North Carolina 2020 Redistricting

[Sol]

Yeah Charlotte is on the hilly western edge of the Piedmont--it's more like Spartanburg or Greenville in terms of location (though it's significantly larger).

That said, it's more Black than other major metro areas in the country, including St. Louis, Houston, or Dallas, and it has an extremely fast growing Black community (over 38% growth between 2010 and 2020!). It has a reputation a bit like Atlanta within the Black community from what I understand.

It's also worth noting that Charlotte has a large Black suburban section like other Southern cities--only in the city limits.  

[Sol]

https://twitter.com/lekhashupeck/status/1448698473348542466

State senate draft

Democrats could try a VRA lawsuit between 1 and 2 for the county splits but I think those clusters were forced by the algorithm. Nothing too crazy besides Wilmington I guess. Fayetteville I guess is weird but honestly just blame the algorithm there.

In addition to the VRA violation, the 2nd lacks road contiguity. Hyde and Pamlico Counties are not connected.

Iirc they have a ferry connection. Don't get me wrong it is an absurd district but I think the GOP just got lucky in this area regarding county clusters.

That's true, though Pamlico doesn't actually have a connection to Carteret, and the connection between Carteret and Hyde is only to Ocracoke.

[Sol]

The thing about the county cluster rule is that it basically acts as an insurance policy, preventing each party from getting thrown out by an overpowered gerrymander.

My big issue with it tbh is that the clusters often don't make any sense with reference to geography (as seen in the above discussion) or communities--you get jokes like Moore+Cumberland.

[Sol]

A lot of these maps have NC-05 taking a deep dive into Greensboro--the Republicans might be thinking that putting Boone and Greensboro in the same district might be taking things too far, especially given the big swings to Democrats in the former.

[Sol]

A lot of these maps have NC-05 taking a deep dive into Greensboro--the Republicans might be thinking that putting Boone and Greensboro in the same district might be taking things too far, especially given the big swings to Democrats in the former.

That's a very good point, thank you.

I also wonder if the awkward western split of Watauga might come from trying to do this without miffing Virginia Foxx. Foxx lives in Avery right over the county line, but started her political career in Watauga County government and used to work at App. She might want the area near her home so she doesn't get slammed as a full on carpetbagger.

[Sol]

A lot of these maps have NC-05 taking a deep dive into Greensboro--the Republicans might be thinking that putting Boone and Greensboro in the same district might be taking things too far, especially given the big swings to Democrats in the former.

That's a very good point, thank you.

I also wonder if the awkward western split of Watauga might come from trying to do this without miffing Virginia Foxx. Foxx lives in Avery right over the county line, but started her political career in Watauga County government and used to work at App. She might want the area near her home so she doesn't get slammed as a full on carpetbagger.

By the way Sol, how should Buncombe have its 3 state house districts ideally?

I think it's pretty obviously 1 Asheville district and two outer seats. Though splitting Asheville isn't horrible--a lot of the neighborhoods have stuff in common with the suburbs.

[Sol]

A lot of these maps have NC-05 taking a deep dive into Greensboro--the Republicans might be thinking that putting Boone and Greensboro in the same district might be taking things too far, especially given the big swings to Democrats in the former.

That's a very good point, thank you.

I also wonder if the awkward western split of Watauga might come from trying to do this without miffing Virginia Foxx. Foxx lives in Avery right over the county line, but started her political career in Watauga County government and used to work at App. She might want the area near her home so she doesn't get slammed as a full on carpetbagger.

By the way Sol, how should Buncombe have its 3 state house districts ideally?

I think it's pretty obviously 1 Asheville district and two outer seats. Though splitting Asheville isn't horrible--a lot of the neighborhoods have stuff in common with the suburbs.

Here's an interesting idea that arguably makes sense. Blue seems to be the upscale part of the county right?

That makes sense to me. This is what I had drafted when I played around with it last night:



Blue is super D of course, Green is likely D, and Purple is likely R.

The split of outer Buncombe is kind of challenging, and I think I'd defer to the judgement of someone from there, because the areas outside of Asheville don't seem super closely connected with each other, or even super alike. I went with this because the eastern and southern parts of the county seem a little more transplant-heavy and in some areas suburban, while that's the opposite in the north and west.

[Sol]

So David Price is retiring. Wonder if the Republicans will try to draw out his district to prevent another Dem from winning there

Why would the GOP ever want to crack Durham and Chapel Hill?
Super high turnout areas that are 75% +D.

No it is pretty much given now that the goal is to just remove the 3 rural/exurban counties attached to this district and add a few ten thousand more from Wake. That is the one constant in all the maps that has happened in that it is just Durham + OC.

You’d add Durham and Chapel Hill to the Raleigh district (which would lost some of its redder bits), and keep the 4th anchored in its more rural areas.

Durham+Chapel Hill is quite large though--even excluding rural portions of Orange County (which are quite D actually so not necessarily the best strategy for Republicans) Wake County is too big not to have another D sink in Raleigh. Splitting NC-04 is a bit like splitting WI-02--it's just too big and too Dem to really work, especially when you also have to drown out the triad and Fayetteville.

You could put Durham and Chapel Hill into the 1st and then remove white Republican areas of NC-01 like the map upthread, but tbh that's more equivalent to getting rid of NC-01.

[Sol]

Cracking Greensboro like that has to be a nonstarter. No way the SC doesn't strike this map down.

Only if Dems can get the case heard and decided by November 2022 when Dems are likely to lose control of the court…

Even then, a narrow 1-seat GOP majority might not necessarily want to undo a clear precedent. That's counting on a lot of things to go right for the GOP and I honestly don't understand why they'd bother when they can get a fairly compact 10-4 map and be done with it.

This map is clearly intended to be a bit provocative--that's why they got rid of NC-01 as well. They aren't playing it safe.

[Sol]

It doesn't do anything partisan-wise but the split of Durham is kind of silly (it's not for VRA reasons).  I guess they're trying to keep incumbents happy, though why they would care what Natalie Murdock and Mike Woodard think is anyone's guess.

[Sol]

https://mobile.twitter.com/will_doran/status/1453784660287369216

Nvm they changed Wilmington ?

Yeah the predominantly Black areas of central Wilmington are just south of the border there I think, the chop is of northern GOP-leaning suburbs like Wrightsboro.

[Sol]

The wonky lines in Wake are a silly attempt to follow municipal lines, presumably to avoid complaints about splitting towns.

[Sol]

yeah not worth it imo

[Sol]

Gotta say, Dems attempting to wave away past/present Democratic gerrymandering is pretty cringe

It's definitely fair to say that Democrats are better on the issue (considering how the party has passed independent commissions in several states) but attempting to justify IL gerrymandering as necessary to avoid unilateral disarmament or excuse the disgusting NC 2000 map by claiming it as a conservadem thing (lol) shows that you actually don't care about the issue.

[Sol]

Court of Appeals is Republican controlled too--though it might be an unrepresentative subsection which decided this, I haven't been following the legal maneuvers as closely as I should be.

[Sol]

I could easily see the state court dismissing all the suits except for the obviously gerrymandered choice of clusters in the NE/NC-02. I also think that's less likely to result in backlash from the NCGA, since those are relatively insignificant portions of the map and it's obviously a bit out on a limb anyway.

Ultimately the real reason why the current lines are bad for Dems on the state legislative level comes down to a combination of unlucky clusters (especially in the house) and a crummy rural vote distribution, especially in the eastern part of the state, where there are a lot of 54R-46D type districts unless you try very hard to avoid this.

There is of course the occasional GOP thumb on the scale, which is certainly present (see the Charlotte suburbs as lfromnj mentioned) but tbh the county cluster rule imposes such intense regulation on districting that it makes it hard to do sophisticated gerrymandering of any kind. Often too these are justifiable--Moore+Outer Cumberland is no worse that Moore+Fayetteville.

The thing about the county cluster rule is that it basically acts as an insurance policy, preventing each party from getting thrown out by an overpowered gerrymander.

My big issue with it tbh is that the clusters often don't make any sense with reference to geography (as seen in the above discussion) or communities--you get jokes like Moore+Cumberland.

^^This is my big takeaway about the cluster rule: it prevents anything drastic by creating dumb random seats that aren't good at doing anything : it blocks gerrymandering and incumbent protection but also blocks sensible lines and population equality.  Democrats argued for the county rule because it was the obvious way to overturn Republican maps but now it's in place I'd argue that it's an obstacle to genuinely good mapping.

[Sol]

Court drawn NC maps are interesting because there are 7 obvious and easy to draw districts in the eastern half of the state (the triangle and points east and south) but only enough people for 6 districts. A fair map has to choose one of these self-evidently reasonable districts to destroy.

For the record, the obvious districts are:
A. A northeastern NC Black influence district (NC-02)--this would be the obvious seat to destroy if this were say, UK redistricting rules, since it lost population and isn't a super strong CoI. But that in practice is both racially discriminatory and probably violates the VRA so a fair map shouldn't do it IMO.
B. A coastal district north of Wilmington (NC-01)--this district has the outer banks and New Bern and potentially some of various small inland cities depending on how exactly you finesse the lines with the 1st.
C. A Wilmington-based district (NC-03): Something based in New Hanover, Brunswick, and Pender, plus various adjacent rurals or Onslow/Carteret.
D. A Sandhills/Fayetteville district (split up currently between 3, 4, and : Something based in the core of Fayetteville and the Lumbee community.
E. An exurban Raleigh district (split up between 4, 5, 6, and 7): Something based in the outer parts of Wake plus various neighboring exurbs, like Johnston.
F. A Raleigh district (5)
G. A Durham and Chapel Hill based seat, also ideally could take in Chatham as well as Granville.

So the art of drawing any map of NC comes down to decide which one of these you want to utterly destroy.

Certain combos work better than others but all have bad effects. Combining B+E and C+E gives you decent district outside of the combination in the east, but forces a lot of the Triangle into a seat based in the Piedmont, either messing with G or with a logical rural Piedmont seat.

Dicing up D between C and E, with Fayetteville going to the latter, has a certain elegance and logic (possibly the best option in terms of CoI?), but also dilutes minority influence and sort of functions as a Republican gerrymander. It also forces population westward out of the Triangle.

Destroying either F or G, by dipping A into Raleigh or Durham, doesn't have that same problem but creates an obviously bizarre district. Cracking Durham is easier because Raleigh is quite white.

Some options don't work very well--in particular B+C is overpopulated without an obvious place to remove people and preserve contiguity.

So yeah, this is the fundamental problem of NC redistricting--which logical community do you absolutely destroy?

[Sol]

How do you feel about  my solution to the problem?

This isn't terrible--I would say it has the same problem that any B+E has in that there's still excess population in the Triangle so some of it gets forced to go into what should be in Piedmont district--in your case exurban Greensboro, which is a decent choice. But a good map!

https://davesredistricting.org/join/f53aa2e9-29cb-49f1-a13a-0c9f47f58e41

Would you say this works? A broader "western parts of the Triangle" seat isn't all that bizarre...

I think you could probably do something to tighten up the boundaries of that red district but yeah, I think it pretty easily illustrates how the very crummy move of putting Durham with the northeast makes a map where a lot of other things work.

[Sol]

https://mobile.twitter.com/lekhashupeck/status/1478055610209951753

As we can see the point of this lawsuit is not merely to prevent a GOP gerrymander but to make Democratic gerrymanders in reverse.

Having an R buncombe district or 2 swing districts is reasonable. I don't know why the GOP made it so ugly though. There aren't any R incumbent demands here as all 3 are D.This is simply due to the fact that even If Buncombe is a safe D County there is an Asheville pack. The rest of the county is like Biden +2. The plaintiffs rather than actually fighting for fair maps by demanding that Gastonia not be split demands an Asheville crack to save the 3 Dem incumbents.

Note that the GOP map is still bad imo but what the plaintiffs are demanding is much worse.

All of the Democratic incumbents in Asheville are retiring though--I don't think it's that. (And it's not a side effect of the maps as far as I can tell, the two who are in safe districts are leaving too).

IMO it's more of a combination of wanting genuinely proportional districts--which is understandable though I disagree, genuinely not thinking of Gastonia as an area where they could get a district (Gaston County has a much smaller footprint in D party politics than Buncombe), and, in recognition of the previous judicial decision which split Asheville three ways, going for something which might be more attractive to the court.

[Sol]

So any chance the congressional map gets overturned or is at least ordered to change 1-2 districts?

I think there's a decent shot that NC-02 (old NC-01) gets remade to be at least likely Dem/VRA-compliant.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if they end up upholding the gerrymander of the Triad, considering the not-so-subtle pressure the NCGA has been applying to the court over the related Voter ID lawsuits and recusal issues therein.

State legislature I suspect will be similar--reconfiguration in the NE and maybe Asheville but little else.

Hope I'm wrong!

[Sol]

That's very good least-change, but Republicans absolutely wouldn't have allowed for there to be a new Democratic district, even if they allowed Butterfield and Manning to stay in office.

[Sol]

So what is the TLDR for this point in time on the outcome?

The map used in 2020 was pretty damn fair, it's frustrating that it couldn't just have been kept in place, since that *should* satisfy the rationals on both sides.

There's 14 districts in the first place.

Ye a least change map was always going to be tricky since there was no obvious place to put the new district other than “in the triangle”, which means most parts of the state where redistricting is decisive would have to be shifted significantly anyways. Doesn’t excuse the GOP Gerry though.

Here's my try at what a least change map could have looked like. The current 8th gets split equally into a rump 8th and a new 14th, with each of the two taking on more areas in the triangle and the Charlotte area respectively. New 8th is Biden+6 in 2020, new 14th is Trump+18. Every other district avoids any major changes, only really get what they need to keep population equality and that's it.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/a292ac55-346b-419c-a21a-3a08569aefe6

Ye I agree 8 is the best district to split as it’s already overpopulated and connects the 2 fastest growing areas of the state. Good job.

FWIW, Fayetteville is not particularly fast growing--it's obviously a bad fit with suburban Charlotte but it's not a great fit with the Triangle either. In a fair map it would serve as the base of its own district.

[Sol]

Made a pass at a similar map, also designed to force Madison Cawthorn west and allow Tim Moore to get the district he always wanted. Intended to be a "fair" map but actually quite calibrated for the GOP, and probably impossible to overrule before the 2022 midterms.

Does require Bishop or Hudson to leave, more likely Hudson than Bishop.

[Sol]

This isn't a what about post by me. Note that steins map is when he was in the minority in 2010 .I just find it funny how once you push the 13th entirely into Wake what Democrats wanted in Raleigh 10 years ago is what the GOP prefers now.

I'm sure you know this already, but Stein was trying to preserve the old Brad Miller 13th district, which linked Greensboro to Raleigh via touch-point contiguity.



Miller was able to do what Tim Moore couldn't, and gave himself a house seat.

[Sol]

y'know, I get defending NC's dumbf**k maps if you're an actual member of the Republican party in the general assembly, but if you're just a normal member of society why do you care? It's fairly obvious that even a perfectly fair map of the state would elect a Republican NCGA in both chambers most of the time, and a Democratic trifecta would be fairly rare. Why go to bat defending something which in practice changes little for you?