North Carolina could very well be ground zero of litigation over partisan gerrymanders in this cycle.  In North Carolina, bills changing district lines are not subject to veto by the Governor.  When they had to redraw district lines in 2016, the state legislature was brutally honest that their main criteria was to maximize the number of Republican districts — drawing a 10-3 map only because it was impossible to draw an 11-2 map.  The North Carolina courts struck down that map.  The legislature then drew a map that resulted in an 8-5 delegation that survived review.  In short, what we will see happening in North Carolina this year is likely to be the Republicans in the legislature drawing the most aggressive map that they think can survive a court challenge followed by the state courts deciding if the map was an improper partisan gerrymander.

Given that the current lines are what the Republicans drew after the previous lines were struck down in 2019, they probably represent a base map for what the new map will look like.  (The software that I use to guesstimate maps does not have these new lines as an overlay.  So I had to eyeball the lines from the map.  There are a lot of split counties so the below combines districts with split counties together rather than trying to guess exactly how much each district is over or under the new average district — i.e. the target number.  In addition, as noted in previous posts, as the official county, city, and precinct populations have not been released by the Census Bureau yet, this software uses the last population estimate from the Census Bureau which will be somewhat off.)

Over in the eastern part of the state, the First District (lean Democrat) and the Third District (solid Republican) are a combined 5,000-10,000 over the target number for a fourteen-district map.  In other words, there might be a minor adjustment of where the lines are in Pitt County (currently split between the two) and some of Vance County (currently split between the First and the Fourth) will get bumped into the Fourth (which will then need to shed some population to the south and west).

On the west side of the state, the Fifth and Eleventh (both solid Republicans) are a combined 40-50,000 over the target for the new districts.  There will be probably be a shift of some precincts in Rutherford County (currently split between the two).  The Eleventh will also need to shed precincts in one of its other “eastern” counties.  These changes will make the Eleventh slightly less safe, but it should still be a pretty safe Republican district.  In turn, the Fifth will probably shed its voters in Catawaba County and another eastern county to the Tenth.  Again, these changes should have minimal impact on the partisan lean of the Fifth.

After these shifts, the Tenth (solidly Republican) will have to shed around 100,000 voters to the Sixth (solidly Democrat) and the Thirteenth (solidly Republican).  (My hunch is that most of the shedding will be in Forsyth County, currently split between the Tenth and the Sixth with the Sixth then shedding voters in Guilford County to the Thirteenth.)  Both the Tenth and Thirteenth are oddly Z shaped .  But even adding in the Sixth, Tenth, and Thirteenth to the Fifth and Eleventh.  the total excess from the western half of the state is around 130-150,000.  (My hunch says that the excess from the Thirteenth will have to be shed in the north and east to the Fourth.)  The overpopulated districts which will have to contribute the core of the new districts are the Second, Fourth,  and Twelfth (all solidly Democrat) the Seventh (solidly Republican), and the Eighth and Ninth (lean Republican).  In short, the core of population growth in North Carolina has been in the Charlotte and Research Triangle areas.

The question for redistricting is can the Republicans take enough Republican voters out of the three Democratic districts to permit them to draw a balanced number of voters out of the three Republican districts so that the new district will be a Republican district without the lines being so artificial that the courts step in again to make them draw fairer lines.  That may ultimately, in turn, come down to whether Republicans can still count on suburban voters.  There is a way to draw a new district that curves around the Research Triangle area, but those lines would shift the Ninth partially into Charlotte.  My initial draft of this type of a map resulted in six safe to solid Republican districts, three lean Republican districts, and five safe to solid Democratic districts.  But with a some slight shifts around the borders (moving Republican voters out of the Twelfth and Democratic voters out of the Ninth and some similar shifts from the Second and Fourth (taking in additional Democratic precincts from the new Fourteenth and shedding Republican precincts to the new Fourteenth and the Seventh) with adjustments along the boundaries of the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth, it was possible to make the split nine safe to solid Republican Districts to five safe to sold Democratic districts.

In my final version, the big changes to the current tilt of the existing districts were to the Twelfth (solid Democrat) and Tenth (solid Republican), both of which became slightly more Democratic which shifted Republican voters into the neighboring districts (Eighth, Ninth, and Thirteenth) which in turn allowed them to give enough Republican voters to the new Fourteenth into an R+7 district.  This final map was very aggressively gerrymandered (i.e. what the legislature is likely to want to do).  This map left only five Republican precincts combined in the Second and Twelfth Districts.  With some careful shifts, it might be possible to lower that number to three precincts, but those shift would have minimal impact on the partisan lean of the maps.  But as noted at the start, the question is whether the state courts will let the legislature go that far.  Getting this strong of a Republican tilt to the map requires splitting some cities and counties separate Republican precincts from Democratic precincts with rather twisty lines to link the Republican precincts to Republican districts and the Democratic precincts to Democratic districts.  It’s not quite as bad as the first map that was struck down before the 2016 elections, but it’s comparable to the map that was struck down before the 2020 elections.

Unfortunately, that leaves us back to where we started.  The Democrats inability to win control of state legislatures in 2020 leaves us with Republican legislatures that will want to stack the deck, and the only defense is state courts saying that the deck has been stacked “too much.”  And in North Carolina, that could make the difference between a map that has a 9-5 split set in stone and one in which Democrats could, with a strong performance (55% or so state-wide) win 8 seats.