Copyright Everett Herald
By Mary Ellen Klas / Bloomberg Opinion North Carolina Republicans will officially enter the redistricting arms race this week when lawmakers try to heed President Donald Trump’s call to create additional Republican seats. But carving out another safe GOP seat will only further unravel the state’s already frayed democratic institutions and leave the state’s rural “Black Belt” region without meaningful representation in Washington. That’s not the representative democracy these lawmakers swore an oath to uphold. North Carolina Republican leaders unveiled their new map on Thursday. If enacted, it could flip the 1st Congressional District — the state’s only competitive House seat — to Republicans’ favor, bringing the congressional delegation to 11 Republicans and 3 Democrats. We’ve come to expect this partisan tit-for-tat reaction from the North Carolina GOP, which has in the last few years demonstrated a brazen willingness to destabilize American democracy for partisan gain. North Carolina was one of the states that was notoriously resistant to democratization during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. (It maintained Jim Crow literacy tests for voting until the 1970s.) But the state made great strides in the 1990s and 2000s and voter turnout increased by more than 10 percentage points during that time. That changed in 2010, when the Republican Party won control of both state legislative chambers and made changes to election laws and procedures. The GOP also rigged its legislative district boundaries to give white and Republican voters an advantage. Today, North Carolina is a purple state in presidential elections and on statewide ballots, but the GOP has the lion’s share of seats in the state House and in the U.S. Congress. Last November, for instance, voters elected five Democrats to statewide offices and five Republicans. The “Black Belt” region originally got this name from the crescent of fertile, black soil that extended from East Texas to Virginia. In the plantation era, it was where tobacco and cotton were king and the economy thrived because of the labor of enslaved Black people. Decades of racial discrimination, substandard education, weak infrastructure, high unemployment and inadequate health care have persisted to give the region some of the highest rates of poverty in the country. This 20-county piece of North Carolina has been known as the 1st Congressional District. It hasn’t elected a Republican since 1883 and hasn’t elected a white candidate since 1992, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act entitled voters to elect candidates of their own choosing, forcing the South to redraw its maps. But all of that could change in the midterm elections next year; and not only because the U.S. Supreme Court seems determined to reverse the Voting Rights Act protections. The Republican-controlled North Carolina Legislature has joined Texas and other states pushing through mid-decade gerrymanders at Trump’s request. The district in question is currently represented by U.S. Rep. Don Davis, a U.S. Air Force veteran, former mayor, and moderate Democrat. He narrowly won re-election in 2024 by less than 2 percentage points after lawmakers redrew the district in 2023 to better favor Republicans. Davis has three Republican challengers so far for 2026, and has vowed to stay in the fight to give the constituents of the mostly rural, agricultural district a voice. This time, Republicans are gunning for the seat again but, confident the Voting Rights Act protections won’t get in their way, they are ready to aggressively diminish any remaining Democratic voting power. The proposed map would dilute Democratic votes by adding three GOP-leaning counties along the coast and three further inland. If that new district had existed in 2024, it would have gone for Trump by 55 percent. The new map will do more than spread Democratic voters across majority red districts so Republicans can maintain power. It’s a subversive act intended to suppress Black and Democratic votes and reverse decades of progress away from the state’s racist past. “The Black Belt of North Carolina is filled with low-wealth counties, and they have real needs for education, public health, transportation; everything that needs good representation,” explained Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, which has sued the state over its maps in the past. “This would be a swath of the state with a high African American population that won’t have any Black representation in Congress.” Polling and social science research show that when voters don’t believe they have any chance of exercising real political power, they opt out of the political process, vote less frequently, and are generally less engaged in civic life. When voters believe their party is so outnumbered that their votes won’t matter, they don’t hold lawmakers accountable. And when lawmakers aren’t held accountable, they start thinking their incumbency is permanent. A recent poll conducted by a GOP polling firm and released by Common Cause North Carolina found that 84 percent of the state’s voters — including 78 percent of unaffiliated voters and 65 percent of Republicans — said gerrymandering maps for partisan advantage is “never acceptable.” Despite these numbers, North Carolina legislators are preparing to ignore them. The remedy depends on whether voters still believe they can take their power back. Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.
