The battle did not end there, however. In those midterm elections, voters elected two new conservative judges to North Carolina’s state supreme court. They quickly joined with their colleagues on the new 5-2 majority to overturn the court’s 2022 ruling, holding that partisan-gerrymandering claims now weren’t justiciable under the state constitution either. That closed the door to the last legal recourse left to voting-rights groups to challenge partisan entrenchment. State lawmakers then set out to redraw the court-imposed maps in time for next year’s election.
Things won’t change as much at the state level, though not for lack of effort by North Carolina Republicans. “The North Carolina Constitution puts a bit of a brake on gerrymandering of state House and Senate maps through the ‘whole county rule,’ which mandates that counties must be kept intact, when possible,” WFAE reporter Steve Harrison wrote in an analysis earlier this week. “That limits the creativity of mapmakers and prevents a near-total wipeout of Democrats. Under the proposed new House map, if Democrats performed as well as Biden did in 2020, they would win 49 seats to the GOP’s 71.”
That would place the projected results roughly in line with where they currently stand: the North Carolina House currently consists of 72 Republicans and 48 Democrats. Of course, even that only speaks to the strength of the existing gerrymander. In the 2020 North Carolina House elections, GOP candidates won 49.99 percent of the overall vote and Democrats won 49.06 percent of it. Republicans nonetheless won 18 more seats in the chamber. Such is the power of partisan gerrymandering.