Competitive Districts

The Court Accepted the New Legislative Maps. What Does This Mean for 2020?

It’s good news/bad news for NC’s maps in today’s state court rulings. A three-judge panel granted an injunction that blocks congressional candidate filing under NC’s current congressional map and wrote that “there is a substantial likelihood that Plaintiffs will prevail on the merits of this action by showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the 2016 congressional districts are extreme partisan gerrymanders in violation of the North Carolina Constitution…”

In a separate ruling, the same three-judge panel approved new legislative maps (NC House and NC Senate) submitted to the court by the GOP-led NCGA. While these maps are, unquestionably, an improvement over those they replace, they leave in place a handful of extreme partisan gerrymanders – and maintain a clear partisan advantage for Republicans.

The 5 Serious Problems with the Republican Maps

In a 357-page ruling on September 3, the NC Courts ordered the GOP-controlled legislature to create remedial legislative maps that correct partisan gerrymandering in 14 county groupings in the NC House and 7 county groupings in the NC Senate. The Court’s ruling clearly described the nature of the gerrymanders in each area and ordered the legislature to draw the remedial maps in full public view based on non-partisan criteria.

It should have been straightforward to create fair maps that remedy the gerrymanders identified by the Court. Instead, the GOP created a bizarre plan for drawing the new maps, deciding to select as a base map one of the 1,000 simulated maps entered as evidence in the case by an expert witness, Dr. Jowei Chen, and then adopt changes from there. Dr. Chen’s maps were produced as a statistical tool for testing partisan bias and were not at all guaranteed to fix the gerrymanders identified by the Court.

So it came as no surprise that, while this procedure produced reasonably fair maps in a number of county groupings, it left extreme partisan gerrymanders in place in others.

The 5 Most Flippable House Districts In and Around the Triangle

Live in the Triangle? Want to see a more balanced NCGA? Want to restore the governor’s veto power? Here’s where you should be working and who you should be working for as the November election approaches! We need volunteers to get out, educate fellow North Carolinians, and urge them to VOTE!

Our best opportunity to break the supermajority and restore the governor's veto power is to focus on the NC House, where Democrats need a net gain of 4 seats to break the supermajority and 15 seats to pull even. Just think of it – we can gain 4 seats within the 919 area code alone!

The Ever-Changing Maps: Wake and Mecklenburg Edition

As the candidate filing period comes to an end and 2018 election campaigns begin in earnest, the NC House maps in Wake and Mecklenburg counties are still being contested in court for yet another election cycle.

Read on for a quick summary of the twists and turns in the legal case, what the NC House maps are likely to look like for 2018, and what this means for Democrats’ chances to break the supermajority or, better yet, to take back the NC House altogether in 2018.