A smaller version of the red wave that eluded Republicans in 2022 is set to crash in North Carolina, washing over the state from coastal Cape Hatteras to the Smoky Mountains 500 miles inland.
A new, Republican-drawn House map virtually ensures GOP candidates will win at least 10 of 14 seats in the Tar Heel State. Another House district pickup is a possibility, depending on the 2024 political winds.
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It’s a striking change from North Carolina’s current 7-7 House split, from a map enacted after redistricting in 2020. That map reflects North Carolina voters’ split-ticket political personas. Fast-growing suburbs around Charlotte and smaller cities are adding in some new Democrats. But North Carolina’s conservative rural realms still hold serious political sway.
For Republicans, additional House seats from North Carolina are a bit of makeup work from the national red wave they expected in the 2022 cycle. Future (and now former) Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) pledged dozens of Republican wins. But the party barely nabbed the majority and has been beset by GOP infighting over spending bills and other measures, which contributed to McCarthy’s ouster in October after nine months on the job.
In 2020, former President Donald Trump won North Carolina by about 74,000 votes, out of more than 5.5 million cast, over President Joe Biden. A similarly competitive, if narrowly GOP-favored, race is expected again in 2024.
This is the fifth House map in six election cycles for North Carolina, a reflection of the state’s brass-knuckle political tactics. Along with shifting sizes of Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, which draws the maps, and the state Supreme Court, which has the power to accept or reject them. Republicans picked up state Supreme Court seats in the 2022 cycle and have a 5-2 edge on the panel.
North Carolina a GOP majority bedrock
Republicans also now hold “supermajorities” in the state House and Senate, three-fifths of lawmakers, that has proved a magic political elixir to be able to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D-NC) vetoes of GOP-skewed political maps, and then have them upheld by North Carolina’s Supreme Court.
Nationally, the new North Carolina maps are a big boon to House Republicans in their efforts to hold the party’s slim 222-213 House majority. The three or four new House seats in North Carolina could provide much-welcome political padding in an unpredictable fight for the majority set against a backdrop of the expected 2024 Biden-Trump rematch for the White House.
Outside of North Carolina, Democrats, too, have already made some progress in off-year redistricting fights. The Supreme Court over the summer upheld lower court rulings that Alabama had disregarded voting rights for the state’s black population, about 27% of people living there, and ordered the creation of a second majority district, where Democrats are heavily favored. Democrats could also pick up a House seat in Louisiana if similar Voting Rights Act litigation goes their way in the coming months, which would lessen the GOP edge in the House delegation Louisiana sent to Washington from 5-1 to 4-2.
And in New York, state Democrats are pushing to overturn a House map imposed by courts for the 2022 cycle, which ended with a 15-11 edge over Republicans. Not exactly what partisan Democrats had envisioned in a state where Biden walloped native son Trump in 2020 by about 61% to 38%. Republicans ran strongly in New York in 2022 on crime and other matters at the top of voters’ minds. But it’s unclear if GOP candidates can replicate their success in a presidential year, particularly with a scrambled map aimed at giving Democrats a House delegation majority of 19-7 or even 20-6.
Which is why North Carolina looms so large in House Republican 2024 plans. The new gerrymander works by, among other things, cracking apart two heavily Democratic urban areas: the city of Fayetteville and the region known as the Piedmont Triad, which includes Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point. These four cities are collectively split among six different districts, combining their large black populations with heavily white rural areas to ensure that all will be represented solely by Republicans.
The map takes a reverse approach to suppress the strength of voters in Charlotte and Raleigh, the state's two biggest cities, as well as the Research Triangle region in the Raleigh area. There, Democrats have been packed into three deep-blue districts.
A top target of the map is Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC), from a Greensboro-area House district in 2020. But the new version of that district includes only a small portion of Greensboro, Manning’s hometown, while picking up heavily Republican rural areas to the southwest.
Manning now doesn’t really have a district to run in, though she hasn’t yet announced political plans. A leading Republican is High Point Mayor Jay Wagner. Other GOP candidates are likely to jump in, too.
Meanwhile, over in the 6th Congressional District, former GOP Rep. Mark Walker has dropped his long-shot 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial campaign to seek the open House seat. The district includes swaths of conservative territory, including all of Rowan, Davidson, and Davie counties and parts of Cabarrus, Forsyth, and Guilford counties — Guilford being Walker’s home county.
Walker held a previous version of this district during his 2015-21 House tenure. But he didn’t seek reelection in 2020 when litigation led to that GOP gerrymander shifting to more Democratic-leaning precincts. At the time, Democrats held a majority on the state Supreme Court and struck down maps that favored Republicans. Manning won the race to succeed Walker, who, at one point in Congress, was chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, composed of a broad range of conservative lawmakers.
A second House Democrat whose congressional career is about to end due to the new GOP maps is freshman Rep. Wiley Nickel. His current southern Raleigh suburbs district is getting significantly transformed by removing its portions of Raleigh, the state capital and home to many Democratic-leaning college students and state workers. The nearby suburb of Cary, also solidly blue, got lopped off, too. In exchange, state Republicans added rural and exurban areas to the north and northwest of Raleigh. The district now fully wraps around the Research Triangle in a backward "C" shape, excluding the homes of many professional-class workers from scientific, financial, and other companies, who tend to be left-leaning.
Democratic despair
Nickel has threatened to sue over the maps but stands little chance in court, considering the Supreme Court has ruled political map-making is a state function only, and federal courts have little oversight outside of disputes over the Voting Rights Act and similar matters. Since North Carolina’s Supreme Court is heavily Republican, Nickel and his fellow House Democrats are effectively out of luck.
Freshman Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) has acknowledged as much since the southern Charlotte and western suburbs 14th District he represents got carved up. Most of dark-blue Charlotte instead goes to the new 12th Congressional District, where Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC) is running.
Jackson is instead leaving Congress after two years to run for state attorney general, and one candidate to replace him in the now-GOP stronghold is one of the state legislators most responsible for drawing the new map, state House Speaker Tim Moore. He’s running in the new 14th Congressional District, which includes his entire current legislative constituency.
Moore has already announced he's spending $1.1 million on a television and radio ad buy that will last from December through the March 5 GOP primary. Also seeking the Republican nod for the open 14th Congressional District are former state Judge Eric Levinson and Army veteran Pat Harrigan.
The only real wild card in redistricting is the newly created 1st Congressional District. Freshman Rep. Don Davis (D-NC) represents rural parts of inland northeastern North Carolina. It has had a black Democratic congressman since its creation in 1993 as a district protected by the Voting Rights Act. The new map trades the city of Greenville, which leans Democratic, for parts of the Outer Banks along that coast that are heavily white and Republican and are represented by Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC).
In 2020, Biden would have beaten Trump in the new district by about 53% to 46%. Under the new lines, Biden edges to about 50%, with 49% for Trump. The Republican field is growing, but Davis says he can still win there.
“In light of new maps for North Carolina, this is no surprise,” Davis said in an Oct. 27 campaign statement, nodding to the district’s shifting constituency. “So many in rural North Carolina have long felt left out, so I have been listening and working to ensure D.C. hears our voices.”
Democratic survivors of the new maps, though, have effectively won a political lottery. They'll see their districts turn even bluer than they are now. The Raleigh-based 2nd Congressional District, represented by Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC), went for Biden over Trump 64% to 35%. It will grow to 67% Biden and only 31% Trump. While Rep. Valerie Foushee's (D-NC) neighboring 4th Congressional District, which includes the Durham and Chapel Hill areas in the Research Triangle, moves from 67%-32% Biden to 72%-26% Biden.
Several House Republicans will see their seats drastically reconfigured. But the map spreads around GOP votes so they aren’t “wasted” in heavily red districts where Republicans are already set to win. That includes GOP Reps. Chuck Edwards, Virginia Foxx, Richard Hudson, Patrick McHenry, Greg Murphy, and David Rouzer.
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The only departure from the current GOP House delegation is Rep. Dan Bishop, who is running for state attorney general. Republicans haven’t won an election for state attorney general since 1896, making it a rare vestige of Democrats’ longtime political dominance in the South.
The likely showdown between Jackson and Bishop also will be the first time in nearly three-quarters of a century that two sitting House members have faced off in a general election to become attorney general of any state. The last time such a matchup came about was in 1954, when New York Democratic Rep. Franklin Roosevelt Jr., who was the son and namesake of the 32nd president, campaigned against Republican colleague Jacob Javits. Javits won that race 51% to 48%, putting him on a path to win a Senate seat two years later he held for 24 years.