After a state court struck down dozens of gerrymandered legislative districts drawn by North Carolina Republicans last month, GOP lawmakers were given the opportunity to pass a new set of replacement maps. These new districts, however, are still unacceptably flawed: Not only did Republican lawmakers fail to follow the instructions laid out by the court, their maps preserve many elements of the old gerrymanders, which the court ruled had illegally violated the rights of Democratic voters.
To bring these problems to the court’s attention—and to propose better alternatives—Daily Kos Elections' Stephen Wolf and North Carolina attorney J. Denton Adams filed an amicus brief with the court that asks the judges to reject the GOP’s maps and adopt the nonpartisan maps we have created instead. Below, we’ll explore the requirements the court specified for any new maps, how our districts meet those requirements, and why the GOP’s maps don’t.
The court instructed Republicans to take "reasonable" efforts to improve the compactness of their districts, many of which sprawled needlessly, and to reduce the number of split precincts (also called voting tabulation districts, or VTDs). Map-makers were also permitted but not required to consider municipal borders, so as to avoid splitting cities, and to avoid placing multiple incumbents in the same district.
Furthermore, state Supreme Court precedent requires the preservation of what cartographers call "communities of interest." There’s no one way to define the term, but it could be a town, a neighborhood, a county, a geographic region, or any other demographic grouping where residents share ties of any sort.
The court also explicitly prohibited the use of partisan data to draw the new maps, meaning Republicans were not permitted to take election results into account. However, the judges did not bar the use of such data in evaluating the partisan distortion of the new maps. We’ve therefore calculated the results of the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections for every district in both the GOP’s maps and our own, as well as the results of all downballot statewide elections from 2012 to 2018.
We then used this data to calculate three common measures that show how much a map unfairly favors a party, using the mean-median difference; the partisan asymmetry metric; and the efficiency gap. In the table below, the GOP's new maps are the Remedial Senate and House maps, while our proposals are the Senate Plan, House Plan A, and House Plan B.
We find all three tests indicate a substantial unfair advantage for Republicans under their maps that could block Democrats from winning a majority of seats in 2020 even if they win a majority of votes. In fact, that very outcome transpired last year, when Democratic candidates for the legislature won 51 percent of all votes cast statewide, but the illegally gerrymandered maps returned Republican majorities in both chambers. By contrast, our proposals more faithfully followed the court's criteria. They are also more likely to ensure that the party that wins the popular vote also wins a majority of seats.
You can find detailed explanations for every district we proposed in our brief, but we'll also look at some of the key districts below. Starting with the Senate, we'll explore the GOP legislature's new maps and our proposed maps in detail, and we’ll also provide the data we used to assess them. In a separate follow-up post, we'll show you how to use that data for any North Carolina district map, including any you might like to try drawing yourself.
Below is a map of the GOP’s new map for the Senate:
Click to enlarge — Electoral and demographic data summary
The GOP's Remedial Senate Map passed with most—but not all—Senate Democrats signing on in support, after certain Democrats got to draw favorable districts for themselves. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are not objecting to them in court, but there are still significant problems with a number of districts, especially in the Piedmont Triad region. In particular, Republicans expended considerable effort to protect incumbents who were elected under the original illegal gerrymanders, which of course has the effect of perpetuating those very same gerrymanders.
By contrast, our map, which is just below, did not consider incumbency whatsoever:
Click to enlarge — Electoral and demographic data summary
In the Asheville area, our proposal makes the 48th District significantly more compact by giving it part of southern Asheville instead of the GOP's awkward appendage that connects Henderson County with the city of Black Mountain via a backward-arching hook. Our map still kept nearly four-fifths of Asheville in the 49th District. You can find the GOP's version in the caption beneath each image below.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In the Winston-Salem area, the GOP's map is particularly egregious in connecting rural Davie County in the 31st District with the furthest-away corner of Forsyth County via a thin strip of land that splits the Winston-Salem suburb of Clemmons. By contrast, our map is much more compact and keeps Clemmons whole.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In Wake County, home to the state capital of Raleigh, our proposal more faithfully preserves communities of interest. The 14th District would take in the entirety of central Raleigh bounded by the Interstate 40 and Interstate 440 beltline instead of splitting it three ways. The city of Cary would also have 97 percent of its population in the 16th District instead of being split in half.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
Under their invalidated gerrymanders, Republicans had illegally cracked the Democratic-leaning city of High Point by placing it with heavily rural Randolph County, a Republican stronghold. Although the GOP’s new map places more of High Point in the Guilford County-based 27th District, it doesn’t go far enough. Our map puts more of High Point in the 27th, eliminates the GOP's division of the town of Jamestown, and is more compact than the GOP's version. (The court ruled that the 24th and 28th Districts, along with certain precincts in the 27th District, couldn't be redrawn, otherwise all of High Point could have been added to the 27th.)
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
Finally, our Mecklenburg County districts, which contain the city of Charlotte, are considerably more compact because, again, they don't take incumbency into account.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
The GOP's new House map (shown below) was an even more brazen gerrymander. It passed along party lines, with Democrats opposed.
Click to enlarge — Electoral and demographic data summary
Subsequently, the plaintiffs filed an objection to several districts, but we’ve gone further and objected to nearly every redrawn district with our own proposals. We submitted two slightly different maps: Plan A prioritized avoiding the division of municipalities at the expense of splitting additional precincts, while Plan B did the reverse. The two maps only differ in nine of the 56 districts that were redrawn, and 99.96 percent of the state’s population would be in the same district under both plans.
Our full House maps are below:
Click to enlarge — Electoral and demographic data summary
Click to enlarge — Electoral and demographic data summary
In the districts around the city of Burlington, our plans are superior to the GOP's map because they are more compact and keep more of central Burlington in the 63rd District, which contains a majority of the city's population. By contrast, the GOP's map puts more of the outer edges of Burlington in that district.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In Union County, which is a suburb and exurb of Charlotte, the GOP’s illegal map was struck down for splitting the heavily Democratic and diverse city of Monroe between the 68th Districts and 69th Districts to ensure the 55th District stayed red. Nevertheless, the GOP's new map still unduly splits the city, putting most of it outside of the 55th. By contrast, our map puts 85 percent of Monroe in the 55th and reduces the degree to which other municipalities are divided in the county.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In the Wilmington area, the GOP's map links parts of the city of Wilmington with rural and beachfront communities across the Cape Fear River in the 19th District, combining two distinctly different communities of interest divided by a body of water. Our maps instead have the 18th District cross the river using the one major roadway that links downtown Wilmington with suburbs across the river such as Leland.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
Another set of districts we objected to are located in the Charlotte suburbs in Cabarrus County. There, the court found that Republicans had illegally separated the Democratic-leaning cities of Concord and Kannapolis, which share significant transportation and urban development connections. Despite this finding, the GOP's new map still keeps these cities divided to an undue degree. Both of our proposals keep all of or nearly the entirety of Kannapolis in the 82nd District and also combine it with nearly all of downtown Concord, which the GOP's map splits in half.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
The suburban Charlotte county of Gaston also has significant flaws under the GOP's new map, which maintains their illegal gerrymander by continuing to fracture the largest city of Gastonia, putting no more than half of it in a single district. By contrast, our maps place 88 percent of Gastonia in the 109th District. They also unite the two halves of Kings Mountain that are separately in Cleveland and Gaston Counties, and they're more compact.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In rural southeastern North Carolina, Republicans drew a map that is far from sufficiently compact. It also maintains their illegal gerrymander by placing the Democratic-leaning and substantially black city of Whiteville in the heavily white 16th District instead of the more competitive 46th District. Our maps are significantly more compact and remedy the illegal gerrymandering in Columbus County by putting Whiteville in the 46th.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In the Fayetteville area, Republicans combined vastly different communities of interest in their 43rd District, which connects the rural eastern half of the county with the heart of downtown Fayetteville. By contrast, our maps remove the rural territory from the 43rd, making it heavily urbanized, while our more rural 45th District only contains more outlying areas of Fayetteville.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In Jacksonville, the GOP's original map was struck down for dividing the Democratic parts of the city among heavily Republican districts, yet the GOP's new map does the same thing. Our maps are more compact and put the entirety of Jacksonville that isn't part of Camp Lejeune, the famous Marine Corps base, in the 14th District. Very few residents on the base vote there, so under the GOP's map, residents of Jacksonville outside the base would get outvoted by rural areas by a significant margin. By contrast, Jacksonville residents outside of the base make up a majority of the population in our 14th District.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
Republicans' new map in Winston-Salem is also especially gerrymandered just like the Senate map, and it continues to pack the city's Democratic voters into just two districts while cracking the rest among the other three GOP-leaning seats. By contrast, our proposals are more compact and split fewer municipalities.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In the more rural pairing of Franklin and Nash Counties in northeastern North Carolina, Republicans failed to fulfill the court's criteria by making the districts less compact and splitting an additional precinct to avoid pairing the two incumbents. Our maps disregarded incumbency and are thus more compact and split no precincts.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In Guilford County, the court ordered that only the 58th, 59th, and 60th Districts were to be redrawn, otherwise High Point could have been placed largely in one district instead of two. Still, Republicans drew an insufficiently compact map that illegally preserves too much of the original gerrymander with the 59th District. Our maps below are more compact and avoid any "boot-like" appendages like those Republicans drew.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
In the Greenville area, our proposals reduced the number of cities or precincts that were substantially split.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
Lastly, Charlotte's Mecklenburg County saw Republicans draw a map that was less compact and split more precincts and municipalities compared to our proposal.
Click to enlarge — Click to see Republicans’ map
If the court finds our arguments persuasive, North Carolina could finally have much fairer districts in 2020 for the first time this decade.
