To have a healthy environment, we need a healthy democracy. Gerrymandering threatens our democracy.

Drawing in secret, Republican mapmakers last week revealed new Congressional and legislative district maps designed to produce North Carolina’s most extreme partisan gerrymanders yet.

North Carolina is well established as a “purple” state, one in which statewide vote margins increasingly fall in a narrow near-balance between Republican and Democratic candidates statewide. Its current Congressional map—drawn by a Court-appointed “special master” expert—produced in the 2022 elections an evenly split Congressional delegation with seven Republicans and seven Democrats.

However, in 2020 and 2022, the Republican nominees for state Supreme Court narrowly swept all eligible seats, flipping a 5-2 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican one. Immediately after taking the Court majority, the new Republican majority reversed its predecessor Court’s ruling that the NC Constitution barred partisan gerrymandering. That reversal freed the Republican supermajority in both chambers of the NC General Assembly to once again draw electoral maps designed to herd most Democratic-leaning voters into the fewest possible districts.

As a result, the newly revealed proposed Congressional district maps would produce either a 10-3-1 Republican majority with one competitive seat, or an 11-3 Republican majority with no competitive seats. (There are 14 congressional districts in North Carolina, so when we say 10-3-1, we mean 10 districts are drawn skewed towards Republicans, 3 are drawn skewed towards Democrats, and 1 is drawn truly competitive. In 2022, congressional districts were drawn 7-6-1, 7 leaning Republican, 6 leaning Democrat, and 1 toss up that was won by Democrat Wiley Nickel.)

Why NC leaders are opposing gerrymandered maps

In a news release, Governor Roy Cooper blasted the proposed maps for Congress and state legislature: “Enabled by the State Supreme Court’s partisan reversal of constitutional law, Republican legislators have rolled out their latest illegal maps that show gerrymandering on steroids. Drawn in the back room and armed with their new law that keeps their plotting secret, they have used race and political party to create districts that are historically discriminatory and unfair.”

As the maps were described in legislative committee, their targets became clear. For example, incumbent Democratic members of Congress Don Davis, Kathy Manning, and Jeff Jackson were redrawn into heavily Republican districts. Two other incumbent Democrats, Wiley Nickel and Deborah Ross, were drawn into the same district. Similarly, several incumbent Democratic state legislators were drawn into districts together, with the old district of the other one of each pair converted to a Republican-dominated district, or individual Democratic legislators simply drawn into a newly designed Republican-dominated district.

The maps are expected to result in lawsuits challenging their Constitutionality. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice sent legislative leaders a letter saying it “reasonably foresees litigation with respect to the forthcoming redraw of congressional and state legislative voting plans.”

“The legislature’s latest redistricting process has thus far been a total failure of transparency. A handful of politicians drew new districts behind closed doors, keeping the public in the dark,” said Bob Phillips, Executive Director of Common Cause North Carolina.

Phillips went on to recommend ways for the legislature to remedy these failures, but none of the majority party map-drawers have indicated any openness to those suggestions thus far. Instead, we can expect another multi-year round of litigation over this latest colossal failure of pro-polluter legislators to draw fair voting maps.