North Carolina could have new political maps this week. Here’s where things stand.
After a month of public hearings and live-streamed map drawing, North Carolina’s Republican legislators are moving quickly through the final stages of the 2021 redistricting process.
If all goes according to the plan lawmakers set in motion earlier this week, the maps could be official as soon as Thursday. If they become law as expected, they will be used in every election from 2022 through 2030 — unless a lawsuit succeeds in forcing them to be redrawn, as has happened numerous times in North Carolina dating back to the 1980s.
There are three different maps the N.C. House and N.C. Senate have been crafting in the past few weeks: They each are drawing their own districts, and they also must come up with a new map for the state’s U.S. House of Representatives delegation. It’s growing from 13 to 14 seats for the next decade, due to North Carolina’s rapid population growth in the 2020 Census.
The new maps will likely increase Republican political power in North Carolina. That has Democrats and anti-gerrymandering advocates crying foul, accusing the GOP of artificially inflating their power in a state that’s split roughly evenly.
In 2020, for example, Republican Donald Trump won the North Carolina presidential vote with 49.9% to 48.6% for Democrat Joe Biden. But even in a similar political climate, the new congressional map would be expected to grow the Republican Party’s current edge from 8-5 to 10-4 in the U.S. House seats.
“These maps were created for one purpose only: to ensure Republicans win more House seats so that they can recapture control of the U.S. House of Representatives,” U.S. Rep. Kathy Manning said in a written statement.
Manning, a Greensboro Democrat, would be unlikely to win reelection under the new congressional map, which she called “an offering to the national Republican party.” It splits up the Triad region around Greensboro, which is kept mostly whole in her current left-leaning district, into four different right-leaning districts.
The other Democratic incumbent who might be out in the new map is Rep. G.K. Butterfield of Wilson. A former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, he also previously served on the North Carolina Supreme Court. He said GOP lawmakers are proposing to turn his district into one a Republican could flip by splitting up Black voters in Eastern North Carolina between districts to diminish their voting power.
“I am planning to run for reelection and I want to run under a fair map and right now we don’t have a fair map,” he said. “I’m encouraging litigation both in state and federal court.”
There is already one lawsuit, which the North Carolina NAACP filed last week, seeking to stop the redistricting process before any maps can be passed into law. It challenges Republicans’ decision not to consider any racial data when drawing the maps, which the NAACP says will lead to Black voters’ rights being violated. Republicans say using racial data is unnecessary.
Like the congressional map, maps for the N.C. House and N.C. Senate would likewise give Republicans a high likelihood of keeping their majority in the General Assembly, at least in the near future. One analysis shows they could get back the supermajorities that would allow them to override vetoes from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper without any legislative Democrats on board.
While Democrats have criticized the process as being politically motivated, GOP leaders have repeatedly said they did not use any political data in drawing the maps. They have avoided commenting specifically on the partisan splits the maps would create, but have touted the transparency of the process — largely similar to court-enforced transparency rules from 2019, which made that year’s redistricting process the most transparent ever.
“I hope that you will all acknowledge the truly historic nature of the process we have seen this time around,” Republican Rep. Destin Hall, the House’s top redistricting official, told Democrats before a Tuesday night vote. “The unprecedented transparency and the unprecedented decision to not use political data in drawing these maps.”
He did not sway any Democrats, however, and the House passed the map for its own districts in a 67-49 party line vote.
Where the maps stand
▪ Congress: The map for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the U.S. House passed the N.C. Senate 27-22 on Tuesday evening. The N.C. House plans to take up the map Wednesday in committee, where redistricting officials will consider potential changes to what the Senate drew. Their goal is to pass it in committee Wednesday in order for the full House to vote Thursday. If they don’t make any changes, it will become law once they pass it. If they do make changes, it would have to go back to the Senate for final approval or potential negotiations. Either way it’s not expected to drag on too long, as GOP leaders have long said their goal is to finish by early November.
▪ N.C. Senate: The map for North Carolina’s 50 state Senate seats passed a Senate committee Tuesday morning, setting up a floor vote Wednesday. After that it would go to the House, potentially for a committee vote Wednesday and a floor vote Thursday. The House is not expected to make any changes, as each chamber typically lets the other draw their own districts.
▪ N.C. House: The map for North Carolina’s 120 state House seats passed the House on Tuesday evening, setting up a Senate committee vote Wednesday and possibly a floor vote Thursday. The Senate is not expected to make any changes.
Political analysis of the maps
All three maps would give Republicans a sizable advantage even if the statewide vote is split more or less evenly as it has been in recent years, according to an analysis of 2016 and 2020 political data by Dave’s Redistricting App, a popular redistricting tool.
A common theme of all three maps is that despite North Carolina’s highly competitive status in statewide elections, there would be very few competitive seats in these more regional races.
Republican have said that part of the reason for that — as well as for why Democrats might win fewer seats than their share of the statewide vote — is that Democratic voters tend to cluster in the state’s big metro areas, meaning the cities are very blue while the more spread-out rural areas are very red. Even if it all adds up to North Carolina being a purple state in statewide elections, Republicans say, they have a built-in advantage to win more districts because of that political geography.
“Democrats are only winning in 20 to 30 counties in North Carolina,” GOP Senate leader Phil Berger said in a 2017 speech, defending different maps being drawn then that gave Republicans a large advantage and which were later redrawn due to a gerrymandering lawsuit.
Since lawmakers say they have not used partisan data to analyze the maps, there is also no official analysis of the potential political breakdowns, leaving it up to outside parties to do that work. Here is what the analysis from Dave’s Redistricting App shows.
▪ Congress: This map would have eight safe Republican seats, three safe Democratic seats and three competitive seats, of which two would lean right and one would lean left. That means Republicans would be expected to win a 10-4 advantage if voters again split the statewide vote more or less evenly. It could increase to an 11-3 GOP advantage if Republicans have a strong year, and Republicans would still expect to hold an 8-6 advantage even in a strong year for Democrats.
▪ N.C. Senate: This map would give Republicans 24 safe seats in the 50-member Senate, two short of a 26-member majority. There would be nine competitive seats out of the 50 total, of which five would lean Republican and four would lean Democratic. So Republicans would be expected to likely win a majority and could also win a veto-proof supermajority by holding all of the right-leaning competitive districts and flipping one of the left-leaning ones. Democrats have 17 safe seats and would have to win every competitive district to win the majority. If there’s a tie, Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson would be the tiebreaker.
▪ N.C. House: This map would give Republicans 55 safe seats in the 120-member House, six short of a 61-member majority. There would be 24 competitive seats, 13 of which lean Republican. So Republicans could expect to keep their majority even if they lost most of the competitive districts. Getting to a 72-member supermajority would require Republicans to win 17 of those 24 competitive seats. Democrats would have 41 safe seats, so they would have to win 20 of the 24 competitive districts to win a majority.
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 November 3, 2021 at 2:23 PM with the headline "North Carolina could have new political maps this week. Here’s where things stand.."
