map, told WRAL Wednesday. "They are not a reflection of the best interests of North Carolinians but rather, an offering to the national Republican Party."

Republicans have long defended their right to draw the maps however they want. Furthermore, they say that even though statewide elections are close, the fact that liberal-leaning voters tend to cluster in urban areas while conservative-leaning voters tend to be more spread out in rural areas gives Republicans a built-in advantage in races that are decided by districts, like for the U.S. House or the state legislature.

"Democrats are only competing in 20 to 30 counties across the state," Senate leader Phil Berger said in a 2017 floor speech, defending maps he and fellow Republicans redrew that year after losing a racial gerrymandering lawsuit. "That might be a viable strategy for squeaking out a win in the occasional statewide race, but you can’t build a legislative majority in a state with 100 counties when you only compete in a quarter of them."

North Carolina does have one of the nation's largest rural populations. But at the same time, the 20 largest counties have roughly twice as many people as the other 80 combined.

The new maps drew immediate criticism from the left, including accusations of backroom deals and illegal gerrymandering and veiled threats of legal action — a response not unlike those lobbed following previous GOP proposals.

But unlike in the past election cycle, the state Supreme Court now favors the legislature after the high court flipped from a Democratic majority to a Republican majority this year. The new Republican majority recently overturned a ruling that had put limitations on partisan gerrymandering, narrowing the path for legal challenges.

"Enabled by the State Supreme Court’s partisan reversal of constitutional law, Republican legislators have rolled out their latest illegal maps that show gerrymandering on steroids," Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said in a statement. "Drawn in the back room and armed with their new law that keeps their plotting secret, they have used race and political party to create districts that are historically discriminatory and unfair."

The state constitution prohibits Cooper from vetoing redistricting plans. Spokespeople for legislative leaders who drew these maps didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

“[Republicans are] certainly going to argue this is a fair map,” said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. “They're going to argue Democrats tend to cluster in certain kinds of places and that leads to these kinds of outcomes that may look off at first glance, but when you look a little closer they're going to argue they're about settlement patterns and where people are."

Bracing for legal challenges

The maps could still change. But any changes are more likely to be minor tweaks than wholesale re-draws. Once the new maps pass they will likely be used in every election until after the 2030 Census triggers another round of redistricting. But first, they'll likely have to survive court challenges.

Lacking a sympathetic state court, map critics might seek to sue in federal court. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has said the federal courts can't do much about partisan gerrymandering, race-based gerrymanders remain illegal, and federal judges have recently thrown out maps in other states.

“I have a long history of suing and beating North Carolina in court — including three times over their congressional maps,” Marc Elias, a national Democratic election law attorney, said on social media Wednesday. “I'm watching carefully.”

Dave Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for The Cook Political Report, said on social media Wednesday that both proposed U.S. House maps slightly diluted Black voting strength in North Carolina's 1st Congressional District, currently held by U.S. Rep. Don Davis. A lawsuit under the U.S. Voting Rights Act is "pretty much assured here," Wasserman said.

Michael Li, redistricting and voting counsel at the Brennan Center, called the proposed maps "a brazen attack on Black political power," saying one of the two pairs current U.S. Reps. Valerie Foushee and Don Davis — who are both Black — in a single district, forcing them to run against each other to keep their seat in Congress. In one of the maps Davis' district shifts from a Democratic leaning district to one the Democratic Party's 2022 U.S. Senate nominee, Cheri Beasley, lost by six percentage points.

Foushee said in a statement that North Carolina's voting maps "should reflect our evenly divided state."

"Once again, the voters in our great state will be subject to unfair electoral maps that will disenfranchise voters and discourage civic participation," she said.

Davis said he and his team were reviewing the new maps and that, "analyzing these maps thoroughly before drawing conclusions or making assumptions is critically important."

Open government groups such as Common Cause North Carolina, meanwhile, criticized the mapmaking process, calling it "a total failure of transparency."

"A handful of politicians drew new districts behind closed doors, keeping the public in the dark. But lawmakers still have a chance to do better," Common Cause North Carolina Executive Director Bob Phillips said in a statement. The group has taken lawmakers to court before over past election maps.

Democratic legislative leaders also spoke out against the process after seeing the maps for first time Wednesday afternoon.

"This secretive process has shut out real, meaningful input from the minority party, stakeholders and most importantly the public," House Democratic leader Robert Reives and Senate Democratic leader Dan Blue said in a joint statement. "We are reviewing these maps in real time and will no doubt find them to be partisan gerrymanders that violate the rights of minority voters in North Carolina."

Congressional swing

North Carolina’s current 7-7 congressional split comes under districts used in the 2022 elections that were drawn by a bipartisan team of court-appointed experts, after a lawsuit overturned the maps GOP lawmakers originally proposed.

One of the new proposed maps would likely elect 11 Republicans. If that one is approved, seats held by Democratic U.S. Reps. Wiley Nickel (southern Wake/Johnston counties), Jeff Jackson (Charlotte) and Manning (Greensboro) would be more winnable by Republicans. The map also puts Democratic U.S. Reps. Don Davis (northeastern NC) and Valerie Foushee (Durham/Chapel Hill) into the same district, meaning one would likely go.U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, who represents Wake County, would likely be safe under both maps, as would U.S. Rep. Alma Adams of Mecklenburg County.

The other newly proposed map would likely elect 10 Republicans and three Democrats, with one competitive seat — the one held now by Davis. That map, too, “eliminates Manning, Jackson and Nickel,” Wasserman said on social media.

“This probably nets Republicans at least three seats in the U.S. House and makes the math of keeping a Republican majority a little easier," Asher Hildebrand, a redistricting expert at Duke University and a chief of staff to former Democratic Rep. David Price, told the Associated Press.

Nickel didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Jackson said in a written statement that “gerrymandering is open political corruption.”

“It was wrong when my party did it and it is wrong when the other party does it,” said Jackson, long thought to be a likely candidate for attorney general in North Carolina if he’s drawn out of his congressional seat.

Ross said Republicans who drew the maps “have proven that their primary allegiance is to their own political self-interest”

What courts say about gerrymandering

Redistricting is only supposed to happen once per decade, after each new census. But North Carolina’s decades-long history of gerrymandering lawsuits has meant that in practice the maps get redrawn every few years. They’re being redrawn again now because of the legislature’s court loss over their original 2021 maps: State law says any court-ordered maps can only be used once.

And this year, Republican legislative leaders have a green light to engage in partisan gerrymandering, given the new state Supreme Court majority’s decision earlier this year to overturn the anti-gerrymandering precedent.

Evidence in the 2021 gerrymandering trial focused on math-heavy expert testimony, which led the court to find that GOP lawmakers tried using the maps to insulate themselves from political accountability.

Republicans would have little fear of losing their legislative majorities even if most voters wanted them out, the evidence showed: Democrats would’ve had to win far more than 50% of the statewide vote to have a chance at getting a tie in the state legislature, let alone a majority.

Likewise, the original 2021 maps would’ve all but guaranteed Republicans to keep a supermajority in the legislature — which is 60% of the seats, enabling them to override any vetoes from a future governor — even with far less than 60% of the statewide vote.

“They are the product of an intentional, pro-Republican partisan redistricting over a wide range of potential election scenarios,” the panel of three judges who oversaw the gerrymandering trial wrote.

The same was true of the congressional maps, the court found: Even if most voters wanted Democrats, the state’s Congressional delegation would remain majority Republican because of the way the maps were drawn.

However, that trial court let the maps stand. The judges ruled that even though the maps were heavily gerrymandered to skew elections in favor of the GOP, there’s nothing technically unlawful about that. The state constitution gives the legislature almost unlimited power over redistricting, the judges noted, and also bans the governor from vetoing redistricting proposals.

“The people of this state enacted this political process and specifically declined to place any checks on their representatives,” the court’s ruling said.

The state Supreme Court overturned that decision, ruling that the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantee of “free elections” does ban extreme partisan gerrymandering because elections can’t be considered free if they don’t represent the will of the people.

But that 2022 ruling was under the court’s previous Democratic majority. Almost immediately upon being sworn in January, the new GOP majority reversed the previous ruling — along with other voting rights rulings their Democratic colleagues had issued — and ruled that the legislature can gerrymander the state’s districts for political gain.

Racial gerrymandering, on the other hand, remains unconstitutional under federal law. Republican lawmakers have unconstitutionally targeted Black voters in multiple ways since taking control of the General Assembly in 2011, via redistricting and other election law changes, a series of court rulings have found.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.