Via the AP: North Carolina GOP announce plans to vote on new House map amid nationwide redistricting battle.
North Carolina Republican legislative leaders announced plans Monday to vote next week on redrawing the state’s U.S. House district map, taking up President Donald Trump’s call to secure more GOP seats nationwide and resist rival moves by Democrats.
[…]
North Carolina Republicans created a map in 2023 that resulted in GOP candidates winning 10 of the state’s 14 U.S. House seats in 2024. That compared to a 7-7 seat split between Democrats and the GOP under the map used in 2022.
If we look at presidential elections, North Carolina is a majority Republican state, but not deeply red.
Here’s the presidential run-down for the last three cycles (Republican candidate listed first, Democratic candidate second).
2016: 49.83%-46.17% (R+3.66)
2020: 49.93%-48.59% (R+1.34)
2024: 50.86%-47.65% (R+3.21)
But it should be noted that the state elected a Democratic governor in 2024 by a wide margin (54.9%-40.1%, D+14.8–although, granted, the R candidate was a loon).
The previous governor was also a Democrat. Roy Cropper won in 2020 by +4.5 and in 2016 by +0.22.
I will not indulge in a deeper dive than this, but it should be more than clear that the state’s partisan makeup is close to even. As such, maps that produced a 7-7 split of the 14 House seats sound democratically reasonable and reasonable to me. 10-4 is a representational abomination, and 11-3 would be even worse.
As such, pronouncements like the following are utter nonsense.
Trump “earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican Congressional seat,” House Speaker Destin Hall said in the release. Trump has won North Carolina’s electoral votes all three times that he’s been on the presidential ballot.
Trump won a comfortable, yet close, victory in North Carolina. The notion that this entitles him to more House seats because of a “clear mandate” is undemocratic.
Let’s just be clear that all of this is an attempt to skew electoral outcomes in a way that is not representative of the people of the state of North Carolina.
The Supreme Court made a grave error in allowing partisan gerrymandering to be legally acceptable. From a constitutional perspective, I would argue it violates the notion of equal protection under the law. Moreover, it clearly vitiates a core assumption of representational democracy, which assumes that voters have a reasonable chance of their votes being treated as equally as possible by the system. Gerrymandering of this type utterly undercuts basic notions of representation. Further, it takes away the possibility of a real democratic feedback loop.
As I have written multiple times, I have deep theoretical and practical problems with single-seat districts. But if we are going to have them, the standard for assessing maps should be how well they represent the state’s partisan breakdown. Compactness and other shape-based criteria are pointless and have little-to-no democratic salience. But above all else, the notion that majorities can redraw boundaries to enhance their power should be anathema to representative democracy. And it is a cruel joke to then say that the remedy is electoral politics.
It would be quite obviously a problem if the Big 10 could dictate that all of its home teams started all games with 35 points on the board and then argue that the visiting team’s remedy would be the play better ball.
BTW, I know that some Democratic states are likewise skewed in their representative outcomes. That, too, is an affront to representative democracy. Fix it all, I say.
I do fear that we are now in a situation in which states will engage in an ongoing, anti-democratic escalation. I wrote about that here (as well as why I would reluctantly vote to engage in this warfare in CA, were I a resident).
