NC political maps are official and election can begin, after court rulings
One of the new maps for political districts that North Carolina lawmakers drew last week is still too skewed to be used in upcoming elections, a state court ruled Wednesday.
The judges overseeing the lawsuit ruled that they would accept the newly redrawn versions of maps for the N.C. House and N.C. Senate that lawmakers passed — but not the new congressional map. Instead of taking the legislature’s congressional map, or the proposed maps drawn by the challengers in the case, the judges had a group of outside experts draw a new congressional map for the state.
An analysis of the map drawn by the outside experts shows it would have more safe seats for Democratic candidates, and fewer tossup seats, than the map the Republican-led legislature had drawn.
The legislature’s version of the congressional map could hypothetically swing from a 10-4 advantage for Republicans to an 8-6 advantage for Democrats. In contrast, the map the court picked Wednesday could hypothetically swing as far as 8-6 in either direction.
Both sides appealed different parts of the ruling, but all were shot down Wednesday by the N.C. Supreme Court. That means candidate filing for the 2022 election can start at 8 a.m. Thursday as scheduled.
“Today’s ruling is nothing short of egregious,” House Speaker Tim Moore said in a news release. “The trial court’s decision to impose a map drawn by anyone other than the legislature is simply unconstitutional and an affront to every North Carolina voter whose representation would be determined by unelected, partisan activists.”
The challengers made the opposite argument: They think the courts should go farther than disregarding only the congressional map the legislature passed. One of the three plaintiffs in the case challenged both the N.C. House and N.C. Senate maps, while the other two groups challenged only the Senate map.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper also expressed dismay that the court hadn’t thrown out the map that the state Senate drew for itself.
“Today’s decision allows a blatantly unfair and unconstitutional state Senate map that may have been the worst of the bunch,” Cooper said in a news release shortly after the ruling was announced. “That is bad for North Carolina because it strips voters of their voice in our democracy. Our elections should not go forward until we have fair, constitutional maps.”
Cooper isn’t a party to the lawsuit, although he is among those writing briefs in support of the groups that challenged the maps.
How we got here
This is now the second version of GOP-drawn congressional maps to be snubbed by the judicial system in recent weeks. And unlike the Supreme Court, this panel of judges has a Republican majority.
Earlier in February the Democratic-majority N.C. Supreme Court ruled that the maps Republican lawmakers drew late last year were unconstitutional and had to be redrawn. The legislature then went back to work, passing new maps that were less skewed in favor of future Republican candidates.
But those new maps still weren’t fair enough, the court ruled, at least for Congress.
The same GOP-majority trio of judges which issued Wednesday’s ruling had ruled in favor of Republican lawmakers at trial — finding that they had drawn gerrymandered districts but adding that they didn’t believe the state constitution forbids politicians from doing so. But the state Supreme Court overturned that ruling, finding that the state constitution does apply.
On Wednesday, with that new guidance in place, the GOP-majority trial court decided that the maps Republican lawmakers redrew on court orders didn’t pass muster for the new congressional districts. So the judges had a group of outside experts known as special masters draw a new map. Those special masters, former N.C. Supreme Court justices Bob Orr and Bob Edmunds and former UNC System president Tom Ross, had help from a team of academic experts from around the country.
The maps for state legislature
The N.C. Senate map that Cooper focused on Wednesday was far more contentious than the N.C. House map. The Senate map passed the legislature on a party-line vote, while the vote on the House map was bipartisan and nearly unanimous.
One possible reason: Analyses of recent election data show that the new maps could put control of the state House up for grabs in future elections, while the Senate would remain favorable to Republicans.
A House majority requires 61 of the 120 seats, and Republicans said in court filings that it could go either way: In the 2020 elections Republican Donald Trump would’ve won a slim majority of these new districts, but at the same time, Cooper also would’ve won a slim majority of them in the race for governor. And the map has several highly competitive districts, indicating that control of the House could swing back and forth depending on which party does better statewide — something the old map that was found unconstitutional would not have done.
In the Senate, however, Trump would have won 28 of 50 seats in 2020, compared to 25 for Cooper, even though Cooper won the state with a larger percentage of the vote than Trump. Attorney General Josh Stein, another Democrat who won a statewide election in 2020, would have won just 23 of the 50 districts.
The court addressed the Senate’s skew toward Republicans in Wednesday’s ruling, saying it’s not due to gerrymandering but rather due to how Democrats are clustered in and around urban areas while Republicans are more spread out. That gives Republicans a built-in advantage, they said — something the GOP has also argued in redistricting lawsuits.
“The court finds that to the extent there remains a partisan skew in the Remedial Senate Plan, that partisan skew is explained by the political geography of North Carolina,” the ruling states.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at https://campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published February 23, 2022 at 12:26 PM.
