The Supreme Court announced this week that it would hear a case this coming term concerning racial gerrymandering in North Carolina’s congressional districts. Alongside a similar challenge to Virginia’s state House of Delegates districts already set for the fall term, the court is poised to resolve some of the unclarified issues regarding the acceptable and impermissible use of race ahead of the 2020 redistricting cycle.
In 2011, Republican legislators in the Tarheel State redrew the 1st and 12th Congressional Districts and increased them from plurality black to majority black, claiming the changes were necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act. In 2016 a federal district court struck down these districts, deeming them an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Legislators subsequently claimed that they had gerrymandered based on party, not race. However, the court found that arbitrarily increasing the share of black voters was not necessary to preserve their ability to elect a black representative, but instead had diluted black voters’ clout in surrounding districts.
The district court thus ordered legislators to redraw the 1st and 12th districts and the Supreme Court refused to issue a stay while lawmakers appealed. Republicans subsequently passed a new, neater-looking map which they claimed ignored race entirely. However, this new map likely will have the exact same political impact as the old map and continue to elect just two minority representatives. Republicans showed their outright disdain for democracy when they explicitly defended the map’s grossly unfair partisan split of 10 Republicans and three Democrats in an evenly-divided swing state.
Although the district court subsequently upheld the legislature’s new replacement map against claims of illegal racial and partisan gerrymandering, its inequities remain. We have previously demonstrated that an alternative configuration could create an additional district that would elect a black representative, while a nonpartisan map could yield a far more balanced partisan outcome. The district court even deemed the legislature’s openly partisan map troubling for democracy, but admitted its hands were tied without an adequate standard to judge illegal partisan gerrymandering under past Supreme Court precedent.
North Carolina Republicans are now appealing to the Supreme Court in hopes that their original gerrymandering scheme will be approved. However, given recent rulings in similar cases in Alabama and Virginia, it seems likely that they will face a skeptical court majority, according to election law professor Rick Hasen. This issue is yet another reminder of how important it is for Democrats to win the 2016 elections and confirm a new justice who firmly supports minority voting rights, especially when many Southern states could have drawn additional congressional districts for minorities, but chose not to.