RALEIGH, N.C. — The new political maps that North Carolina Republicans passed through the legislature this week could unseat several politicians whose homes would now be in the same district as one of their fellow officials.
Some might choose to retire, others to fight it out against a fellow incumbent. Still others could decide to move to a district that doesn’t have an incumbent or is more politically favorable.
Members of Congress don’t have to live in their district, which for some might make the decision easier. They just have to live somewhere in the state. But state legislators must be residents of their districts.
North Carolina legislative Republicans passed redistricting maps Thursday to be used in elections from 2022 to 2030 for the state House, state Senate and U.S. House. All the votes were along party lines with Democrats objecting to the maps on process and fairness grounds. All three maps are expected to give Republicans larger majorities.
The rules that lawmakers adopted for the redistricting process specifically say that the maps should try to avoid double-bunkings — that is, placing two incumbents in the same district — whenever possible.
But in some cases, it was unavoidable. Those cases mostly affect Republican state legislators from rural parts of the state, which have shrunk so much in the last decade that they lost seats because the districts had to get geographically bigger to pick up enough population.
Other cases of double-bunking were avoidable. GOP lawmakers did agree to fix several of them as the process went along — but not all.
In the state Senate, Democrats accused Republicans of purposefully putting an up-and-coming Democrat into a heavily Republican district.
And in the new map for the state’s 14 congressional seats, three districts would now be home to six incumbents:
—Republican Rep. Dan Bishop’s Charlotte home is now in a district that leans considerably left and is currently represented by Democratic Rep. Alma Adams, who lives a few miles to the north of Bishop.
—Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning’s Greensboro home is in a district that leans right and is currently represented by Republican Rep. Virgina Foxx, who lives more than 100 miles to the west in Watauga County.
—Two Republicans, Rep. Ted Budd and Rep. Richard Hudson, would also be in the same district. But unlike with the other two double-bunkings, that likely doesn’t matter as much since Budd is planning to run for the U.S. Senate instead of seeking reelection to the House.
Bishop’s current district stretches from the south Charlotte suburbs east along the South Carolina border to Lumberton and Robeson County.
However, the new district being proposed this year will lose Robeson County — home of Democratic state Sen. Charles Graham, who gained national attention earlier this year after he announced plans to run against Bishop in 2022. It will also lose the south Charlotte suburbs where Bishop lives, in and around the Myers Park neighborhood.
That area, one of the wealthiest in the state, has been trending left in recent years as Republicans have struggled with suburban voters. Now GOP leaders have proposed putting it in Adams’ heavily Democratic district, rather than keeping it in Bishop’s district.
Rather than try to take on Adams in her newly drawn 9th district where Democrats will likely outnumber Republicans nearly three-to-one, according to one analysis, Bishop’s congressional staff confirmed that he will run in the new version of his district, now labeled the 8th, and plans to move so he remains inside the district.
His new district would keep some of the farthest south portions of Mecklenburg County along the Union County line, as well as most of the rest of the rural counties it currently has along the South Carolina border. In order to make up for the population drop from losing Robeson County and parts of Charlotte, it will also pick up Stanly, Montgomery and Moore counties. It’s expected to be a safe Republican seat, according to analysis by Dave’s Redistricting App.
Earlier this week Graham said he still plans to run for Congress — but didn’t say whether he’ll still try to take on Bishop or if he will run in a different district, like the district his Robeson County home would now be in. That’s the new 3rd district, which is the home of incumbent Rep. David Rouzer, a Wilmington Republican.
In the state Senate, Charlotte is also the only place in the state where Republicans could have avoided double-bunking two incumbents but didn’t, Democrats have said.
In the new map, Democratic Sen. Natasha Marcus would lose much of the territory in northern Mecklenburg County she currently represents and would instead find her home in a new district that includes a few of those neighborhoods plus all of Iredell County, which is represented by Republican Sen. Vickie Sawyer.
It would be a highly conservative district, and Marcus — who is one of her party’s more active and outspoken lawmakers — said she believes she was targeted on purpose. She noted that when redistricting began, Republican leaders asked every legislator to send in their address so that they could try to avoid putting them in districts with their colleagues.
“It seemed to me that my information was used for the opposite purpose, since the Republican map double-bunks me, pitting me against one of the few other female members of this body,” she said.
Marcus proposed an amendment Tuesday that she said would fix the double-bunking while also scoring higher on certain tests in the legislature’s self-imposed redistricting criteria than the GOP version of the map. Republican leaders said they’d take a day to think about it, but in the end it never happened.
Both sides blame the other, The NC Insider reported. Democrats say Republicans told them the only way they’d accept an amendment saving Marcus is if Democrats agreed to include the same version of a southern Mecklenburg district that Democrats have previously said is an example of gerrymandering — essentially giving them the choice of either sacrificing Marcus in the northern part of the county or endorsing that other district in the southern part of the county.
Republicans said that’s not true. A spokesman for Senate leader Phil Berger told The NC Insider that they never made such a demand.
The congressional map creates a major uphill battle for Manning, a Greensboro Democrat who won election in 2020 under a new map that kept Greensboro and Winston-Salem together. That left-leaning district was drawn under court order after two previous maps — which had both split up Greensboro between two right-leaning districts — had been ruled unconstitutional.
But that court order is no longer in effect, and Republican lawmakers in charge of redistricting split up the Triad once again. Manning’s house is now in a heavily conservative district. But unlike with Bishop, Republican lawmakers did not leave an open seat nearby that Manning could run in and face a decent chance of winning.
“These maps don’t acknowledge that the Triad is a region with shared interests, concerns, and needs,” Manning said in a written statement.
Guilford County would be split into three separate districts, with most of Greensboro — and Manning’s home near downtown — added onto a heavily conservative district that is mostly dominated by rural areas in the northwest corner of the state. It would stretch from Greensboro to just outside Boone in the ski resort town of Banner Elk. That’s where the district’s current representative, Virgina Foxx, lives. Foxx announced Thursday she would run for reelection.
Greensboro is the only city in the state that’s split and doesn’t need to be, said Republican Rep. Destin Hall, the top House redistricting leader. But he said the map does keep 90% of Greensboro in one district. He didn’t address the complaints that it would be placed into a mostly rural, heavily conservative district.
Hall said the map deserves praise for not splitting up other cities around the state.
“That is an incredible feat for a congressional map,” Hall said, noting there are more than 500 cities in North Carolina.
Manning would likely have a tough time defeating Foxx in the newly drawn district, according to an analysis by Dave’s Redistricting App. Its analysis anticipates the district would lean Republican by 12 percentage points, even with the addition of Greensboro. That’s much closer than the 33-point margin of victory Foxx had in 2020, but still a relatively safe Republican seat.
Manning has long expressed concern about what might happen to her district, warning supporters in early September that the district was “a target for potential gerrymandering.” She bashed the new districts earlier this week, but did not signal her plans for 2022.
“These maps were created for one purpose only: to ensure Republicans win more House seats so that they can recapture control of the U.S. House of Representatives. They are not a reflection of the best interests of North Carolinians but rather, an offering to the national Republican Party,” Manning said.
In addition to the district with most of Greensboro that would stretch into the northwest, two other districts containing pieces of Guilford County would stretch either south to the Charlotte suburb of Concord or east to the Raleigh suburb of Fuquay-Varina, picking up plenty of rural areas along the way. A fourth district containing Forsyth County and Winston-Salem would likewise contain mostly rural areas, stretching from Yadkin County south to Lincoln County, where Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry lives.
All four districts would be expected to vote for a Republican by double digits.
Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a Wilson Democrat who is the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, said the map represents an “extreme gerrymander” that would result in either a 10-4 or 11-3 split in favor of the GOP, with his seat being the one in question.
His current district includes the northern part of Greenville’s Pitt County, which has a substantial Black population and voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The new version of his district would lose nearly all those residents and instead pick up Granville, Person and Caswell counties on the Virginia border north of the Triangle, all of which voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.
“I’m very upset about this map. It looks like Pitt County was targeted,” Butterfield said.
Butterfield said moving all but a sliver of Pitt County out of his district — and putting most of the county in a heavily conservative neighboring district — shows both partisan and racial gerrymandering because it “submerges the Democratic vote in Pitt County and the African-American vote in Pitt County.”
Since the 1990s, because of a federal court ruling on racial gerrymandering, North Carolina lawmakers have always drawn a majority-minority district in the northeastern part of the state. Butterfield represents it now, but the new map being proposed would make his district majority-white.
The 74-year-old Butterfield, a former civil rights attorney and North Carolina Supreme Court justice, said the map appears unconstitutional but he’s planning to run for reelection even if he thinks it treats his part of the state unfairly.
The North Carolina NAACP has already filed a lawsuit, even before the map becomes law, trying to stop the redistricting process and claiming the map does not afford Black voters their due protections. Republicans have said they don’t need to intentionally draw majority-minority districts anymore because they have seen no evidence of racially polarized voting.
Sen. Dan Blue of Raleigh, the top Democrat in the Senate, outlined many of the Democratic objections to the maps during a speech before one recent vote and said that they will almost certainly lead to expensive lawsuits for the state.
“You’re spending tens of millions of dollars in what you know will be defense costs of defending something that is indefensible and that at the end of the day, you’re going to have to change,” Blue said.
But Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican from Rockingham County, said the maps are consistent with the law and the criteria the legislature established.
“The thing that seems to upset people, in my opinion, is when they see a map that has a bunch of squiggly lines going here, there and everywhere,” Berger said. “If you compare that map to maps that have been drawn in the past, this map certainly has a visual that is much more positive.”
Double-bunkings
9th Congressional District: Dan Bishop (R) and Alma Adams (D)
10th Congressional District: Ted Budd (R) and Richard Hudson (R)
11th Congressional District: Kathy Manning (D) and Virginia Foxx (R)
NC Senate District 2: Norm Sanderson (R) and Bob Steinburg (R)
NC Senate District 24: Ben Clark (D) and Danny Britt (R)
NC Senate District 29: Tom McInnis (R) and David Craven (R)
NC Senate District 37: Vickie Sawyer (R) and Natasha Marcus (D)
NC Senate District 47: Ralph Hise (R) and Deanna Ballard (R)
NC House District 1: Ed Goodwin (R) and Bobby Hanig (R)
NC House District 10: John Bell (R) and Raymond Smith (D)
NC House District 59: Jamie Boles (R) and Ben Griffin (R)
NC House District 84: Julia Howard (R) and Lee Zachary (R)
NC House District 113: Jake Johnson (R) and David Rogers (R)
Congressional districts breakdown
District 1: Republican Greg Murphy (Greenville)
District 2: Democrat G.K. Butterfield (Wilson)
District 3: Republican David Rouzer (Wilmington)
District 4: no incumbent
District 5: Democrat Deborah Ross (Raleigh)
District 6: Democrat David Price (Chapel Hill); Price has announced his retirement
District 7: no incumbent
District 8: no incumbent; Republican Dan Bishop (Charlotte) plans to run.
District 9: Democrat Alma Adams (Charlotte), Republican Dan Bishop
District 10: Republican Richard Hudson (Concord), Republican Ted Budd (Davie County). Budd is running for U.S. Senate.
District 11: Democrat Kathy Manning (Greensboro), Republican Virginia Foxx (Banner Elk)
District 12: Republican Patrick McHenry (Denver)
District 13: no incumbent
District 14: Republican Madison Cawthorn (Henderson County)
