Redrawn congressional districts lean blue, have new Triangle focus
The court-forced redistricting that shifted one congressional district from leaning Republican to leaning Democratic also potentially consolidated the Triangle’s political power in Washington.
Once spread over three districts, two of which were heavily rural, the Triangle will now be represented by one U.S. House district contained entirely in Wake County and another covering the rest of Wake, Durham and Orange counties, with two Democratic front-runners running against Republican political newcomers.
Deborah Ross, who lost to Sen. Richard Burr in 2016 as the Democratic challenger, is making another run at Congress, this time in the redrawn 2nd Congressional District that encompasses the southern three-fourths of Wake County. Her opponents are Republican Alan Swain, a former Army officer, and Libertarian Jeff Matemu.
Democratic Rep. David Price is running for reelection in the 4th District, which he has represented, with a two-year gap, since 1987. That district keeps Orange County and now includes all of Durham County and the remaining portion of Wake, along with some outlying areas. He’s running against Republican Robert Thomas, a lawyer and real-estate appraiser.
While the new 4th District remains a bit of a mishmash of counties, the new 2nd represents Raleigh and its biggest suburbs, exclusively. That for the first time puts Raleigh on par with Charlotte, which has for many decades had a congressional district representing the core of Mecklenburg County.
“We’ve had a lot of congressional maps over the last 30 years in North Carolina,” said Andrew Taylor, a political science professor at N.C. State. “But generally Mecklenburg has had a district in a way that Wake hasn’t. It’s more of an even playing field in that way.”
Johnston County is in the 7th District, which includes the southeastern corner of the state and where Republican incumbent David Rouzer is running against Democratic challenger Christopher M. Ward. The 4th District is considered “solid Democratic” by the Cook Partisan Voting Index, while the 2nd is listed as “likely Democratic” and the 7th as “solid Republican.”
In the two squarely Triangle-focused districts, if expectations hold, Price and Ross may be in a position to exert new influence on behalf of the Triangle, especially with the North Carolina delegation expected to move from a 10-3 split in favor of Republicans to 8-5.
“It perhaps gives the delegation more of an urban character and helps urban interests in the state a little bit more,” Taylor, the N.C. State professor, said.
Some or all of this may be fleeting: these districts, drawn by the General Assembly in 2019, were intended to be quick fixes after the previous maps were struck down in court as illegal partisan gerrymandering; there will be new districts drawn for the 2022 election based on the 2020 Census.
The candidates
Ross, a Raleigh lawyer who served more than 10 years in the N.C. House, is running for the seat vacated by Republican incumbent George Holding, whose old district included not only part of Wake but parts of Franklin, Harnett, Johnston, Nash and Wilson counties. In the state House, she pushed through an anti-racial profiling bill among other legislative achievements, while she said her green energy clients in private practice give her a unique perspective on the implications of climate change.
“I’ve lived here for 30 years. I’ve seen it grow as part of the Wake delegation,” Ross said. “I’ve had to think about Wake County as a whole. It’s not just Raleigh. Cary is the seventh largest municipality in the state and there’s Wendell and Knightdale and Zebulon, which are entirely different than what you’re talking about in Cary and Morrisville. It’s a diverse county and having a person who understands how everything fits together at the federal, state and local level is going to be so important, as we’ve seen with the coronavirus.”
When Holding decided not to seek reelection after his district was redrawn, Swain was drafted to run against Ross. A retired Army colonel who served with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in the White House before founding a government-contracting business, Swain has preached bipartisanship while positioning himself as a small-government conservative with Washington experience. He and Ross shared some common ground on health care in a virtual forum earlier this month.
“There are people on the far left and people on the far right,” Swain said. “I don’t accept either one of those views. We need to reach across the middle. I may be beating my head against the wall a lot in Washington.”
Price’s district still has the Triangle as its center of gravity, although it also includes Franklin and Granville counties as well as portions of Chatham and Vance counties. Much of Durham County — including the city of Durham itself — had previously been in the 1st District, which was built around the I-95 corridor stretching from Roanoke Rapids to Rocky Mount to Wilson.
The longtime Democratic congressman is the only North Carolina member of the House Appropriations Committee and has an established record of support for transportation, affordable housing and public education. He also has raised vocal opposition to President Donald Trump’s policies on everything from immigration to health care.
“I have wanted for a long time to have a leadership role in transportation and housing,” Price said. “From my first day in the House, I have believed those issues are uniquely important to this part of North Carolina. And they’re compelling morally, in terms of trying to do the right thing. I really am eager to see us move forward in those areas. They’ve both been under-resourced under Trump. He talks about having an ‘infrastructure week’ and it has become a punch line. A lot of big talk. I’m anxious to do more than big talk. I want to get these areas moving.”
Price talked about this election being a referendum on “Trump and Trumpism” at every level. That’s also how Thomas, his Republican challenger, is approaching it. Thomas has focused his campaign on support for a border wall, the 2nd Amendment and what he believes to be the unconstitutional impeachment of Trump, which is what prompted him to run for office.
“I hope that it is (a referendum),” Thomas said. “Because if you judge President Trump on his performance then he’s done pretty well. If you look at the kind of things he’s accomplished and you put them single-spaced on pages it would take you five pages to cover over four years. Things that matter.”
