On Friday, North Carolina Republican legislators passed a new congressional map, shown at the top of this post (see here for a larger version), along party lines, over Democratic objections, and we'll analyze the new districts below and how they still discriminate against Democratic voters. Because Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper lacks the constitutional authority to veto congressional redistricting, this new map becomes law, but the plaintiffs have vowed to fight the new map.
In late October, a state court issued a preliminary injunction blocking election officials from preparing to administer the 2020 election using Republicans' existing gerrymander, but the court didn’t actually strike down the map as unconstitutional, and that case is still proceeding on the merits. However, the court strongly implied that lawmakers should pass a new map, which the plaintiffs are now challenging. Should they prevail, the court could draw its own map.
Knowing that they risk losing on the merits, Republicans are likely to continue arguing that it's too late to replace the map they just enacted, since the candidate filing period for the March 2020 primary is coming up on Dec. 2, and Republicans separately filed a federal lawsuit supporting that claim. However, when their original congressional gerrymander was struck down for racial discrimination against black voters in 2016, it was redrawn in February of that year and officials simply delayed the primary, meaning there is likely still sufficient time for the court to impose a fairer alternative.
As for each of the GOP's districts themselves, we've calculated the 2004-2018 statewide elections, 2016 primary turnout by race and party, racial demographics of adult citizens, and educational attainment rates for adults. Analyzing these statistics, we find that the map likely locks in an 8-5 Republican majority with five districts that backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and eight that supported Trump, few of which give Democrats any chance at an upset. Democrats would be heavy favorites to flip two GOP seats: Rep. George Holding's 2nd District in Raleigh and Rep. Mark Walker's 6th District in the Piedmont Triad, both of which voted for Clinton by more than 20 points.
Confirming that the map is a gerrymander, GOP state Sen. Jerry Tillman spoke on the record and claimed that the process is “set up to be partisan. Do you think we're going to draw Democrat maps? ... We're doing exactly what you all did for 140 years." That admission of partisan intent could aid the plaintiffs in their case.
An 8-5 GOP edge is considerably fairer than the current 10-3 majority Republicans had engineered with what some analysts deemed the most extreme gerrymander ever passed in the modern era. However, in a state that only slightly leans right-of-center, a durable 8-5 Republican majority is still short of a fairer map that could elect a 7-6 GOP edge or even a 7-6 Democratic majority in Democratic-leaning years like 2018.
A key problem area with Republicans' new map is how they have cracked the Sandhills region among multiple districts in the Fayetteville area of southeastern North Carolina. As shown on the two maps below overlaying the district lines on demographic maps of educational attainment and median household income, Republicans have diluted the votes of the Sandhills by stretching both the 8th and the 9th Districts from the Charlotte suburbs, which are heavily white and have high income and education levels, into the Sandhills, which has the lowest educational attainment rates in the state, low income levels, and is racially diverse.
This configuration is very similar to the 8th and 9th Districts under the previous gerrymander, and it's likely to see the most opposition in court.
As shown below, a fairer alternative to the GOP's gerrymander could eliminate this problem. Daily Kos Elections' Stephen Wolf has drawn a hypothetical nonpartisan congressional map that keeps the Sandhills largely in one district and also better satisfies traditional neutral criteria by drawing districts that are more compact and split fewer municipalities than the GOP's new map.
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 map is the 2019 map, and our map is the Stephen Wolf map. We find that all three tests still indicate an advantage for Republicans under the GOP's new map, and the Wolf map has less of an unfair skew, particularly when looking at the 2012-2018 average of 30 nonpresidential elections.
If the latest Republican gerrymander is replaced with something like Wolf's map above, North Carolina could have seven Republican-leaning seats and six Democratic-leaning seats for a relatively fairer distribution. Democrats would also have an outside chance to retake the 11th District against Rep. Mark Meadows, a reactionary hardliner who was sanctioned for ethics violations last year. Indeed, two of 2018's appeals court elections saw Democrats win statewide by 2% and come within 4% of carrying the 11th, and this configuration was very similar to the district that elected moderate Democrat Heath Shuler last decade.
Wolf's 8th District is also far more racially diverse than the GOP's map and could elect a representative supported by black voters. At 9%, it would also have the fifth-largest Native American population of any district nationally thanks to the Lumbee tribe, and keeping that community intact could aid them in their fight to finally gain federal recognition. Voters of color would likely have the ability to elect their chosen representatives in four of 13 districts (Districts 1, 8, 12, and 13), which is proportional to North Carolina's overall population, and it would double the number of such districts compared to the old gerrymander.
If Republicans' new gerrymander survives judicial review, Democrats would still be practically guaranteed to gain two seats. However, since the plaintiffs are opposing the new map, North Carolina could end up with a court-drawn replacement that could see Democrats gain three seats and potentially have a chance to pull off an upset in a fourth GOP-held district if the plaintiffs prevail.