As redistricting kicks off in NC, here’s what we’ve seen so far and what’s still to come
North Carolina legislators have started drawing the political districts that, pending any legal challenges, will be used in every election for the U.S. House of Representatives and N.C. General Assembly for the next decade.
Some early versions of maps drawn by top Republican officials Wednesday and Thursday garnered widespread attention online from observers who said the maps appeared to have been drawn to give Republican candidates a heavy advantage.
But the process is not yet over. Lawmakers are likely to draw more maps next week, and potentially into the week after that, too, depending on how quickly they settle on options they like during the post-2020 Census redraw.
In one early proposal for a new U.S. House of Representatives map, the lines split the state’s largest counties — Wake, Mecklenburg and Guilford — among three different districts each. The counties home to Wilmington, Fayetteville, Winston-Salem and Greenville were all split between two districts.
That map was the first one drawn Wednesday, when the map-making process began, by Sen. Warren Daniel of Morganton. He is a top GOP map-drawer, as one of three chairman of the Senate’s redistricting committee.
Wake and Mecklenburg are the only counties in the state big enough to need to be split at all in a congressional map, and each could be split between just two districts, not three. So Democrats were suspicious as to why so many urban areas were being split. Duke political science professor Asher Hildebrand, a former staffer for U.S. Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat, tweeted that the map would probably result in Republicans winning 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the House.
“The strategy here is plain as day,” Hildebrand said, referring to the way the state’s cities had been broken up in order for the pieces to be paired with more rural areas.
He also noted that the state’s new 14th district would be centered around rural Cleveland County. That happens to be the home of N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore, who has been frequently rumored as considering a congressional run.
On Wednesday, Moore said he didn’t know anything about that map and wouldn’t speculate about what might happen in 2022.
“I still have a campaign committee open for state House, but it’s premature to talk about anything else other than that,” he said.
And while that was the very first map drawn by a top Republican official, it’s only one map. Some observers said they doubted it would make the cut in the end.
“This will not be the final map,” tweeted Andy Jackson, an election law expert with the conservative John Locke Foundation. “Looks more like the opening round of negotiating.”
Timeline for redistricting
Politicians on both sides of the aisle will likely end up drawing many iterations of possible maps over the coming days, potentially leaving lawmakers with dozens of options to sift through and vote on in the end.
They’ll have to come up with three maps: One of the U.S. House seats, one for the North Carolina House, and one for the North Carolina Senate.
There’s no real deadline, but Republican leaders have said they want be finished by late October or early November. That would give people thinking about running for office in 2022 a month to review the new maps and consider their options, before early December when candidates have to file for election.
“We are operating on a tight timeline,” said Republican Rep. Destin Hall, who chairs the House redistricting committee. “That’s going to be our goal, to get these things done by the end of the month.”
And since both the House and Senate have to pass their own proposed maps and then come to an agreement on which version to use, leaders in both chambers have said they want to finish their initial maps in the next week or two.
Political considerations
One thing that won’t be standing in the way is the Democrats.
They can participate in the redistricting process, and Republicans might choose to listen to them, but Democrats have very little leverage since the state constitution forbids the governor from vetoing any redistricting plans.
Democrats have already tried protesting the GOP plan not to consider racial data, saying that will make the maps inherently unconstitutional. But legislative leaders were unconvinced and went ahead with their plans not to use either racial or political data. Republicans said it’s unnecessary to consider race since they don’t believe there need to be any majority-minority districts. And they said the decision not to use political data will make the maps more fair.
With Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper powerless to threaten a veto in order to make Republicans work with his party — something he is currently doing with the state budget — that means that in redistricting, Republicans can pass whatever version of the maps they want as long as all their members are on board.
Many Democrats suspect that Republicans will draw themselves heavily favorable maps, even though the state’s voters tend to split nearly 50-50 in many statewide races.
Republicans have said in the past, when they have passed skewed maps, that they aren’t cheating but rather have the advantage of geography: Democratic voters are more likely to live clustered in cities, whereas Republicans are more spread out all across the state.
Last decade, Republicans drew themselves a 10-3 advantage in the congressional delegation. That was struck down as unconstitutional. They then drew a different map that also gave themselves a 10-3 advantage. That was also struck down as unconstitutional. They then drew a map that gave themselves an 8-5 advantage. That was upheld, and that is what’s being replaced now.
The new maps will have 14 congressional districts, not 13, due to North Carolina’s population growth in the last decade. And although nearly all of that growth was centered in and around the heavily Democratic cities of Raleigh and Charlotte, Democrats fear the new maps may look like the maps that kept getting struck down last decade for giving conservative voters an inordinate amount of power by disenfranchising liberals and minorities.
Republicans, however, have said they are operating this year under similar rules for increased transparency — and banning the use of political data — that they used when drawing the current 8-5 maps.
“We could just simply have somebody draw these maps behind closed doors, as has been done in the past,” Hall said. “The law would allow the use of election data in these maps. ... We are voluntarily saying we don’t think that’s the best way to do this.”
Staff writer Danielle Battaglia contributed reporting.
This story was originally published October 8, 2021 at 11:22 AM.
