North Carolina lawmakers passed new congressional and legislative maps Tuesday, setting up a final vote Wednesday — decisions that could cement GOP control of state politics for years to come.
The new maps would be used in every election from 2024 through 2030 once passed into law, unless struck down in court.
The new congressional map passed the Senate Tuesday along party lines, with all Republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed. It’s expected to pass along similar lines Wednesday in the state House.
Under the new district lines, the state’s 14 U.S. House seats would shift from an even 7-7 split between Republicans and Democrats to a 10-4 or 11-3 edge favoring Republicans. There’s one competitive district, according to analyses of recent election data by the state legislature, WRAL News and others.
Democrats have slammed the Republican-drawn maps as gerrymandered to negate public opinion, by making it likely that Republicans will keep majorities in the state legislature and the congressional delegation — even if most voters across the state cast their ballots for Democratic candidates instead.
“I’m just tired, and I’m just angry,” said Rep. Robert Reives, D-Chatham, the top House Democrat. He wasn’t the only Democrat to express a sense of dread for future elections under the new maps.
“Why even hold elections, when the maps are rigged from the beginning?” said Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, D-Wake. He proposed undoing the GOP’s new lines and instead keeping the congressional districts used in the 2022 elections, with their 7-7 split. That proposal was immediately shot down along party lines, with no debate.
Republicans say they’re allowed the draw the maps however they please, since they control the legislature. They also have the backing of the Republican-majority state Supreme Court, which so far has consistently sided with Republican legislators in gerrymandering and voting rights cases.
“Democrats want you to believe this is the end of democracy as we know it,” said Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke. “Of course, that is laughably untrue.”
If Democrats want to compete in these new Republican-drawn districts, GOP leaders say, then Democratic politicians should do more to win over rural voters rather than complaining about gerrymandering in the new maps, which carve up the state’s main urban areas.
“The Democratic Party does not compete in almost three-quarters of North Carolina’s counties,” Rep. Destin Hall, R-Caldwell, said Tuesday, noting that when Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper won re-election in 2020, he won 29 of the state’s 100 counties.
Lawmakers made some tweaks to the new maps Monday, including a change to which congressional district most of Fayetteville’s Cumberland County will be part of in the future.
Democrats proposed further changes Tuesday, but Republicans shot nearly all down. One was to redraw the Charlotte-area legislative lines to save Sen. Natasha Marcus, D-Davidson, a vocal critic of Republican-backed bills whose house will be placed in a heavily Republican district in the new state Senate map. It failed in a party-line vote.
Marcus said even though Republicans have the power to drive her out of the legislature like this, they should’ve respected the voters who sent her to Raleigh in the first place.
“I speak in opposition to your bills and your policies,” she told her GOP colleagues Tuesday. “I do it in a professional manner. I don’t make personal attacks. … I fight hard for the things that they sent me here to fight for: Reproductive freedom, public education, environmental protections, clean energy, equality.”
Also on Tuesday, the state House and state Senate passed new maps for their own districts, over protests from Democrats who are likely to lose a number of seats under the proposed new maps. The chambers will now switch and approve each others’ maps, likely on Wednesday. The congressional map is also expected to receive a final vote in the House Wednesday, after passing the Senate Tuesday.
“This has nothing to do with the values and the will of North Carolina citizens,” Rep. Deb Butler, D-New Hanover. “It has everything to do with placing the lines to manipulate and pre-ordain the outcome of elections.”
Once the votes Wednesday are finished the maps will automatically become law, as long as no changes are made that would need additional approval. The governor is banned from vetoing redistricting plans.
Republicans have been open about using this year’s redistricting process to boost their own voters’ power at the expense of Democratic voters. They’ve defended those actions, pointing to a North Carolina Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that greenlit politically motivated gerrymandering.
That ruling, issued by the court’s new Republican majority, overturned an anti-gerrymandering Supreme Court ruling from 2022 when Democrats controlled the court.
More gerrymandering lawsuits are expected once the maps become law. Given the state Supreme Court’s recent political shift it’s likely that opponents will be looking to federal courts, not state courts, to overturn the maps. That would require making claims of racial gerrymandering.
Democrats have claimed since the maps were made public last week that the lines do in fact reflect racial gerrymandering. The maps “mean weakening Black votes in eastern North Carolina,” Chaudhuri said during Tuesday’s debate.
GOP leaders have given almost no details explaining their various decisions in redrawing the political districts, saying their lawyers have advised them not to say much given the likely lawsuits. But one refrain from Republicans has been to repeatedly claim they didn’t use racial data in drawing the maps. They’ve said they intended only to diminish the influence of Democratic voters in general, not Black voters specifically.
That distinction could raise broad questions in court about race and politics in a state like North Carolina — where Black voters overwhelmingly support Democratic politicians, and where 90% of registered Republican voters are white.
“We have racially polarized voting in parts of North Carolina,” Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, said. “We have an obligation to draw districts that protect African-American voting rights.”
Democrats urged Republicans to pass a different version of a state House map, which Harrison proposed and said would fix the racial issues that exist in the proposed map. It failed in a party-line vote, with Republicans saying they don’t believe that racially polarized voting exists anywhere in North Carolina.