A federal district court just struck down North Carolina’s extreme congressional gerrymander over the impermissible use of race. It held that Republican legislators violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by using race as the sole metric when constructing the 1st and 12th districts, both of which went from plurality black to majority black during 2011 redistricting. Republicans’ use of a 50 percent black threshold was found to be without justification under the Voting Rights Act, and the court found they went to great lengths to hide their true purpose of partisanship from public scrutiny.
The three-judge court panel ordered the legislature to pass a remedial map by February 19 and barred the state from holding the upcoming 2016 elections under the current map. With filing closed and the state’s primaries just over a month away on March 15, primary elections will likely have to be delayed unless the United States Supreme Court stays the decision pending appeal, which is quite probable. Rulings from three-judge district court panels go directly to the Supreme Court on appeal.
Coming on the heels of a similar ruling against racial gerrymandering in Virginia, this ruling in North Carolina might seem like great news for foes of partisan and racial gerrymandering. However, Republicans still control the legislature and will get to draw a remedial map unimpeded by Democratic officeholders, unlike in Virginia. Given the extremes Republicans already went to with the above gerrymander, which elected 10 Republicans and three Democrats, it is quite likely they will seek to preserve any partisan advantage they can. While they will appeal this decision, Republicans should easily be able to mitigate any partisan impact of a remap, as seen below.
Under a remedial map, the invalidated 1st and 12th would need to shed excess black voters, but unlike in Virginia, there is no adjacent district that could be made heavily black without unlikely radical changes. Republicans should be able to make modest tweaks to both districts while ensuring all 10 Republican districts stay solidly red. With the above map, the 12th drops Winston-Salem for more white residents of Charlotte and Greensboro, while the 1st drops some of its eastern tentacles for nearly all of Durham, lowering both districts to merely plurality black. These changes still allow all 10 Republican districts to have gone for Romney by nearly 15 points or more.
Even if the first remedial map’s 12th District still doesn’t pass muster and the district must drop all of the Triad region, Republicans could still successfully maintain their 10 to 3 advantage. Here the three heavily-Democratic cities of the Triad are divided between three different Republican districts with none of the 10 Republican seats voting for Romney by less than 11 percent. However, the court didn’t specifically find unconstitutional how the 12th ventured from Charlotte to the Triad, since the district has done so since the 1990s, but specifically invalidated how it used race to do so rather than partisanship.
Unfortunately, there is no probable scenario where North Carolina implements a fair, nonpartisan congressional map like this one above. This map would dismantle the black-majority 12th and replace it with one district likely to elect a black Democrat in Charlotte and the Triad each. In total, Democrats could gain three to five members out of 13. However, since North Carolina’s governor cannot veto redistricting laws and the legislature is heavily gerrymandered, Democrats would need a tidal wave in a redistricting year to wrest control away from Republicans.
While it’s nonetheless welcome that Republican gerrymandering faces any setback, a new North Carolina congressional map is highly unlikely to produce any net change in the racial or partisan delegation the state sends to Congress. (You can find more detailed election result data for these hypothetical districts and the current map here.)