CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The public has already seen a handful of potential redistricting maps — which could be used in every North Carolina election from 2022 to 2030 — but on Friday a top redistricting official filed the official bills for maps that whittled down the various proposed options to just one map.
Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise filed two bills Friday: One for the map that will determine the 50 seats that make up the North Carolina Senate, and the other for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The map for the 120 North Carolina House seats should at least be up by Monday, according to a meeting agenda on the Legislature’s website, but it could be posted before then, too. The House could also offer a competing version of a congressional map different from the bill Hise filed Friday.
GOP leaders previously put out half a dozen different draft maps for the congressional map, each of which was different in some ways but all of which would likely lead to strong Republican majorities in the state’s congressional delegation for years to come.
Democratic politicians have criticized those draft maps as being heavily gerrymandered — comments echoed by several dozen speakers at public hearings the Legislature held last week after posting those drafts for the public to review.
The statewide vote is split almost exactly evenly — in the 2020 presidential race, Republican Donald Trump won just under 50% of the vote and Democrat Joe Biden won just under 49% — but all of the congressional maps that GOP leaders have floated would likely give their party nine, 10 or even 11 of the state’s 14 congressional seats.
The map Hise filed Friday was not one of the ones that had previously been shown to the public before the public hearings, although it does appear to be almost identical to one of the maps that was.
That other, similar map would have likely led to a 10-4 split in favor of Republicans, based on election data from the 2020 presidential race, although one of the Democratic-leaning seats would be highly competitive, separated by less than 1% of the vote.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the new version posted Friday had similar underlying statistics.
The House and Senate redistricting committees both plan to meet Monday.
The public will be able to attend, but it’s unlikely that they will be able to comment. Members of the committees will be able to discuss the maps and propose potential tweaks for the committee to consider.
It’s possible the committees might also decide to go ahead and vote Monday. Or a vote may come later in the week. It’s unlikely to stretch too long, though, since leaders have long said they want to be finished by early November since candidate filing for the 2022 elections is in early December.
Once the committees pass the maps they will go to the full House and Senate for approval, where the Republican majorities in both chambers are likely to pass whatever maps come out of the committees.
And that will be the end of the process. Unlike with most bills in North Carolina, the governor is banned from vetoing redistricting maps. So unlike with the state budget or other high-profile issues, Democrats have very little leverage on redistricting since Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper can’t threaten a veto to force Republicans to negotiate with his party’s lawmakers.
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