North Carolina Is Gerrymandering Ground Zero
Progressives are fighting back
North Carolina’s state government has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
The Republican-controlled General Assembly became the target of widespread outrage when it passed the nation’s first “bathroom bill” in March 2016.
Republican legislators in the Tar Heel state again drew flak in December 2016 when they orchestrated a “legislative ambush,” meeting in a surprise special session to pass several bills aimed at consolidating their power.
The coup came after incumbent Republican governor Pat McCrory lost to Democratic challenger Roy Cooper in the November 2016 election.
Both moves elicited vehement criticism and condemnation. They also came as a surprise to the many who viewed North Carolina as a politically moderate swing state.
Despite being geographically located in the Bible Belt, North Carolina is more purple than red. Barack Obama won there in 2008 and lost to Mitt Romney by only two points in 2012. The state Democratic Party boasts 600,000 more registered voters than than the Republican Party does and Democrats controlled the state legislature for more than 100 years prior to 2010.
North Carolina may have a red streak, but it is definitely nothing like deep-red conservative bastions such as Mississippi or Alabama.
You wouldn’t know that by looking at the General Assembly, where Republicans enjoy a supermajority in both the state house (74 seats to the Democrata’ 46) and the state senate (35 seats to 15).
It’s this supermajority that has allowed Republicans to force through any legislation they wish without fear of a filibuster.
To be clear, the Republicans didn’t earn their supermajority simply by running stronger candidates and superior campaigns. They did it by gerrymandering state districts and passing voting regulations designed to suppress the Democratic Party’s base.
Thanks to the hard work of activists and organizations such as the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the political landscape may be shifting once again in the Democrats’ favor. Of course, the GOP isn’t happy about it — and is doing everything it can to resist.
In 2010, Republicans in North Carolina rode the Tea Party wave to a decisive victory in the midterm elections, winning 67 seats in the state house to the Democrats’ 52 (with one independent gaining office) and securing 31 seats in the state senate while the Democrats took only 19.
Republicans quickly moved to expand their power in future elections by implementing some of the most extreme gerrymandering in recent history. Republicans redrew General Assembly district lines in North Carolina so that people of color were concentrated in as few districts as possible.
The New York Times reported that North Carolina’s “serpentine” 12th U.S. House district was so “contorted and contrived” that it may be “the least geographically compact of all the nation’s many gerrymandered districts.”
The district weaved its way across half the state, absorbing several predominately African-American communities that would have otherwise been spread out over several districts. It’s indicative of the type of gerrymandering the Republicans implemented in both the state General Assembly districts and U.S. House districts.
The gerrymandering led to even greater Republican victories in the 2012 election, with 77 Republicans and only 43 Democrats being elected in the state house, and 33 Republicans and 17 Democrats filling the senate.
As Politico’s Jonathan M. Katz noted, the redistricting not only allowed for more Republicans to come into office, it also allowed more conservative Republicans to win in the new districts. This sent the centrist state careening to the far right in a very short period of time.
“[T]he new Republican majority gerrymandered districts in which Democrats couldn’t win — which resulted in ever-more-hard-line conservatives winning primaries in each election,” Katz writes. “A Southern economic powerhouse once known for a careful, if awkward, political balance (from 1999 to 2003, the state’s voters sent both John Edwards and Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate) became a conservative lab experiment.”
Unsatisfied with the formidable gains they made in the 2010 and 2012 elections, Republicans pushed even farther by passing H.B. 589, an “omnibus” voting-regulations bill, in 2013.
Prior to the Republican-controlled state assembly drafting the new legislation, GOP lawmakers requested data that tracked voter habits based specifically on race. They used the data to determine the most effective ways of targeting minority voters and excluding as many of them as possible from the electoral process.
The bill created a strict voter I.D. requirement and ended same-day registration and pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. It was immediately obvious that H.B. 589 was designed to suppress Democratic voters, but Democrats in the General Assembly were helpless against its passage because of the Republican supermajority.
The North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, along with religious leaders and activists, filed a lawsuit against the state of North Carolina in response, claiming that the new voting laws were intentionally discriminatory and violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as well as the 14th and 15th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
A year and a half later, in May 2015, Sandra Little Covington and several other plaintiffs filed a separate lawsuit alleging that 28 of the state’s 170 districts were racially gerrymandered in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore needed to be remapped.
As the two cases made their way through the courts, the negative effects of the Republicans’ discriminatory tendencies became manifest in other ways. In February 2016, the Charlotte city council passed what should have been an innocuous ordinance that simply allowed transgender individuals to use the restroom of their choice in public and provided basic civil rights protections for the LGBT community.
Of course that outraged Republicans in North Carolina’s General Assembly who claimed the Charlotte ordinance put young people and women at greater risk for facing sexual assault in public restrooms. This compelled the General Assembly, again with a filibuster-proof Republican supermajority, to pass what became known as the nation’s first “bathroom bill.”
The bill, commonly referred to as the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act or House Bill 2, eliminated anti-discrimination protections for the LGBT community in North Carolina and required all individuals to use restrooms based on the sex assigned to them on their birth certificates in government buildings. It also forbid local authorities from passing anti-discrimination policies in general.
For good measure, Republicans tacked on several unrelated anti-labor measures that made it illegal for municipal governments to establish a local minimum wage, enforce child labor laws or enact regulations for municipal employees.
Critics called the bill the most anti-LGBT piece of legislation in the United States. But it wasn’t just the language of the bill that was troubling. The way it was forced through the General Assembly was equally disturbing in that it became indicative of the behavior of North Carolina’s Republicans holding state office.
“The manner in which legislators passed the most extreme anti-LGBT bill in the nation — voting hours after it was unveiled without adequate public debate — flies in the face of fairness and democracy,” Sarah Preston, acting Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said in a statement.
The backlash against H.B. 2 was widespread and swift. The NBA and NCAA cancelled championship games scheduled in North Carolina, Common Dreams reported at the time. Bruce Springsteen, Ani DiFranco, Boston, Pearl Jam, Ringo Starr and Cirque du Soleil all cancelled performances in the state as well. PayPal abandoned plans to open an office that would have employed 500 people in North Carolina.
Within a matter of months it became obvious that H.B. 2 was costing the state millions of dollars in lost revenue. On April 9, 2016, McCrory gave some ground and singed an executive order that offered some protections against discrimination for LGBT state employees. However, the bulk of H.B. 2 remained intact.
Last summer brought news that the legal efforts of the NAACP and other activists were finally gaining ground. In July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned major parts of the 2013 voting regulations bill on the grounds the it was in fact intentionally discriminatory and violated parts of the Voting Rights Act.
“[I]n what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race — specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote in the official opinion of the court.
Just a few weeks later, North Carolina Republicans lost another legal battle when the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled that the General Assembly must redraw the map for 28 of its 170 state electoral districts sited in Covington v. The State of North Carolina and hold special elections in 2017 for effected districts because.
“Twenty-eight districts is a lot, and redrawing this many districts will have ripple effects that will impact much of the overall map,” Think Progress Justice Editor Ian Millhise commented in an article covering the court’s ruling.
With the court rulings and McCrory’s loss to Cooper, it was clear that North Carolina’s Republicans were losing their stranglehold on state politics. They, in turn, made it equally clear that they intended to hold on to as much power as the could.
Republicans in the General Assembly called a special session on Dec. 14, 2016, ostensibly to repeal H.B. 2 in a compromise agreement after Charlotte voted to overturn the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance. However, the repeal died in session, and Republicans then called another special session which Democrats had not been informed of or planned for.
In the second special session, Republicans introduced several bills their Democratic counterparts had never seen or even heard of, giving them less than an hour to review the proposed legislation before voting on it.
“There was legislation that provided for Republican control of the State Board of Elections in every even year (which, incidentally, means every election year), legislation that makes Supreme Court elections partisan (which, incidentally, benefits Republicans) and legislation that transfers new power to the office of state superintendent (which, incidentally, is passing from a Democrat to a Republican),” North Carolina state senator Jeff Jackson recalled in an opinion piece for The Washington Post.
The special session votes were definitely a setback, but the federal court rulings from July and August 2016 give state Democrats a chance to even the playing field in the next election, and they have been rigorously pursuing the opportunity.
Democratic lawmakers such as Jackson and state representative Graig Meyer are encouraging Democratic activists to help mobilize voters, contribute to party fundraisers and run for office under a program called the Pipeline Project and a Facebook Live series titled Our Shot.
The Pipeline Project is the North Carolina Democratic Party’s new program to “recruit, train, and support candidates running for local office in the 2017 Special Election.” Our Shot promotes the Pipeline Project and keeps voters up to date on the redistricting, the special election and other state political news.
“This gives us three chances to retake the legislature in the next four years (2017, 2018, and 2020),” Meyer wrote on the Our Shot page on his campaign website. “We need your help to build momentum.”
So far, Democrats are seeing an overwhelmingly positive response to these campaigns.
“In 24 hours since we premiered #OurShot, the North Carolina Democratic Party Pipeline Project has had 151 people sign up to express interest in running for office!!” Meyer wrote in a Jan. 13, 2017 Facebook post. “We’ve got people from the mountains to the coast, cities and rural counties, and most importantly … places where we haven’t had Democratic legislative candidates in years.”
But they’ve still got a big battle ahead of them, and a U.S. Supreme Court order handed down on Jan. 10, 2017 has at least temporarily delayed the lower court’s ruling requiring new redistricting and special elections.
Millhiser explained in a second Think Progress article that the case falls under the court’s mandatory jurisdiction, meaning SCOTUS cannot simply choose not to take up the case. However, the temporary order is not necessarily indicative of how the court may ultimately rule on the case.
“The justices could immediately dismiss the appeal and keep the order for new maps and new elections this year in effect,” wrote the Charlotte News & Observer’s Colin Campbell. “Or they could ask attorneys involved in the case to give them more briefs in the case and set arguments for later in the year, leaving the question of an election this year ambiguous.”
While the SCOTUS order may ultimately be good news for North Carolina Democrats, putting an end to the issue once and for all, it has still caused anxiety among those who have been looking forward to the redistricting and special elections.
“This is a setback to our efforts to take back the NCGA. But this is not over,” Meyer wrote in a Jan. 10, 2017 Facebook post responding to the SCOTUS order. “If the Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal, then 2017 elections will be back on. Stay tuned to this developing story …
“And no matter what, this doesn’t stop our momentum,” Meyer wrote. “We will keep organizing for #OurShot! 2018 elections happen either way.”
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