The always excellent Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has just published its demographic analysis of NC Republicans’ proposed “2016 Contingent Congressional Plan — Corrected” on the Center’s web site, Carolina Demography. The new map was hastily produced last week, and approved by both houses of the state General Assembly on a party-line vote, in response to a finding earlier this month by a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court of Appeals that the old map, imposed by Republicans in 2012, is unconstitutionally race-based. And until we have a better map — one which can pass those judges’ scrutiny — North Carolina cannot hold its 2016 congressional primary election...a restriction which has thrown the election calendar into chaos.
We are still awaiting word regarding whether the U.S. District Court of Appeals will accept this new map, thus permitting the 2016 primary to go forward. But Carolina Demography’s new analysis suggests that the new map, just like the old one, is abhorrent.
Both statutory and case law permit a wide range of shenanigans in the decennial redrawing of Congressional districts: redrawing districts for partisan advantage is, sadly, A-OK, as is arbitrarily dismembering a community, city, or county among multiple districts, Two things, however, are not OK:
- Basing a map on voters’ races, with the effect of diluting minorities’ electoral power
- Creating districts with unequal population sizes, thus violating the fundamental principle that the House of Representatives, unlike the Senate, provides all citizens with equal representation.
In a concession which proved necessary in order to see the Constitution through to adoption, the Founders purposely designed the U.S. Senate to feature unequal representation: the one million citizens of tiny Rhode Island have, today, precisely as much voice in the Senate (two votes) as do the nearly 40 million residents of California. To counter-balance the tendency toward a tyranny of the minority which this concession created, the Founders designed the lower house of the legislative branch, the House of Representatives, to be strictly proportional: every House district should have as near to the same total population as every other district, and thus every member of the House represents quite nearly the same number of citizens. This is why we redraw House district maps every ten years (driven by the decennial census), to correct for differences in district growth rates. And, thus, a map which features districts of significantly different population sizes is, a priori, unconstitutional.
How close in population size should Congressional districts be? There’s no hard and fast statutory law here, but in case law, districts which vary in size by, at most, 0.5% tend to survive judicial scrutiny, whereas greater disparities seldom if ever do.
Carolina Demography’s new analysis — employing the most current and reliable population estimates (the Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey data) — documents that NC Republicans’ proposed new map doesn’t even come close to that goal:
As the chart above shows, the problematic NC-12 district (whose racially gerrymandered nature triggered this whole kerfluffle in the first place) is more than 9% larger in its proposed new form than are either the proposed new NC-10 or NC-11. And smaller, but still significant, disparities are found across the map; only two of the proposed 13 districts (NC-07 and NC-09) fall within the accepted +/- 0.5% wiggle room which case law smiles upon.
It is increasingly obvious that Republicans’ proposed new map defies both sense and sensibility, and seems likely to go down in flames before the Circuit Court of Appeals. We are probably no closer today to knowing the date of NC’s upcoming congressional primary than we were two weeks ago.
Monday, Feb 22, 2016 · 3:29:46 PM +00:00 · DocDawg
As first pointed out by Superribbie in a comment, below (and amplified upon by cbabob), the ‘gold standard’ for district populations is the decennial census, not the Census Bureau’s annual updated ACS estimates. And if we judge by the 2010 census alone, the proposed new districts are equal in population. Yet we know damn well that Charlotte (home to the proposed new NC-12) has been and continues to be growing rapidly, while many other regions of North Carolina are actually shrinking. And thus we know that the 2010 census numbers are now out of whack. And, interestingly (and no doubt completely coincidentally), the proposed new NC-12 has either the largest or second-largest African American population of any district in the state…so the fact that it is also the largest district in the new map means that, once again, NC Republicans are proposing to corral black voters in a ghetto of Republicans’ making. How will the court balance these important considerations in judging this map? Stay tuned.
Monday, Feb 22, 2016 · 4:23:34 PM +00:00 · DocDawg
According to today’s Raleigh News & Observer:
Critics of the congressional redistricting process that took place in 2011, and who successfully sued to overturn it on the basis of racial gerrymandering, on Monday filed a brief in federal court saying they don’t like the new map, either.
[….] “The map adopted by the General Assembly has been subject to considerable criticism, and plaintiffs share those deep concerns,” the brief they filed Monday says. “Their preliminary analysis of the new plan suggests that it is no more appropriate than the version struck down by the court.”