North Carolina has become THE gerrymandering capital of the United States. Since the turn of the century, the state has gone through seven Congressional maps, and comparable numbers of state legislative districts. There was hope that this era was over after the intervention of the state’s Supreme Court in 2018 and 2020, but the new, Republican-controlled Court ruled in 2022 that the legislature could gerrymander at will.

This saga, in lieu of some kind of external intervention, will highlight all of the maladies in the new maps. First looking at the state senate map first, then the house map in a second article, and finally, the big-bad of the Congressional map in the finale. But before that, a little backstory.

To begin, North Carolina uses county clusters to help regulate their redistricting process (which you can view here). What they’re intended to do is limit gerrymandering by limiting county’s being split up while minimizing population deviation of districts. This is supposed to remove human influence via an algorithm for creating districts. Some district setups have variation, allowing those drawing the maps to choose from a few viable district configurations within a cluster. Both of these, however, notably do not guarantee compliance to the Voting Rights Act (VRA), nor does it guarantee districts that make sense in terms of communities of interest, or even geographic compactness.

So, first, here is their technically cluster-compliant State Senate map, shaded by Biden’s 2020 margins. In terms of base partisanship, it’s a 32R-18D map, which is a brutal gerrymander for a politically competitive state. There is no path to a Democratic majority barring a large shift in the political landscape of the state , and probably the nation.

And now, here is the map that was previously enacted under the court mandate. It clocks in at 29R-21D using Biden’s 2020 numbers, which isn’t all that bad considering the confines of the clusters, and  North Carolina’s interesting geographic issues for Democrats. On the last point, their coalition maintains consistent support though is geographically becoming more compact. Republicans offered three Democratic seats, and interestingly enough, shored one up, one each in Raleigh, Wilmington, and the Black Belt. Democrats would have had a possible, albeit rough path to a majority on this map. 

Starting in the west of the state, the first issue that arises is with Cluster A, from the document linked above, which contains Buncombe County (Asheville) and other surrounding areas. It’s one of the regions where two options are available, and as will be the case with most of these, there is one clearly superior option. The option they went with was Cluster A1. This combines Buncombe County with McDowell and Burke counties to the east, and groups Henderson, Polk, and Rutherford counties to the south. In the screenshot below, please ignore Alexander County.

Henderson, as a growing suburban county, is notably much more similar to Buncombe than distinctly rural McDowell and small-city Burke. Accordingly, option A2 is better, as it makes a Buncombe/Henderson/Polk cluster. The only downside, as shown below, is that an awkward, barely-contiguous cluster of Burke/Lincoln/Gaston is created. 

The debate about compactness concerns is understandable However, by going with option A1, North Carolina Republicans aimed to further secure SD 46 (with Buncombe/Burke/McDowell). As shown below, the previous iteration of the 46th cut mainly the more logical eastern communities of Buncombe, including Black Mountain. The new iteration wraps around the county to take in all of the Republican dominated precincts, which further locks down the district in the R column.

Another concern out west is the Winston-Salem setup. The two clustering options allow the map drawers to either group Stokes or Yadkin counties with Forsyth. Neither option has any real advantage over the other, but the issue is that a competitive seat was lost between the 2020s map (two maps ago) and the present. The current iteration of the seat goes around the dark blue core of Winston-Salem, making the seat safely Republican.

Below are designs on how to get a competitive seat back using each cluster configuration. Both versions of the competitive seat lean Republican, and only differ by one precinct in Forsyth to account for slight population variances in the clusters. The first uses the current Stokes configuration and the second the Yadkin configuration, which is somewhat more compact. Both take in the whiter parts of Winston-Salem that have seen shifts to the left in recent years and put them both in the neighborhood of Trump+5 seats.

A similar, but not nearly as severe, issue is present in the Greensboro area. Guilford County is grouped with Rockingham, and three districts that need to be drawn. The current map has the Rockingham district, a guaranteed Republican district, takes in the outskirts of the city rather than the communities in proximity to the county. The version shown below addresses this, and keeps a plurality Black district in downtown Greensboro.

The Charlotte area sees only one egregious issue. SD 42, former LG nominee Rachel Hunt’s district, has been redrawn in an attempt to get a redder seat. The seat, in the more conservative part of Mecklenburg, where a semi-competitive seat is warranted. How it was done is without a doubt a gerrymander. The 42nd (in bright green) takes a squiggle of redder precincts from “The Wedge” (a whiter part of town). Interestingly, this seat is still fairly Democratic, with Biden having won it in 2020 by around 6 points. What the goal was with this specific shape versus a more compact seat of similar partisanship is unclear. 

The Wake/Granville cluster is the next case of serious gerrymandering. Prior to the redraw Democrats held all of these seats, and its status will drift into uncertainty in 2024. The new versions of these seats below have some *interesting* features. The 18th and 13th districts at the far northern and southern ends of the cluster have been totally reworked to be Republican-favoring. The 13th now takes most of the conservative turf in southern Wake, and the 18th altered to take in more competitive turf along the county line. To help facilitate these changes, Senate Democratic Leader Dan Blue’s SD 14, in camo green below, now has a distinct fold in it, and this fold cuts Knightdale in two. 

The last issue, before the piece-de-resistance, of gerrymandering is the Columbus/Brunswick/New Hanover, home to Wilmington, cluster option. Essentially, using the C2 configuration, instead of the more complex C1 option, makes Columbus and Brunswick counties take a small portion of New Hanover’s population. This makes sense, but how it was executed is blatant racial gerrymandering. The little outcrop of SD 8 shown on the map below goes right into downtown Wilmington, taking the most African American precincts and offsetting their influence with the two red counties. It turns what should be a fairly even district into a Trump+5 seat using 2020 numbers.

Lastly, the *most* egregious part of this gerrymander centers around the clustering in the northeast of the state. A bunch of counties in the Black Belt are grouped with parts of the Outer Banks and Crystal Coast. Two seats are expected to be created from the grouping. This cluster itself is innately problematic. It combines two very different areas into one, but more importantly than that, it groups them in such ways that fails to account for these differences. 

The first image, shown below, was the configuration used prior to overturning the maps last year (D1). Most of the Black Belt counties (Warren, Halifax, Northampton, Hertford, Gates, Bertie, and Martin) were kept together, though Washington and Pasquotank were separated in pursuit of minimal population deviation without splitting counties. The main group of Black Belt counties were also grouped with Camden and Currituck in the Outer Banks and non-contiguously joined with Tyrell on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula via water contiguity. The other district in this grouping joins Carteret in the far south, only contiguous by ferry to Ocracoke in Hyde County, and Elizabeth City in the far north, with the trio of counties north of Washington being only connected by 1 bridge. It is worth stressing that, while this is the better option in terms of preserving communities of interest, these contiguity and compactness issues are serious.

The State Senate map is, without a doubt, a blatant gerrymander. The previous map, of decent quality, resulted in Republicans being one seat short of a supermajority, prior to Tricia Cotham’s questionable party switch giving them the ability to override Democrat Roy Cooper’s vetoes.  Republicans, by petitioning a newly-favorable State Supreme Court specifically to allow themselves to gerrymander, perpetuated splitting of communities of interest, diluting the votes of African American voters, and served to rob the people of North Carolina of their democratic right to determine their representatives, and not the other way around. Barring lawsuits regarding the VRA violations of the map in federal court, there likely is not much that will change prior to the next redistricting cycle.