North Carolina Returns to Redistricting Question
North Carolina has been a prime example of extreme gerrymandering for decades. Over the past few years, the fight for democratic representation has been waged in the courts. Despite its growing cities, youth-powered college towns, and large minority population, Republicans have continued to outperform the partisan breakdown of the state. As such, many have continued to assert that those in power do not accurately reflect the state’s population. The implications from what has happened and what is yet to come, is not just shaping the landscape in the Tar Heel State, but could impact others around the country as well.
North Carolina, by voting population, is a deeply purple state. As of late 2022, 34% of registered voters in NC are Democrats, 30% are Republicans, and another 36% are registered as “unaffiliated.” But gerrymandering has helped Republicans win 30 out of 50 state Senate seats and 72 out of 120 North Carolina House seats, despite the state sending an evenly split delegation to the U.S. House and going to Donald Trump by less than a point and a half in 2020. Most recently, Tricia Cotham’s decision to switch parties to the GOP handed Republicans a veto-proof majority.
The redistricting battles are part of a broader set of conflicts around representation and voting fights that have taken place in North Carolina, including bitter battles over voter ID laws. But this March, the state’s Supreme Court elected to rehear a case on redistricting–a move that has many advocates worried.
In February of 2022, the then-Democratic-majority Court ruled that the original maps were too partisan in how they were drawn, which violated the state’s constitution. North Carolina Republicans were unhappy with the ruling, arguing that the courts should not make decisions like these. Instead, Republicans wanted the state’s legislature to have more power. But now, in 2023, North Carolina has a conservative lean on their state Supreme Court. And they are rehearing a challenge to the initial case, led by the Republican N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore. Speaker Moore has already announced his intention to redraw maps this summer, though without a Court decision this would go against North Carolina’s constitutional prohibition on mid-decade redistricting.
For Democrats and independent reform groups like Common Cause, the move to rehear the case and possibly overturn the previous Court’s ruling reads as a nakedly political ploy. Many in N.C. are concerned about the tenuous nature of voting in their state. These cases and challenges have significant implications for democracy at the local level, and the ripple effects can cross state lines. What constitutes basic fairness in configuring districts? Political mapmaking may not sound the most exciting, but it is critically important. What does ‘one person one vote’ actually mean when the people elected in a given session can turn around and reconfigure the map to entrench their own power? Should a state with such a tightly divided electorate have such a startling gap between the parties in terms of actual officeholding power? In recent years, North Carolina is a competitive state, but that fact is often not obvious from the outcomes of state races. These lingering questions are some of the challenges for democracy as we continue to move forward in these divided political times.
