A panel of three federal judges heard arguments Wednesday over whether a newly drawn congressional map should be used for North Carolina’s 2026 elections. The hearing comes a month after North Carolina lawmakers redrew the map with the intention of giving Republicans an extra seat in the U.S. House, as part of a broader mid-decade redistricting push.
If the judges side with legislators, the new map will be used for the 2026 midterm elections while the broader court case progresses. If not, North Carolina would return to its pre-existing congressional map for the upcoming election cycle. However, any decision from the judges would also likely be appealed.
North Carolina follows Texas, California and Missouri in the mid-decade redistricting battle over the congressional map in each state.
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The fight began in Texas, after President Donald Trump asked Gov. Greg Abbott and state lawmakers to find five more Republican seats. California lawmakers then launched a counter attack, asking voters to temporarily sidestep the state’s independent redistricting committee to approve a new congressional map adding five likely Democratic U.S. House seats. In early November, voters approved that map. And in Missouri, the state legislature and governor approved a redrawn congressional map adding an additional safe Republican seat.
Each effort has drawn lawsuits. Missouri’s state courts held a redistricting trial mid-November. A proposed ballot referendum could also block their map. After voters approved California’s map, the state Republican Party took them to court. The Department of Justice joined their suit. Most recently, a Texas federal court struck down its redistricted map.
The Texas case is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the ruling in North Carolina’s case is appealed, its next stop is also the nation’s highest court.
Time is ticking. Candidate filing period begins Dec. 1 in North Carolina, and maps have to be finalized by then. In the past, courts have pushed back the filing when necessary to draw another congressional map, but it is not their preference.
The panel of judges hearing the case on Wednesday said they would issue a ruling “as quickly as possible.” They appear likely to rule in Republican legislators’ favor, based on their lines of questioning during the preliminary hearing.
The congressional map drawer testifies
Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, was the sole witness during Wednesday’s hearing in Winston-Salem. Since at least 2019, he has been the legislature’s primary map drawer — in North Carolina, that means he’s already overseen more than a few redistricting processes.
In mid-October, Hise released a proposed congressional map that the legislature ended up passing along party lines. There was no court order requiring the legislature to redraw maps. There was no technical or legal problem with the maps. There certainly was no recent Census requiring redistricting.
But there was one reason to redistrict: partisan advantage. Generally, the party of the President underperforms in midterm elections, and the margins are narrow in the U.S. House. If Democrats flipped a few seats, they could gain a majority and block some of Trump’s agenda.
Trump knows that, so he has called for state legislatures to give him a bit of a buffer. Wednesday, Hise testified that he wanted the balance of power in Congress to remain in the Republicans’ favor, and the best way to ensure that was to redraw electoral lines in a way that gave North Carolina Republicans the best shot at winning the most seats in the U.S. House.
Already, Republicans have safe seats in 10 of the state’s 14 U.S. House districts. The new 2025 congressional map realigns the First and Third U.S. House districts to give them 11, if all goes to plan.
Before the change, Republicans had about a 49% share of the vote in the First Congressional District, and 60% in the Third Congressional District. Now, it’s closer to 55% in both.
U.S. Rep. Don Davis, a Black Democrat, currently serves the First Congressional District. Due to the redistricting, his home is now in the Third District. Davis has indicated that he will run for reelection, but now he has to choose which district to run in — congressional candidates don’t technically have to live in their districts.
The only redistricting criteria Hise used in the most recent 2023 redrawing that he didn’t use this time was incumbency advantage, or attempting to keep current representatives in the same district, he said.
Hise was careful to say that his goal was to help Republicans, not to specifically target Davis. He added that he did not consider racial data, and hadn’t used it in the redistricting process since 2017.
‘Endless game of whack-a-mole’
If judges let this mid-decade redistricting slide, they’ll be sanctioning an “endless game of whack-a-mole,” said Hilary Klein, an attorney for the plaintiffs, which include the North Carolina chapters of the NAACP and Common Cause.
She argued that if lawmakers don’t need a “legitimate reason” to redraw the congressional map, like the U.S. Census or a court order, then they can redistrict after every election in retaliation against voters’ choices.
Due to a previous U.S. Supreme Court case originating in North Carolina, Rucho v. Common Cause, and a state Supreme Court ruling of the same ilk, judges cannot normally rule on partisan gerrymandering — the practice of redrawing maps to give one party a disproportionate advantage over the other.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that while extreme partisan gerrymandering may be illegal, there’s no way for the federal court to draw the line between what is acceptable partisan redistricting and what isn’t without putting their thumb on the political scale. So, in 2019, the court’s majority sent the question back to state courts. Once the North Carolina Supreme Court got a Republican majority, it allowed the legislature to draw partisan gerrymanders.
Legislative attorneys argued that Rucho and the state Supreme Court ruling mean that the 2025 redistricting is completely legal. In addition, the state Constitution bans mid-decade redistricting for state legislative maps, but says nothing about the congressional map, legislative attorney Phillip Strach said.
However, plaintiffs are presenting a novel argument: that the First Amendment bars partisan redistricting if there is no “legitimate” reason to already be redrawing maps. In other words, if the legislature is redistricting after the decennial U.S. Census to adjust for population changes or is redrawing the congressional map because a court told them to, then they can be as partisan as they want due to previous court decisions.
“We can’t police this when they’re already redrawing lines,” Klein said.
On the other hand, if lawmakers decide to draw a new congressional map in the middle of the decade because they want to give a certain party or group an advantage or disadvantage, courts should be able to strike that down as discrimination against a particular group’s First Amendment-protected viewpoint, she said.
Plaintiffs also alleged that the new map unconstitutionally divided northeast North Carolina’s Black Belt, giving Black voters little to no opportunity to elect their preferred candidate.
“They picked this district for a reason,” Kat Robles, Forward Justice attorney, said after the hearing. “There are Democratic voters across this state. There are other places that could be cut. It is not just a surprise or random occurrence that has happened in the Black Belt.”
Strach argued that race wasn’t part of the motivation. Rather, looking at election results, northeast North Carolina simply made the most sense as the place to switch up district lines. Just because Hise knows where Black voters live doesn’t mean he used that in his thought process, Strach added.
“Sen. Hise is not required to undergo a lobotomy to forget,” he testified.
Judges’ signals
The panel of judges — Trump appointees Richard Myers III and Allison Rushing, joined by George W. Bush appointee Thomas Schroeder — were skeptical of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment argument.
The hearing was over a preliminary injunction, which would halt the map’s use while the broader lawsuit progresses. To issue a preliminary injunction, judges are supposed to rule in favor of whoever is most likely to win in the long term.
Considering court precedent and how novel their argument is, Judge Schroeder said plaintiffs would have to reach a “high bar” for the panel to rule in their favor.
Judges Rushing and Myers appeared to doubt that the organizations represented in this case would take the same position if Democrats had drawn the lines on the new North Carolina congressional map, based on their national counterparts’ advocacy.
As a whole, the judges didn’t seem convinced that there was a legal basis for requiring the state legislature to provide a reason for redistricting. They seemed more inclined to apply Rucho and other precedent to redistricting, mid-decade or otherwise.
For Common Cause North Carolina Executive Director Bob Phillips, it’s not that complicated.
“Imagine you’re a voter, and the candidate of your choice is elected, and then you find yourself before the next election in another district,” he said. “That’s what thousands of North Carolina voters, Black voters particularly in eastern North Carolina, are facing right now, and it is retaliation.”
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