‘Not a fair map.’ Lawsuit accuses NC Republicans of gerrymandering new districts
The first lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s new political districts as unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering was filed Friday by a group affiliated with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
State legislators passed the maps into law on Thursday. All three new maps — for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the U.S. House, 50 seats in the N.C. Senate and 120 seats in the N.C. House — passed along partisan lines with Republicans in support and Democrats opposed.
The lawsuit challenges only the congressional map. It’s framed as a continuation of sorts of a successful 2019 partisan gerrymandering lawsuit, which forced GOP lawmakers to draw new lines for the 2020 elections.
“Following the 2020 decennial census, from which North Carolina gained an additional congressional seat, legislative defendants recently enacted a new congressional map,” says the lawsuit, filed late Friday in Wake County Superior Court. “But rather than adhere to this Court’s admonition that extreme partisan gerrymanders unconstitutionally deprive millions of North Carolinians of fundamental rights, legislative defendants enacted another extreme and brazen partisan gerrymander.”
This new lawsuit is supported by the National Redistricting Foundation, an affiliate of Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The 2019 challenge also was backed by Holder’s organization.
Republican leaders did not respond to the lawsuit Friday evening. But they have said repeatedly that they did not use political data in drawing the maps. They have not commented on outside analyses that show the maps would likely lead to a large GOP advantage even if the statewide vote is split roughly 50-50.
“The congressional map passed yesterday in North Carolina is the epitome of partisan gerrymandering, and very plainly violates the state constitution,” said Marina Jenkins, director of litigation and policy for the National Redistricting Foundation, which is behind the lawsuit, said in statement Friday. “This is not a fair map.”
When is partisan bias unconstitutional?
The former maps with the unconstitutional partisan bias had given Republicans a 10-3 split in the congressional delegation.
North Carolina’s new maps would be expected to give Republicans a 10-4 split under similar political conditions.
Democratic representation would increase from what it had been in the unconstitutional maps — but it would also decrease from the current 8-5 map, which has been approved in court as part of that 2019 lawsuit.
Voters in North Carolina are split roughly 50-50 statewide. Political analyses show that if Republicans improve beyond that baseline, they would probably win an 11-3 edge under the new map. And if Democrats had the stronger year, Republicans would still likely keep an 8-6 advantage.
That’s in part because many of the state’s Democratic voters will now find themselves in one of just three districts centered around Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte. Each would be expected to elect a Democrat by a massive margin, potentially with over 70% of the vote.
The lawsuit says the map divides up the state’s main metro areas, “then packs many of the remaining Democratic strongholds into three congressional districts. The result is as intended: a map that produces 10 safe Republican seats, 3 safe Democratic seats, and 1 competitive district.”
Michael Li, a voting rights attorney, told The News & Observer the new map is a “breathtakingly aggressive” gerrymander — but could make sense from a Republican political point of view.
“It will likely take half a decade or more for these cases to be litigated,” said Li, with the liberal Brennan Center for Justice in New York City, before Friday’s lawsuit was filed. “And in the meantime you get to have the fruits of your ill-gotten gains.”
One of the Democratic districts that could flip under the new map is the northeastern district held by Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a former head of the Congressional Black Caucus. The new map takes the city of Greenville and surrounding areas out of his district and replaces it with several rural, conservative counties on the Virginia border. The lawsuit said that “significantly improves Republicans’ voting strength in the district.”
Andy Jackson, an election policy expert at the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, though, said that northeastern area of the state has been shrinking — and growing more conservative — in recent years. He questioned whether it’s the new maps that give Republicans a chance to defeat Butterfield, or just changing demographics.
“The district has been trending Republican anyway,” he told The N&O Friday before the lawsuit was filed. “Even if it had kept its same shape, it would probably be a Republican seat in six, eight years.”
Butterfield and the other four Democratic members of North Carolina’s congressional delegation — Reps. Alma Adams, Deborah Ross, David Price and Kathy Manning — issued a statement Friday night backing the lawsuit.
“We fully support this effort to ensure voters have fair congressional districts once and for all. The Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly has once again deliberately silenced large numbers of voters to create politically and racially imbalanced maps that provide a baked-in advantage for Republicans,” they said.
Racial considerations
Local and national groups have been watching redistricting in North Carolina closely, and are anticipating a lengthy and complex legal battle over the state’s maps, which could be used in every election until 2030.
One lawsuit already has been filed, but it doesn’t challenge the maps themselves but rather Republican leaders’ decision not to use racial data when drawing them.
The North Carolina NAACP, represented by the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, argued that no matter how the maps ended up, they would inherently fail to protect the rights of Black voters as demanded by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“It will be interesting to see how they defend these maps,” Li said. “It’s an aggressive gerrymander, but they drew them on a race-blind basis. Or supposedly a race-blind basis.”
Jackson said that in the last decade, one court ruling said it was OK to draw maps with a partisan bias in favor of one side. But a later ruling, in the 2019 case from Holder’s group, said an extreme partisan bias is unconstitutional.
“I think they’re hoping these districts will kind of thread that needle between what those rulings have said,” Jackson said of GOP lawmakers.
Republicans say there’s no evidence that “racially polarized voting” exists in North Carolina anymore, and that courts have upheld previous decisions they’ve made not to use racial data.
“This same lawsuit outfit sued us previously because we used race, and now they’re suing us because we didn’t use race,” Republican Sen. Ralph Hise, a top redistricting official, told The News & Observer after the first lawsuit was filed last week.
He was referring to the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which has led other recent gerrymandering lawsuits in North Carolina — including a successful racial gerrymandering challenge from 2011 and an unsuccessful partisan gerrymandering challenge from 2016.
This story was originally published November 5, 2021 at 6:27 PM with the headline "‘Not a fair map.’ Lawsuit accuses NC Republicans of gerrymandering new districts."
