“If you can’t beat ‘em, cheat ‘em.” That’s the opening line of a just-released political ad asking North Carolinians to support mid-decade redistricting. The ad, paid for by conservative political action group Club for Growth, continues: “That’s what Democrats are trying to do to President Trump — rigging congressional district maps in California to give Democrats a leg up in the midterms. Republicans in Raleigh are fighting back, aiming to pass Trump’s plan for new maps in North Carolina to restore fairness in our elections.”
This summer, Texas heeded President Donald Trump’s call, beginning the mid-decade redistricting trend by redrawing their congressional district maps to give Republicans a five-seat boost in the midterms. California soon joined what would quickly become a tit-for-tat battleground. Now, more than a handful of other states are considering returning to the drawing board.
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Until recently, it seemed as if North Carolina would sit this one out. North Carolina’s congressional district maps are already just about as gerrymandered as they can get. A few years ago, Democrats and Republicans both held seven US House seats, but after recent redistricting efforts, Republicans have a solid 11 seats, Democrats have three, and there’s one toss-up — the 1st US House District, currently represented by Democratic US Rep. Don Davis.
Redrawing congressional district maps for the fifth time this decade would be expensive. It would risk further redistricting litigation, and is not guaranteed to succeed, as Davis’ seat is already the subject of a racial gerrymandering lawsuit. It would take time, and the clock is ticking for lawmakers to act before candidate filing opens in December.
All that for one seat? What seemed far-fetched a few weeks ago now appears in full swing.
New district maps moves from unlikely to likely
Last week, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger said if North Carolina Republicans “have to draw one more map this year, we will.” This week, the first political ad pressuring state lawmakers to get in line with Trump’s mid-decade redistricting strategy dropped.
And Tuesday, Democrats suffered a redistricting blow in the courts. Seven months after trial, a district court judge said that the state Senate redistricting map that lawmakers redrew in October 2023 did not dilute Black voting power, and therefore, could not be struck down as a racial gerrymander.
While the case, Pierce v. North Carolina State Board of Elections, deals with state legislative district maps, and the mid-decade redistricting push deals with congressional district maps, much of the reasoning in the judge’s order would apply to the racial gerrymandering case including US House District 1, the only toss-up district in the state.
With partisan gerrymandering effectively greenlit by North Carolina courts, racial gerrymandering is the last argument standing in the way of no-holds-barred redistricting.
Now, one of the main reasons why legislators would consider not mid-decade redistricting — Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — is “minimized,” said Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper.
A timely loss
In October 2023, lawmakers redrew district maps upon the decision of a new, Republican North Carolina Supreme Court. A month later, two Black North Carolinians living in the newly drawn state Senate District 2 called foul.
Now-State Rep. Rodney Pierce, D-Halifax, and Moses Matthews said the state Senate map weakened the voting power of Black North Carolinians by separating communities in the northeastern Black Belt.
This racial voting dilution allegedly violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which calls for majority-minority districts in certain situations to ensure minority communities are able to elect their preferred candidate, they argued. This week, U.S. District Court Judge James Dever unequivocally disagreed.
First of all, lawmakers didn’t use racial data in the computers they used for redistricting, Dever wrote in his order. Second, North Carolina voters elected a proportional number of Black state representatives under the challenged district maps in the 2024 election — they held about 22% of legislative seats and 21% of the Black voting age population.
Third, North Carolina voters aren’t especially racially polarized, Dever wrote. In northeastern North Carolina and across the entire state, Black minority voters and white majority voters don’t vote as unified blocs against each other; instead, there is a fair bit of crossover, the judge said. Party-based polarization is more relevant, he added.
Essentially, North Carolina as a whole has outgrown a need for majority-minority or majority-Black districts, Dever’s order said.
“Here, plaintiffs seek to use Section 2 not to address vote dilution but to obtain ‘’the maximum possible’ political power,” Dever wrote. “The current redistricting plan in the Senate protects (Black) voters from ‘political famine.’ Section 2 does not entitle plaintiffs to a ‘’political feast.’”
The Pierce case was never expected to go anywhere, said Andy Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Center. Lawmakers certainly weren’t waiting on it to greenlight mid-decade redistricting efforts, he added.
But, it could inform what happens next as legislators take another look at district maps.
Tuesday, Berger celebrated the ruling on social media.
“BIG WIN!” he posted. “Today, the court confirmed the (North Carolina General Assembly) was right not to use race in its redistricting process. The (Voting Rights Act) can’t be weaponized to make up for the shortcomings of the Democratic Party.”
Same region, different district maps
On its face, the Pierce case has little to do with the current, national battle.
It does hold weight in another decades-long debate about the role race should play in redistricting, said Asher Hildebrand, Duke Professor of the Practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy.
In the 1980s, a North Carolina case that ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court established a basic test for when majority-minority districts should be created to ensure a minority community can elect their preferred candidate under the Voting Rights Act.
In the ’90s, the Supreme Court took up another North Carolina redistricting case and used it to set limitations on creating majority-minority districts when it encroached on other voters’ 14th Amendment rights to equal protection.
“That’s created this kind of Goldilocks standard where you can’t use race too little and you can’t use race too much,” Hildebrand said. “A lot of the litigation that’s happened in recent decades has been trying to pinpoint exactly where that standard is.”
At the same time, the Pierce case could inform how easy or successful a mid-decade redistricting push may be in North Carolina.
The Pierce judge did not hold back when punching holes in Pierce and Matthews’ arguments. He not only rejected the existence of significant racially-polarized voting that would justify redrawing district maps in the first and second state Senate districts, but declared that racially-polarized voting wasn’t a significant factor across the entire state.
Dever specifically mentions U.S. Rep. Don Davis as an example of a Black candidate being able to win elections without district maps specifically drawn so that minority voters have a majority — Davis won his 1st District seat in 2022 with a Black voting age population of just 41%.
After the Pierce order dropped, the court gave notice to the judge in a separate case, Williams v. Hall.
That case also challenges four districts in the 2023 congressional district maps for racial gerrymandering, including the 1st District. The court held a trial in July, and stakeholders are now awaiting an order.
It’s not necessarily the end of the story, Hildebrand said. Another judge could hear different evidence from different witnesses and find a racial gerrymandering case more compelling than Dever did. However, the Pierce case covers almost exactly the same region as the Williams case.
If the precedent just set in Pierce is that racial gerrymandering is not a factor in the drawing of state Senate northeastern North Carolina maps, it would be harder for another judge to declare that it is a significant problem in the drawing of Congressional northeastern North Carolina maps.
“There’s not a lot of room for gray here,” Cooper said. “I mean, the court is saying pretty clearly, ‘We see no evidence of racially polarized voting in North Carolina period, and that includes this part of the state.’”
What’s next
If lawmakers do decide to redraw district maps, they still may face a few challenges. The first is timing. Candidate filing begins in December, and courts tend to look down upon changes to elections after they’ve officially begun.
The second is the drawing itself. The 1st District is already fairly compact, and only splits one county. Any redrawn map would have to be just as compact and not split any more than one county, Jackson said.
“If they take a shot at it, I think a challenge of that district will probably, depending on what they draw, be stronger than what we saw in (the Pierce) case,” he added.
But it’s possible. Jackson thinks a district could survive court review if legislators showed the courts they considered party more than race in the process. North Carolina courts do not weigh in on partisan gerrymandering anymore, so that would be less of an issue.
Third, it’s a lot of effort for a seat that’s already trending Republican.
“There’s no guarantee that Don Davis is going to win that seat,” Cooper said. “It is the definition of a toss up. So the Republicans may feel like they’ve got a good enough candidate that they don’t need to redraw those lines to get that outcome.”
Fourth, drawing new district maps would require the Senate and the House, who are currently arguing over the budget, to work together.
Redistricting for partisan gain can always backfire, particularly if a party stretches itself too thin in an attempt to gather more seats. That’s what happened to Democrats in the early 2000s, Jackson said. They kept gerrymandering to gain more Democratic districts, but as they spread their population around, margins got narrower in each of their districts. In the 2010 red wave election, they lost all their progress to a Republican takeover.
History could repeat itself in the districts bordering the 1st District.
“If 2026 turns out to be a bad year for Republicans, it’s possible that Democrats could take both those districts if they have solid candidates and a good year,” Jackson said.
On one level, Hildebrand said it would be “absurd” for North Carolina Republicans “to try to squeeze a little more juice out of that lemon by redrawing the 1st District.”
“But on the other hand, at this point, the bottom knows no limits. We keep finding new bottoms, and they keep going lower.”
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