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). Continue Reading...