Court refuses to block North Carolina GOP's new House gerrymander in a setback for fair elections

This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Democrats chose not to appeal.

In a setback in the fight against Republican gerrymandering, a 2-1 Democratic panel of state court judges has unanimously refused to block the congressional map that North Carolina Republicans passed last month after the same court panel had blocked their previous gerrymander from being used for 2020.

Ruling that there was insufficient time remaining to adjudicate the facts of the plaintiffs' challenge to the new map, the court did not issue a finding of whether it was constitutional or not, but the judges allowed the GOP's new map to enter into effect for the March 2020 primary. The plaintiffs subsequently announced late Monday that they wouldn't appeal to the 6-1 Democratic state Supreme Court, meaning the new map is finalized.

Daily Kos Elections has calculated the 2004-2018 statewide election results and a handful of demographic statistics for the GOP's new districts, and they indicate that the new map is likely to elect an 8-5 Republican majority barring a Democratic wave even larger than 2018. While that's a much fairer split than the previous map's 10-3 Republican advantage, that's a very low bar given that the previous map was by one measure the most extreme gerrymander nationwide for the last several decades. The new map likely precludes Democrats from winning a majority of seats even in years when they're winning more votes like 2018.

Nevertheless, Democrats will be practically guaranteed to flip GOP Rep. George Holding's 2nd District in Raleigh and GOP Rep. Mark Walker's 6th District in the Piedmont Triad, since both seats backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 by more than 20 points.