North Carolina Republicans Are About to Win Their War Against Democracy

Representative Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who represents the state’s 14th district, which covers southern Charlotte, said last week that he is all but guaranteed to lose next year thanks to the new maps. “Two draft maps are out, and both of them draw me out of my district and put [me] in one that is totally unwinnable,” he explained in a video post on Twitter. “If either of these maps become final, it means I’m toast in Congress.”

North Carolina Republicans haven’t been subtle about their goals since embarking upon this path after the 2010 midterm elections. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats,” a state lawmaker famously quipped during an earlier redistricting battle in 2016. (North Carolina gained a fourteenth seat after the 2020 census.)

Like every other state in the Union, North Carolina redrew its legislative maps after the 2020 census. Republican lawmakers, true to form, passed new district boundaries that would continue to entrench them in power. Their path had been cleared by the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which closed the door to Fourteenth Amendment challenges to partisan gerrymandering in federal courts. That ruling effectively ended the legal battles that had dogged state lawmakers for most of the 2010s.

jackstraw97 on October 26th, 2023 at 16:07 UTC »

NC is where WI was a decade ago.

It can be reversed, but NC dems will have to actually show up and make sure that they never lose another state-wide race.

Specifically, the only reason this map won’t be struck down in state court is because the state Supreme Court flipped from a one-seat liberal majority to a 5-2 conservative majority.

There is a playbook to un-fuck these maps, and it is retaking the state’s high court, which (thankfully) is a state-wide elected office.

If voters can turn out strong, they can turn this around.

TurningTwo on October 26th, 2023 at 15:35 UTC »

And yet, it’s almost exclusively Republicans that cry about ‘stolen elections’.

Simmery on October 26th, 2023 at 15:02 UTC »

Thanks to more than a decade of extreme partisan gerrymandering, Republicans have an ironclad grip on the state legislature. That dominance has allowed them to effectively decide most of the state’s legislative races, both for the state Assembly and for Congress, before voters even cast a ballot.

What an incredibly stupid system we have. How far do Republicans think they can push this before people push back?