NC will redistrict after census data release. Here’s why you should care.
Every state in the country can start redrawing political maps after the U.S. Census Bureau releases local population data on Thursday. But attention to the process, and any potential shenanigans, may be more intense in North Carolina than anywhere else.
The redrawing process is called redistricting. But when boundaries get skewed to favor a particular political party or group, it’s gerrymandering.
Redistricting is supposed to occur once a decade. So revised district maps could guide who votes for which state and federal politicians until 2030. That is unless courts strike down new boundaries as unconstitutional.
That’s always a possibility in North Carolina.
“North Carolina really is, in some ways, ground zero for partisan and racial gerrymandering,” former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech at the UNC School of Law in February.
The Tar Heel State has had some of the most egregious examples of gerrymandering anywhere in the country.
Most recently, maps from redistricting in 2011 were thrown out in court, as were maps drawn to replace them. Republicans drew both to favor themselves.
Also failing to hold up in court were the maps created the 2000s, 1990s and 1980s. Democrats drew those with their self interest in mind.
This year, Republicans will lead the process because they hold the majority in the General Assembly. And already some Democrats have all but promised to sue, saying they anticipate another set of unconstitutional maps.
Holder now leads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. That group bankrolled two successful gerrymandering lawsuits in North Carolina in 2019, forcing Republican lawmakers to redraw the districts for the state’s 13 Congressional seats as well as for the N.C. House and N.C. Senate.
He’ll probably be back in court here again this year, unless there are big changes to the way North Carolina proceeds, he said at the UNC speech.
Why wait for the census?
Census data shows not just how many people live in each state, but also exactly where they live. That’s important because political districts for specific categories of elected offices must have more or less the same size populations statewide.
North Carolina’s population grew 9.5% in the last decade, outpacing other parts of the country, preliminary 2020 Census data showed. That earned this state a new seat in Congress, meaning an important redistricting job ahead is expanding this state’s U.S. House delegation from 13 to 14 representatives.
Once more detailed census data drops on Thursday, politicians and the public can start crunching numbers and experimenting with different ways to carve up those 14 U.S. House districts, 50 N.C. Senate districts and 120 N.C. House districts.
Much of North Carolina’s growth is expected to be lopsided, with population in some rural areas and smaller cities likely to have stagnated or shrunk while the biggest cities continued to do the opposite. That means that new electoral district maps could look drastically different too.
Current maps, drawn in 2019, had to be drawn using 2010 population data. That meant lawmakers created them while pretending that the previous nine years’ worth of population changes did not happen. That’s not an option this year.
If the new census data shows that Democratic-leaning areas grew significantly more than Republican-leaning areas, that could pose a challenge for GOP leaders hoping to retain their political edge.
How does it work?
Every state has at least slightly different rules for redistricting, while some wildly differ from others.
In North Carolina, there are very few rules beyond this: whichever political party controls the state legislature draws district lines. That said, there are decades worth of court rulings — some contradictory — that inform how the maps should or should not be drawn.
The General Assembly makes up new, more detailed rules before each redistricting session. That began this week.
New draft rules proposed by a state House and Senate redistricting committee rule out using race and election-result data to create maps and detail procedural steps. Once the criteria are set and the census data is public, both of which are expected to happen Thursday, the drawing can begin.
Legislative leaders have said they want to finish revisions by early November or sooner — and that they hope to have multiple public hearings this fall, with a schedule possibly finalized by the end of August.
Who does the drawing?
Non-elected people have a voice. Anyone who wants to submit written public comments can do so on the legislature’s website.
And anyone is allowed to submit a proposed map for lawmakers to consider. Lawmakers will make staff available to help people with appointments to use the official redistricting computer at the legislature to draw their map.
But in the end, decisions are in the hands of the political party with a majority in the legislature.
Lawmakers have hired political consultants for this job. In 2011, legislators hired Tom Hofeller, a Republican operative, whose maps were ruled unconstitutional. They hired Hofeller again to draw new maps that were also ruled unconstitutional. Hofeller died before that second ruling and lawmakers drew the third set of maps themselves.
Why are politicians in charge?
Many states don’t let politicians draw their own maps. Instead they give that power to independent commissions. But in North Carolina, politicians on both sides of the aisle have defeated multiple attempts over decades to do the same.
Furthermore, state law — which Democrat leaders passed in the 1990s — forbids the governor from vetoing the maps. So even though Democrats control the executive branch and Republicans lead the legislative branch today, there’s no need for compromise. Accepting new maps will require only a 51% majority vote.
A few Republicans did try to push their party to reform the system in recent years, ahead of the 2020 elections and the 2021 redistricting process. But despite some high-profile names on board, it went nowhere.
“Typically the majority party is not interested in engaging in any type of meaningful reform,” Bob Phillips, leader of Common Cause NC and the state’s most high-profile redistricting reform advocate, said in an interview last year. “That’s Democrats when they’re in charge, or Republicans when they’re in charge.”
History suggests that it’s not safe to assume that lawmakers always follow rules they set up.
During Hofeller’s second stint helping draw North Carolina maps, legislators likely weren’t truthful about how the maps were drawn, according to the judges who declared them unconstitutional in 2019.
“The judges did not outright accuse lawmakers of lying,” The N&O reported during that 2019 lawsuit. “But they listed statements Republican leaders made in court, and to the general public — about who really drew the maps, and when — then called those claims ‘highly improbable’.”
So judges then ordered a level of transparency never before seen in any North Carolina redistricting process.
GOP leaders are not required to follow any of those same rules this year, since that court order is no longer in effect. However, they have said they probably will pass rules that are at least similar to what a court order forced in 2019.
“We look forward to learning from the past to have the best process we’ve ever had, going forward,” Republican Sen. Paul Newton of Cabarrus County, who co-chairs the Senate’s redistricting committee, said last week.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published August 11, 2021 at 5:30 AM with the headline "NC will redistrict after census data release. Here’s why you should care.."
