Politics

Democrat: How does new map reflect NC's 50-50 party balance. GOP: 'It doesn't'

Hundreds of protesters gather Oct. 21 at the Old Capitol in Raleigh to listen to top Democrats voice objections to a mid-decade redistricting effort led by Republican leaders of the N.C. Legislature. [SARAH MICHEL/Carolina Public Press]

By SARAH MICHELS, Carolina Public Press, Published: October 25, 2025

While more than a dozen North Carolinians pleaded with lawmakers to bow out of mid-decade congressional redistricting last Tuesday afternoon, state Rep. Brenden Jones, R-Columbus, looked down at his phone. 

A day earlier, State Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, stared blankly ahead for two hours while his Democratic colleagues lectured him and his fellow Republicans for heeding President Donald Trump’s call to redraw maps to give Republicans an edge in the midterms.

Faced with a foot-high stack of over 12,280 public comments — nearly all adamantly against the redistricting process — Republicans cut off House floor debate after an hour Wednesday, voting along party lines to implement the new maps before lunchtime. 

Jones, a House redistricting committee co-chair, and Hise, a Senate elections committee chairman responsible for the new Congressional map, didn’t have to pay attention. Republicans didn’t have to consider the plethora of public comments. They didn’t have to make excuses. So they didn’t. 

“The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: draw a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation,” Hise said. “Republicans hold a razor-thin margin in the United States House of Representatives. If Democrats flip four seats in the upcoming midterm elections, they will take control of the House, and torpedo president Trump’s agenda.”

In North Carolina, the governor cannot veto redistricting legislation; now, the only barrier to implementation is the courts. 

Litigants in an ongoing redistricting case concerning North Carolina’s congressional map added onto their lawsuit Thursday in light of the new maps. Other lawsuits could follow.

Gerrymandering: What’s legal, what isn’t? 

In 2023, the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed its own precedent to greenlight partisan gerrymandering, or the practice of redrawing maps to give one party a disproportionate advantage in elections. 

Republican legislators then jettisoned their court-ordered 2022 maps that featured an even number of Democratic- and Republican-leaning districts, in favor of a new map with 10 solid Republican districts, three solid Democratic districts, and one competitive district that U.S. Democratic Rep. Don Davis, NC-1 has held since. 

Now, because of that same ruling, Republicans can say the quiet part out loud. They can draw an even stronger partisan gerrymander, so they will. Wednesday, they drew Davis out of his district in a proposed 11-3 Congressional map. 

When asked by state Sen. Gladys Robinson, D-Guilford, how the new plan reflected the state’s approximately 50-50 party split, Hise responded simply: 

“It doesn’t.” 

The new map would impact the First and Third Congressional Districts. 

The First District would gain some of the Third District’s most red counties, and consequently shift from a district where Trump won 52 percent of the 2024 vote to one where he would have earned 55 percent of the vote. 

Consequently, the Third District would become less Republican. Under the new map, it would move from a district where Trump won 60 percent   of the 2024 vote to 56 percent. 

Even if Democrats overperform in the 2026 midterm elections and win the First or Third District, the districts will “almost certainly” go to Republicans in the long term, said Andy Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation.

Democrats can’t do anything about partisan gerrymandering, but they do have one hope left —  that the courts rule against the redistricted map for racial gerrymandering. 

The First District has a storied history. 

State Rep. Rodney Pierce, D-Halifax, said it’s been home to the highest concentration of Black North Carolinians since the Antebellum era. During the Reconstruction Period, voters chose a handful of Black congressional representatives, but then stopped for nearly a century.

After 91 years without a Black congressional representative, former Congresswoman Eva Clayton won a seat in 1992. She was followed by Black Congressmen Frank Ballance, G.K. Butterfield and most recently, Don Davis. 

If the new maps make it through court scrutiny, the proportion of Black voters in the First District would drop from about 41% to 33 percent, while the proportion of Black voters in the Third District would rise to 29%. 

Neither is likely to be enough to elect the preferred candidate of the districts’ Black voters. 

The map also splits districts in a way that combines mainland agricultural folk with beach and coastal North Carolinians, groups that have “different priorities, different needs, different economies, different lives in general, different cultures,” Pierce said. 

Throughout the legislative week, Democrats relentlessly alleged that the maps were drawn to dilute the power of Black North Carolina voters, while Hise and other Republicans consistently rejected the idea. 

As the sole mapmaker, Hise said he did not use any racial data in the computers used to draw maps. 

Pierce said he didn’t have to use that data to know where the Black population is concentrated.

He said it seems intentional that this effort is happening while the U.S. Supreme Court may be on its way to decide that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — which requires drawing majority-minority districts in certain cases to ensure minority groups can elect their preferred representative — is unconstitutional. 

“You have all these cases about political representation, namely Black political representation, and the only thing pretty much protecting that is Section 2 (of the VRA),” he said. “So I just don’t see that as a coincidence.”

The Voting Rights Act and congressional districts

Trish Todaro attached a yellow paper clip on her shirt, a subtle marker of resistance against Nazi occupation used by Norwegians during World War II. 

Todaro was one of several hundred protestors who first rallied in front of the Old Capitol and then marched to the state legislature to confront lawmakers Tuesday. She came all the way from Surf City in Pender County to express her opposition to mid-decade redistricting. 

Todaro fought for women’s rights, and now, she says she is fighting for everyone’s rights.

“We’re going to lose Democratic representatives, which is going to trickle over to having a Congress  that is just going to say ‘Yes, sir, no, sir,’” she said. “There’s not going to be a voice of opposition.” 

Megan O’Neill, another protestor and co-founder of Underwire NC, an organization supporting women voters, said losing representation matters on a host of issues, like gun violence and reproductive health care access. 

“North Carolina is a 50-50 state, right?” she said. “We are purple, and when you look at our map, you don’t see that. And so the Democratic and even the unaffiliated voices in North Carolina then don’t have representation fighting for what we want at the state level or at the national level.” 

Redistricting for partisan gain is unpopular — an estimated 84% of North Carolinians oppose it, according to a recent poll. 

But popularity isn’t a legal consideration. The Voting Rights Act may be. 

Under Section 2 of the VRA, parties can sue over maps they allege dilute a minority group’s voting power. However, it’s not an automatic slam dunk every time a map reduces the proportion of Black or brown voters in a district. 

Instead, courts have to decide whether minority voter dilution is illegal based on three criteria established in the 1986 Thornburg v. Gingles case. 

The first Gingles criterion is that the minority group impacted by vote dilution could have made up over 50% of a district’s voting age population if the map were drawn a different way that met traditional redistricting criteria, like compactness. 

The second Gingles criterion requires affected minority groups to be politically cohesive, meaning that minority voters tend to vote together in elections. 

The third Gingles criterion requires white voters who make up a majority of challenged districts to also vote together as a bloc, usually in opposition to the minority group’s preferred candidate. 

In a recently decided racial gerrymandering case involving northeastern North Carolina — albeit one involving state legislative maps, not congressional maps — District Court Judge James Devers III ruled that plaintiffs did not prove that the region met the first or third Gingles criteria. 

In his opinion, he stated that voters across the state, including in northeastern North Carolina, voted more along partisan lines than racial lines. 

“That’s a big deal, because if you can’t demonstrate those criteria, especially whites voting as a block to thwart Black voters, you’re going to have a hard time proving a racial gerrymandering case,” Jackson said. 

An attorney involved with the redistricting litigation objected to Devers’ ruling, calling it “egregiously wrong” and not determinative of what’s happening in northeastern North Carolina. There is significant racially polarized voting in the region, they argued. 

“I expect it to be taken up by the Fourth Circuit,” they added. “I expect the Fourth Circuit to not necessarily agree with the district court in that case.” 

Any litigation over the new maps could use different evidence and different expert testimony that may stand a better chance of proving a VRA violation. If plaintiffs can’t find a more convincing set of arguments, they’re unlikely to succeed, Jackson said. 

Even if Section 2 is struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, there are other legal avenues to challenge the maps, Jackson and the redistricting attorney said. Intentional racial discrimination is still illegal under the 14th Amendment, for example. 

Thursday, the Elias Group added onto its ongoing lawsuit over North Carolina’s congressional map — Williams v. Hall — to reflect the legislature’s actions.

In a supplemental complaint, the Elias Group argued that the new map is not only a partisan gerrymander, but a racial gerrymander as well.

The new maps move four counties with Black voting age populations ranging from 30-39% out of the First District in exchange for six counties from the old Third District that have Black voting age populations from 2-19%, according to the filing.

In addition, the Elias Group filing argues that the mere premise of mid-decade redistricting without a court order is unconstitutional because it does not account for population shifts since the last U.S. Census. While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that partisan gerrymandering is an unavoidable side effect of required redistricting, the Elias Group argues that this map-making was voluntary, and so no justification exists for using partisan or racial data in the process. 

Based on precedent, Jackson suspects that courts will allow the newly passed map to stand at least for 2026 while litigation progresses. Otherwise, courts would risk pushing back the December filing period and complicating the 2026 election cycle. 

No matter how hard the struggle, Pierce said he won’t stop advocating for fairer maps. 

“You’ve got to reorganize, restrategize, and then come back,” he said. “You never stop fighting. You can’t, because people continuously fought to get you where you are, and if you don’t do your part, then what are you doing?”