NC had one of the nation’s 18 competitive congressional districts. Until now. | Opinion
Lost in the conversation about North Carolina’s new congressional map — the latest entry into a national gerrymandering arms race — is the effect it could have on an already polarized Congress.
Over the years, the number of truly competitive seats in the U.S. House of Representatives has dwindled considerably, the result of redistricting growing more and more partisan. Just 18 out of 435 seats are considered to be true toss-ups, according to Cook Political Report. That’s less than 5%. Until now, that list included North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, currently held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis. The new map passed by lawmakers this week changes that, reclassifying it as a seat that’s “likely Republican.”
The consequences of that shift extend beyond just North Carolina.
“The 1st District was the only toss-up district in the state of North Carolina, and the only toss-up district in the entire Southeast,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, said. “So to shift it to a red seat is to take competitiveness completely off the table in an entire region of the country.”
That’s also bad for Congress as a whole, which is already plagued by polarization that yields much more gridlock than it does bipartisanship and compromise.
Former U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel knows this story well. He was elected to Congress in 2022, under fair maps enacted as a result of the N.C. Supreme Court’s ruling on partisan gerrymandering earlier that year. The version of the 13th Congressional District that he represented was the most competitive in the state until lawmakers gerrymandered it to be safely Republican in 2024, making it futile for Nickel to run for re-election.
Nickel said that during his time in Washington, the biggest divide in Congress didn’t occur along partisan lines. It was a divide between those in safe seats and those whose seats were competitive.
“Those are the people that I did most of my work with. Democrats and Republicans in districts like mine, because they were incentivized to work together to get things done,” Nickel said. “And right now, we’re witnessing the death of competition in American elections. There will be fewer and fewer competitive seats as a result of all of this.”
Gerrymandering attempts to lock in seats for a particular party, resulting in less competitive general elections. That means representation for most seats will be determined in party primaries. When candidates don’t have to worry about a general election, they make fewer attempts to court moderate and independent voters and instead focus on placating the party base. The presence of extreme primary challengers — as well as a smaller, more extreme primary electorate — also pushes candidates further away from the center.
“We’re seeing the proof of that right now with the government shutdown. Folks on the left and the right are feeling like they’re winning, and they probably are, if your goal is to win your Democratic primary or Republican primary,” Nickel said. “But for the vast majority of Americans, they want folks who are going to solve problems.”
Davis, who plans to run again but will face a steep uphill battle to re-election, was already an endangered species as a moderate in Congress. He is one of just 13 Democrats who won a district that Donald Trump carried in 2024. He votes more conservatively than the vast majority of Democrats and is rated one of the most bipartisan members of Congress. That doesn’t just give a voice to his own evenly divided district — it also gives a voice to the many moderate North Carolinians who live in districts where their voice is diluted.
Even the loss of just a few competitive seats is enough to worsen dysfunction in Congress. Narrow majorities are becoming more common, with the GOP’s current House majority the slimmest in modern history. It wouldn’t take many representatives to break the gridlock. But that can’t happen if moderates are disappearing, and as more states join the ongoing redistricting frenzy, the surplus of safe, uncompetitive seats will only increase.
“I don’t think anybody looks at Congress and says, ‘I’d like them to do less,’” Cooper said. “But that’s the situation that I think we may be in very, very soon.”
