RALEIGH, N.C. — The first lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s new political districts as unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering was filed Friday by a group affiliated with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
State legislators passed the maps into law Thursday. All three new maps — for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the U.S. House, 50 seats in the state Senate and 120 seats in the state House — passed along partisan lines with Republicans in support and Democrats opposed.
The lawsuit is framed as a continuation of sorts of the successful 2019 partisan gerrymandering lawsuit, which forced GOP lawmakers to draw new lines for the 2020 elections. This new lawsuit is supported by the National Redistricting Foundation, an affiliate of Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The 2019 challenge also was backed by Holder’s organization.
This year, lawmakers had to redraw the lines yet again to update the maps with the most recent population data.
“Following the 2020 decennial census, from which North Carolina gained an additional congressional seat, legislative defendants recently enacted a new congressional map,” says the lawsuit, filed late Friday in Wake County Superior Court. “But rather than adhere to this Court’s admonition that extreme partisan gerrymanders unconstitutionally deprive millions of North Carolinians of fundamental rights, legislative defendants enacted another extreme and brazen partisan gerrymander.”
Republican leaders did not immediately respond to the lawsuit Friday evening.
Republican leaders have said repeatedly that they did not use political data in drawing the maps and have not commented on outside analyses that show the maps would likely lead to a large GOP advantage even if the statewide vote is split roughly 50-50.
“The congressional map passed yesterday in North Carolina is the epitome of partisan gerrymandering, and very plainly violates the state constitution,” said Marina Jenkins, Director of Litigation and Policy for the NRF in a statement Friday. “This is not a fair map.”
North Carolina’s new maps would be expected to give Republicans a 10-4 split under similar political conditions.
So Democratic representation would increase from what it had been in the unconstitutional maps — but it would also decrease from the current 8-5 map, which has been approved in court as part of that 2019 lawsuit.
Voters in North Carolina are split roughly 50-50 statewide. Political analyses show that if Republicans improve beyond that baseline, they would probably win an 11-3 edge. And if Democrats had the stronger year, Republicans would still likely keep an 8-6 advantage.
In part that’s because many of the state’s Democratic voters will now find themselves in one of just three districts centered around Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte. Each would be expected to elect a Democrat by a massive margin, potentially with over 70% of the vote.
Local and national groups have been watching redistricting in North Carolina closely, and are anticipating a lengthy and complex legal battle over the state’s maps, which could be used in every election until 2030.
One lawsuit already has been filed, but it doesn’t challenge the maps themselves but rather Republican leaders’ decision not to use racial data when drawing them.
The North Carolina NAACP, represented by the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, argued that no matter how the maps ended up, they would inherently fail to protect the rights of Black voters as demanded by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“It will be interesting to see how they defend these maps,” said Michael Li, a voting rights attorney at the liberal Brennan Center for Justice in New York City. “It’s an aggressive gerrymander, but they drew them on a race-blind basis. Or supposedly a race-blind basis.”
Andy Jackson, an election policy expert at the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, said that in the last decade one court ruling said it was OK to draw maps with a partisan bias in favor of one side — but a later ruling, in that 2019 case from Holder’s group, said an extreme partisan bias is unconstitutional.
“I think they’re hoping these districts will kind of thread that needle between what those rulings have said,” Jackson said of GOP lawmakers.
Republicans say there’s no evidence that “racially polarized voting” exists in North Carolina anymore, and that courts have upheld previous decisions they’ve made not to use racial data.
“This same lawsuit outfit sued us previously because we used race, and now they’re suing us because we didn’t use race,” Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise, a top redistricting official, told The News & Observer after that first lawsuit was filed.
He was referring to the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which has led other recent gerrymandering lawsuits in North Carolina — including a successful racial gerrymandering challenge from 2011 and an unsuccessful partisan gerrymandering challenge from 2016.
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