RALEIGH, N.C. — A bipartisan group of former governors from around the country are banding together to support an anti-gerrymandering lawsuit in North Carolina, saying the state’s new political maps are an affront to democracy.
They include one Democrat — former North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley — and three Republicans: former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who was also the Libertarian Party’s nominee for vice president in the 2016 presidential election.
“I have pledged to do everything I can, to fight in every state, to terminate partisan gerrymandering,” Schwarzenegger said in a news release announcing a court filing he and the others submitted Monday supporting the lawsuit. “These latest maps in North Carolina are yet another example of politicians placing their interests above the people.”
The lawsuit they’re supporting was filed by the North Carolina NAACP a month ago. It doesn’t challenge the specific lines that Republican lawmakers recently passed into law — two other lawsuits so far are challenging those — but rather, this one challenges the rules that lawmakers used to draw the maps in the first place.
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In the press release, Easley said that “the only way to protect the people’s rights is for the courts to get rid of this manipulated and rigged system.”
Specifically, the NAACP is challenging the legislature’s decision not to use racial data when drawing the new maps. That decision ultimately led to North Carolina losing one of its two majority-minority seats in Congress, in addition to several changes in state legislative seats that the NAACP is concerned will lead to less Black political representation in the future.
“Democracy and political gerrymandering are totally at odds,” Easley said.
When the lawsuit was first filed, however, top GOP redistricting leader Sen. Ralph Hise told The News & Observer that the lawyers in this case — the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice — were also behind a racial gerrymandering lawsuit in the past that argued the legislature had improperly used racial data.
That previous lawsuit was successful, and after that GOP leaders stopped using racial data at all in subsequent maps. So Hise said he thinks this new lawsuit is hypocritical.
“This same lawsuit outfit sued us previously because we used race, and now they’re suing us because we didn’t use race,” he said at the time. “The only constant here is finding any excuse to sue to gain partisan advantage, no matter how contradictory.”
Unless the maps are overturned in court, they will be used in the 2022, 2024, 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections for the N.C. General Assembly and U.S. House of Representatives.
The lawsuit has its first big court hearing on Tuesday in Wake County Superior Court.
At that hearing the NAACP will argue that the new maps should be stopped from going into place, at least temporarily, before a trial can determine if they are acceptable. Republican lawmakers will argue that the lawsuit should be thrown out and that their maps should stand.
The governors’ brief for the case, filed in conjunction with the States United Democracy Center, says they have a unique perspective as political leaders who were elected statewide but then, in order to run their states, had to deal with legislators elected in districts.
When seats are gerrymandered to be safe rather than competitive, they argue, it takes away much of the motivation for those lawmakers to work on compromises and instead worsens partisan divides.
“At its worst, it creates a fabricated supermajority that may override the authority vested in coordinate branches of government and ultimately to the people,” the brief says.
A supermajority is 60% of the votes in the House or Senate. It’s the threshold that’s required to do things like override a veto by the governor or propose a constitutional amendment. Republicans held a supermajority here for much of the last decade, under maps they drew for themselves that were later ruled unconstitutional for racial and partisan gerrymandering.
Democrats were able to break the GOP supermajority because of the 2018 Blue Wave election followed by two successful gerrymandering lawsuits in 2019 that led to new maps for the 2020 elections.
But new Census data is out, so the maps must be redrawn again. And those new Republican-drawn maps, multiple outside analyses show, put a 60% supermajority within reach for the GOP.
The N&O previously reported that according to one analysis, roughly one in five seats in the state House and Senate would be competitive if past voting patterns hold up.
Under those conditions, the analysis shows, Republicans could get back their supermajority by flipping just one of the four competitive Democratic-leaning seats in the new Senate map, and four of the 13 competitive Democratic-leaning seats in the new House map.
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