North Carolina Republicans Passed A Heavily Skewed Congressional Map. How Will The Courts Respond?
After considering at least 11 proposals, the North Carolina General Assembly finally passed a new congressional map on Nov. 4 — and it’s one of the most Republican-biased maps they could have chosen. But this likely isn’t the end of the redistricting saga in the Tar Heel State.
Redistricting is usually a once-a-decade process, but in North Carolina, courts have repeatedly ordered the drawing of new congressional maps due to extreme gerrymandering. And given that both racial and partisan gerrymandering lawsuits have already been filed against this new map, it remains to be seen whether it will survive either.
North Carolina’s previous congressional map — which is to say, the one used in last year’s election — already gave Republicans eight seats and Democrats five seats in a state President Biden lost by just 1 percentage point, but the new map gives the GOP an even greater advantage. According to our analysis, it creates 10 Republican seats, three Democratic seats and one highly competitive seat.
The approved map has an efficiency gap of R+20.1, up 11.6 points from the old map, which had an efficiency gap of R+8.5. (Efficiency gap is a measure of which party has more “wasted” votes, i.e., votes that don’t contribute toward a candidate winning. This means that the new map is more than twice as efficient for Republicans as the old map, which was already pretty efficient for them.) Under the new map, North Carolina’s median congressional district is also now 11.4 points redder than the state as a whole. In other words, Democrats would have to win North Carolina by 11.4 points just to win half its congressional seats.
The new map boosts Republicans in the state through reapportionment, both by giving the state a 14th district, which the Republican-majority General Assembly used to give their party a double-digit advantage, and by making two currently Democratic-held seats much less blue. One of those seats is the 6th District, which previously encompassed all of Guilford County and part of Forsyth County. The new map splits the old 6th into four districts, which contradicts House Redistricting Committee Chair Destin Hall’s claim that the committee “focused only on traditional criteria like keeping counties and cities whole” when drawing maps. This change will surely make for an improbable reelection for Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning. In the new map, Manning represents the new 11th District, which leans Republican by 16 points.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/north-carolina-republicans-passed-a-heavily-skewed-congressional-map-how-will-the-courts-respond/
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