The Democrats’ chances in 2016 may have gotten somewhat better on Friday. A three-judge federal appeals panel tossed out North Carolina’s congressional map after finding that two of the districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The panel gave the state legislature two weeks to submit a replacement map, which will almost certainly force a delay in the state’s congressional primary.
One of the first things the Republicans did after taking complete control of the North Carolina General Assembly for the first time since Reconstruction was to submit one of the most aggressively partisan congressional maps in recent memory. It was intended to flip the state’s congressional delegation from seven Democrats and five Republicans to ten Republicans and three Democrats. The two men who crafted the map, state senator Bob Rucho and state representative David Lewis, openly admitted that the map was a partisan Republican gerrymander. They got their wish over the next two cycles when one Democratic incumbent was ousted by a Republican and three Republicans succeeded retiring Democrats.
However, in 2014, three North Carolina residents sued, contending that two of the districts were drawn to be majority-black to the exclusion of all other factors. Specifically, the plaintiffs contended that the 1st and 12th Districts were illegal. The 1st stretches across parts of 24 counties in northeastern North Carolina, from Durham to Elizabeth City. The 12th snakes from Charlotte to Winston-Salem and Greensboro, following Interstate 85 almost exactly for most of its stretch.
The plaintiffs–one from Durham and two from Charlotte–argued that the General Assembly deliberately packed as many Democrats into the 1st and 12th as possible in order to reduce their overall clout at the ballot box. For instance, they argued that anyone traveling along I-85 between Charlotte and Greensboro would leave the 12th “multiple times,” since the district was deliberately drawn to “zig zag” back and forth to take in as many black neighborhoods as possible. They also contended that by pushing the 1st into Durham, the legislature “ignored the common rural and agricultural interests” of the state’s northeast corner.
A panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Read the decision here. Writing for the court, Judge Roger Gregory said that the three plaintiffs had shown “race was the only nonnegotiable criterion” in crafting the 1st and 12th districts, and that “traditional redistricting principles” were thrown out. He noted that oral arguments demonstrated that “race was the legislature’s primary concern,” and that partisanship “was more an afterthought than a clear objective.” As the majority saw it, the legislature went as far as to set a “floor” for the percentage of voting-age blacks in those two districts, “and that floor could not be compromised.”
Indeed, the men who helped Rucho and Lewis draw the maps contended that the two districts were drawn in a way to prevent the state from being sued for violating the Voting Rights Act. In so doing, they appeared to bolster the plaintiffs’ contention that the legislature used the Voting Rights Act as “a justification to racially gerrymander Congressional districts.”
This ruling could have a significant domino effect. Due to the way the 1st and 12th are configured, every district in the state will have to be redrawn. It could also affect a separate lawsuit filed by the North Carolina NAACP which contends that state legislative districts were also racially gerrymandered. North Carolina NAACP president William Barber hailed the ruling as proof that “the legislature was engaged in race-based redistricting.” Bob Phillips of Common Cause North Carolina argued that this ruling proves it’s past time for North Carolina to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians. Phillips pointed out that partisan redistricting by both parties has long “deprived North Carolina voters of a real choice and a real voice in our elections.”
Rucho and Lewis’ only answer to this ruling was that it was disruptive. They argued that this “eleventh-hour ruling” could result in many absentee ballots being thrown out. Um, guys? If you had drawn the map correctly in the first place, none of this would have happened.
