North Carolina 2020 Redistricting

[Tekken_Guy]

I don’t understand why Districts 5 and 10 are drawn that way, though I’d assume the NC GOP wanted to protect their only female rep from Mark Walker’s potential carpetbagging. Railroading Virginia Foxx is bad optics for a party who’s trying to win over women.

[Tekken_Guy]

The voters didn’t make the districts themselves. Even if the GOP base isn’t in the mood for more female representatives, I’m assuming the politicians in Raleigh are concerned that not holding on to their state delegation’s only female Republican would make it hard to fight back charges of sexism. Especially after they elected men in both of their special elections.

We saw this same thing play out in Georgia. Brian Kemp picked a woman to be their new senator for many of the same reasons NC is trying to keep Foxx aboard.

[Tekken_Guy]

I doubt the peculiar lines of 5 and 10 (and to a lesser extent 13) had anything to do with Foxx's gender. I suspect it had everything to do with rigging the primaries for someone - we just don't know who yet. It could be that the mappers wanted Walker to survive so they made the 13th in a way that could benefit him in a primary, and cut 13 between districts to prevent Budd from fleeing. Or the lines could be set up to prevent or facilitate the advancement of state legislators to Washington. We won't know till everyone has filed.

Why would they want to get rid of Budd? And how do you know he wouldn’t go to the 10th instead?

[Tekken_Guy]

I doubt the peculiar lines of 5 and 10 (and to a lesser extent 13) had anything to do with Foxx's gender. I suspect it had everything to do with rigging the primaries for someone - we just don't know who yet. It could be that the mappers wanted Walker to survive so they made the 13th in a way that could benefit him in a primary, and cut 13 between districts to prevent Budd from fleeing. Or the lines could be set up to prevent or facilitate the advancement of state legislators to Washington. We won't know till everyone has filed.

Why would they want to get rid of Budd? And how do you know he wouldn’t go to the 10th instead?

No idea, just guessing. The fact that so much safe R territory was unnecessarily shuffled when everything could be kept compact suggests an external desire. The partisan makeup of the region implies this desire  has to do with the GOP primary. What those primary desires exactly are remain unknown.

I agree. It probably means they want to keep certain MOC safe from primary challenges. This configuration seems to benefit Foxx the most as it puts her district away from the 6th. A more compact split would have her district touching the new 6th.

[Tekken_Guy]

It's worth bearing in mind that Foxx is 76 years old, so she must be on a retirement watchlist anyway.

See, heres a good reason why they might have messed with the western seats. Plenty of others her age are looking at the figures and expecting that the GOP won't take the House. The 5th could have been drawn to specifications for say another Suburban Charlotte legislator who wants to advance, couldn't previously without a primary, and is expecting Foxx to throw in the towel.

Kathy Harrington?

[Tekken_Guy]

Would this type of map ever get approved in NC? Its a 9R - 5D map

https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::cf4d4eb1-0b6a-4d93-a24e-340dc8141612

No because you double bunked Bishop and Hudson. Bishop lives somewhere in south Charlotte while Hudson is from Cabbarus.

If one of them runs for Senate, they'll make an exception like they did with Holly Grange.

[Tekken_Guy]

Relatively similar proposal to Vern's, but with some differences in the Southeast (sorry for not changing the district numbers):


1: Clinton +11.2
2: Trump +5.6
3: Trump +22.6
4: Clinton + 27.1
5: Trump +43.9
6: Clinton +31.8
7: Trump +19.0
8: Trump +10.8
9: Clinton +4.2
10: Trump +36.3
11: Trump +12.6
12: Clinton +43.5
13: Clinton + 24.3
14: Trump +42.5

This can of course be seen as a Democratic trendymander: The 2nd and 8th swung towards Biden and I'm not sure whether they went for Biden or Trump. The 11th swung towards Biden, but Trump still won it by a couple of points. The 9th on the other hand swung towards Trump and I'm not sure if Fayetteville kept it in Biden's column or if it went for Trump.

Hence overall: 5 Safe R, 1 Lean to Likely R, 3 Toss-ups, 5 Safe D.

This is a good map. The only problem is the double-bunking of Bishop and Hudson may not go over well in the legislature.

Also, I'm not sure if Murphy and Rouzer would be happy being switched around. Wilmington is Rouzer's base and he may not want to give it up even though he doesn't live near it. Same with the Outer Banks and Murphy.

[Tekken_Guy]

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

Right now I think the biggest obstacle to an 11-3 is not the Greensboro crack but rather the VRA on NC-1.

[Tekken_Guy]

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.

Well a Democrat did narrowly win the main Wilmington State Senate seat. But the Republicans won it back just last year even though Biden carried the seat. I do think Lee will hold this seat in 2022 but he might go down in 2024.

[Tekken_Guy]

Are the R districts without incumbents designed for anyone in particular. I believe one was made for Speaker Tim Moore, but are the other two perhaps meant for Mark Walker and George Holding to come back?

[Tekken_Guy]

Who do you guys think will run in NC-7?

People I would like to run would be:

Rep. Jon Hardister
Rep. Pat Hurley
Sen. Amy Galey
Rep. Erin Paré

Mark Walker.

[Tekken_Guy]

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article256309297.html

No blocking, they also muddled the case heavily by mixing the legislative maps and the congressional map

I thought Newby was going to run out the clock.

[Tekken_Guy]

Given how 2022 will go, is it a reasonable assumption that the gerrymander will be in place for several cycles, perhaps the full decade?

Unfortunately for Democrats no Republican held seat will be up again until 2028. All the Republicans on the court right now are the ones elected in 2020 and terms are eight years long.

[Tekken_Guy]

Either it's making Butterfield's seat VRA-friendly again or giving Manning her district back at the expense of one of the open seats (probably not the Mark Walker one, though).

[Tekken_Guy]

7-5-2 is a great deal for a state like NC, at least if the 2 swing districts are genuine swing districts (ie went for Biden narrowly).

I guess the 5 D districts are
-Black Belt
-Raleigh
-Durham/Chapel Hill
-Greensboro/Winston Salem
-Charlotte

And the 2 swing districts are
-Sandhills (trending R)
-Raleigh suburbs (trending D)

And 7 safe R districts including a Charlotte suburbs district that’s rapidly trending D but is countered by the R trend in the Black Belt seat.

[Tekken_Guy]

Hot take- In this environment and given the trends in the black belt/results in similar seats, the black belt seat will flip unless they add Durham to it or something like that

This would be totally fine since the district that has the rest of Durham county along with Orange and Chatham will still be safe D,  and the black belt seat will be MUCH more Dem.





https://davesredistricting.org/join/d7c4144a-e6d9-4e4d-b993-01aa273eb149

I assume Republicans win both 4 and 7 this year if this were the map.

[Tekken_Guy]

This is what I think will happen:

Congressional: Likely 3-1-10, with the swing seat being a predecessor to the current NC-01 the GOP counts of continuing to shift right. Map is likely similar to the one that was originally overturned, but makes some minor changes now that there's different sets of incumbents and we've seen another cycle of political shifts.

State Sen: Honestly, it's not hard to lock the GOP into a supermajority without doing anything too absurd; the GOP already won a supermajority in 2022 with just a slightly R favorable year. I expect a map similar to the current one that just makes some optimizations so in your average year, the GOP gets to about 32 seats, and basically locks in a supermajority. I don't expect them to be super aggressive with cracking up suburbs of Charlotte and Raliegh, especially given the 2022 results; I think most emphasis will be on the black-belt and more mid-sized cities like Fayetteville, Greensboro, and Wilmington.

State House: This is honestly more difficult to *lock-in* a GOP supermajority, but you can do it so the GOP should be favored in a normal cycle. Again, I expect the biggest point of contention to be the black-belt seats and seats around smaller D-leaning communities. Especially on the state House level, I doubt we'll see GOP aggressively try to bacon-strip out suburbs, but def try to shore up incumbents (rmbr County-splitting rrule is still in place too, so it's literally impossible to squeeze much out of Mecklenburg and Wake Counties).

The GOP got to exactly 30 seats in the state senate and that’s through winning a swing seat in New Hanover. Seat 31 for them is probably in north Wake County, but I don’t see where seat 32 is for them. Making any of them Safe R is a tough order.

[Tekken_Guy]

Since I'm a masochist, I've been playing around with a maximalist NCGOP gerrymander.

The landscape for NC redistricting post-Allen v. Milligan is interesting -- Republicans have pretty much obliterated most previous constraints on their gerrymandering, except now they can't get rid of NC-01 like they wanted. I figured they might go with a map which shores up NC-01 instead.

link



It's 10-3-1, with NC-06 as a narrow Trump district, functionally Lean R.

You could probably tighten this up more, especially with 14.

That south Wake seat is a little too close for comfort for Republicans. They’d probably pull it out into more rural areas like going deeper into Wayne County.

[Tekken_Guy]

The state legislature is worth keeping an eye on here too; the Congressional map is fairly predictable but the state legislative map less so.

Under current interpretations of NC state law, the legislature is required to minimize county splits to the maximum degree possible, a rule which sometimes results in kind of awkward districts but which severely constrains gerrymandering. If the legislature colors within these lines, the maps will be certainly gerrymandered (especially in the House) but Democrats would likely still be within striking distance of breaking the supermajority in a good year, even if it's a bit harder.

However, given the current Republican majority in the State Supreme Court, it seems likely to me that they may jettison these rules and draw freely with the understanding that the court would back them up. In that case, it would lock in a Republican supermajority with 100% certainty for the rest of the decade.

I could see Republicans shore up the seats they currently have and concede the ones they don’t to Democrats, with a few exceptions (the Cabarrus County D seat, for instance).

In the senate the toughest think to do is shore up the New Hanover senate seat. The only competitive D-held seat, the one partially in Wake can’t be made much redder than it currently is.

[Tekken_Guy]

The state legislature is worth keeping an eye on here too; the Congressional map is fairly predictable but the state legislative map less so.

Under current interpretations of NC state law, the legislature is required to minimize county splits to the maximum degree possible, a rule which sometimes results in kind of awkward districts but which severely constrains gerrymandering. If the legislature colors within these lines, the maps will be certainly gerrymandered (especially in the House) but Democrats would likely still be within striking distance of breaking the supermajority in a good year, even if it's a bit harder.

However, given the current Republican majority in the State Supreme Court, it seems likely to me that they may jettison these rules and draw freely with the understanding that the court would back them up. In that case, it would lock in a Republican supermajority with 100% certainty for the rest of the decade.

I could see Republicans shore up the seats they currently have and concede the ones they don’t to Democrats, with a few exceptions (the Cabarrus County D seat, for instance).

In the senate the toughest think to do is shore up the New Hanover senate seat. The only competitive D-held seat, the one partially in Wake can’t be made much redder than it currently is.

The challenge with that approach is that there's kind of a push and pull with it. Cabarrus is a good example; you can draw it so that Diamond Staton-Williams's district becomes Republican, but there are a lot of 55-45 R areas that mean you're probably just drawing two lean R seats instead of one tossup and one likely R seat.

In the House there's more room to rig--the GOP control of the NCSC means we probably get an Asheville pack, you can probably split Chatham and draw out Reives, boost R margins in suburban Guilford seats, maybe tighten lean D seats in Mecklenburg and Wake, etc. But that's only a few seats in practice, still enough for a Dem rebound since in most cases these seats are going to stay competitive-ish.

Also the house has a lot of competitive seats in the NE that Biden won but are held by Republicans, and while Trump might flip them, he also might not.

In the senate it’ll be hard to gerrymander out Applewhite in Fayetteville without endangering McInnis as well. The one D seat in the black belt around Greenville probably has to stay because unpacking it weakens the Hanig and Newton seats. I can’t imagine how Guilford can be reduced to one D seat and Buncombe to 0. 

[Tekken_Guy]

For the legislative maps I think Republicans are favored to maintain the supermajority in the senate at least, but the house is a toss-up.

[Tekken_Guy]

How long til Jeff Jackson and the rest of the drawn out people decide to run for statewide office

Jackson will almost certainly run for AG next year. Idk about the others.

Davis has a shot in an 11-3-1, and Nickel could run against Ross or Foushee in a primary.

[Tekken_Guy]

Democrats do have an opportunity to break the NC Supermajority in 2024, though it won’t be easy.

In the Senate, Trump won 31 seats, one more than what is needed for a supermajority, and Budd won the same 31. There are two plausible pickup opportunities for Democrats:
- SD-11, held by Lisa Stone Barnes, is a seat based in rural areas north of Raleigh, stretching from Henderson to Rocky Mount. Trump only won it by a point, but that’s an underperformance from 2016 when Clinton narrowly carried it, and Budd won it by 6. Don Davis only lost it by 3, though. With better black turnout, Democrats will have better opportunities to win here, but Barnes starts out as a favorite.
- SD-07, held by Michael Lee, is based in New Hanover county. It is Trump+5, an improvement for Rs from its Biden-won incarnations of the past, but it was Trump+12 in 2016 and is quickly Democratic-trending. Budd only won it by 4 (though Rouzer carried it pretty easily), and there’s a chance Biden carries it next year. Lee is favored but on a good night for Democrats, he could go down.

Republicans, meanwhile have three potential pickup opportunities.
- Republicans’ best pickup opportunity is SD-18, a seat in northern Wake County held by Mary Willis Bode, which Trump won by 2 points and Budd by 1, but left trending from its Trump+6 2016 result. Bode is more vulnerable now than in her Biden-won current seat, but she’s far from an underdog.
- SD-13, in south Wake County, is held by Sydney Batch. Biden only won it by 2 points, but Beasley won it by 4 and Nickel by 6. She starts out as a favorite.
- SD-42 in South Mecklenburg is open because Rachel Hunt is running for Lt. Governor. Biden won it by 6, but Beasley carried it by just 5, and some of the Supreme Court Republicans came close to winning it. Dems are favored here.


Now in the house, Democrats have better odds at breaking the supermajority. Trump won 70 seats on the map, two shy of a supermajority, but Budd won three additional seats to have a one-seat buffer, while not losing any of the Trump seats. The three Biden-Budd seats, all represented by freshman Republicans, are:
- HD-05, stretching from Elizabeth City to Winston, is represented by Bill Ward. Biden won it by 0.2, but Budd by 6. Better black turnout could give Ward a tougher race than he had in 2022.
- HD-24, based in Wilson County, is represented by Ken Fontenot. Biden won it by a point, but Budd carried it by 5. Like Ward, heightened black turnout is the key to taking out Fontenot.
- HD-25, based in Nash County, is represented by Allen Chester. It voted for Biden by 2 and Budd by 5, and Chesser’s fate is, once again, dependent on black turnout.

There are also two Republicans defending Biden-Beasley seats:
- HD-32, represented by Frank Sossamon, takes in parts of Henderson and Granville counties. It voted for Biden by 5 but Budd only lost it by 0.3. Sossamon will have a tougher election than the Biden-Budd trio but he’s not out of the running entirely.
- HD-98, in northern Mecklenburg County, is represented by John Bradford, who is retiring to run for Treasurer. Biden won it by 1 and Beasley by 2. Without Bradford, Democrats may be in better shape to win this seat than they were in the past.

Vulnerable Republicans in Trump-Budd seats include:
- HD-37 in southern Wake County, held by Erin Pare. Trump won it by 7, but Budd by just 4. Pare is running for congress so this open seat will be attractive to Democrats.
- HD-105 in southern Mecklenburg county, held by party-switcher Tricia Cotham. Trump won it by 2 and Budd by 1.4, and it is rapidly left-trending.

Vulnerable Democrats include:
- HD-35 in northern Wake County, held by Terrence Everitt, which is Trump+5 and Budd+3. Biden could win it next year, which could be a boon to Everitt’s chances.
- HD-48 in Hoke and Scotland Counties, held by Garland Pierce. Biden won it by 6, but Beasley by 4, though black turnout will probably be better in 2024.
- HD-54 in Chatham and Randolph counties, held by Minority Leader Robert Reives. Biden only won it by 2, but Beasley by 6. He should be favored.
- HD-73 in Cabarrus County, held by Diamond Staton Williams. Trump won it by 8 and Budd by 11. This is a likely flip, though it is trending Democratic.
- HD-116 in Buncombe County, held by Caleb Rudow. Went from Trump+8 to Budd+3, and Rudow has a decent chance at holding on.

[Tekken_Guy]

What's the constitutional petition process like in NC?

60% vote of approval in both leg. chambers in one session to get an amendment on the ballot (no gov veto).

Oof.

Ye Dems only shot at fixing NC redistricting at this point is flipping the State Court and/or the federal Court, both of which will prolly take a while. Good chance NC itself is Senate seat 50 or 51 for Dems at some point this decade so could be decisive as to whether they fill a seat or not.

The best they can do is elect Stein in 2024 and block a supermajority in at least one chamber. While the latter won’t be easy (Budd won the tipping point in both chambers by at least 3 points) it’s not completely out of reach either (as a lot of those seats around the tipping point are left-trending).

Then they to win 4 out of 5 State Supreme Court races up until 2028.

[Tekken_Guy]

Here's the final State Senate map Rs passed. It breaks 31 Trump - 19 Biden.

Of the 19 seats only 3 are remotely competitive. 13 and 42 are both desperate attempts by Rs to cling on to suburban seats within Wake and Mecklenburg Counties respectively. Both districts have been shifting pretty hard left and should prolly be Dem long term. District 5 is Biden + 13 but only Beasley + 7 in 2022 and has generally been drifting right but for the most part think it should be ok for Dems.

There are several competative R seats. Both 11 and 24 are Clinton-Trump seats. Only way I can see Dems clinging onto 11 long term is if Franklin County starts seeing some liberal spillover from Wake. 24 really comes down to who has a candidate that can appeal to the Lumbee tribe. 18 takes in Northern Wake, is currently represented by a Dem overperformer, and is generally shifting left so Dems prolly hold it long term; was only Budd + 1 in 2022. Dems may also have a shot at SD-07 if they continue their gains in Wilmington and a longshot in the Trump + 10 Carrabus based seat. This basically locks Dems out of a majority for the decade, and difficult to break the R supermajority.

District 5 is notable in that it's the only place in Eastern NC outside of the coasts to have a non-negligible white liberal population as well.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a bit of leftward movement in Franklin County, though I may be being optimistic; there's been a lot of suburban growth along US-1 in Northern Wake County, which most recently flipped the area around Wake Forest. Youngsville is the next logical zone to see growth in this way. The adjacent part of Northern Wake may also get commuter rail in the medium term thanks to the S-line project, which is basically the only viable rail project happening in the Triangle these days, though that probably doesn't happen this decade.

18 is interesting; Mary Wills Bode will definitely have an uphill climb, but she's also fairly good recruit for Democrats in that her ~vibes~ are well to the right of her actual views (which to my understanding are actually even well to the left of her voting record), in a way which is a good fit for exurban Wake.

A bit off topic but I feel like in general over the past few cycles, Democrats have done a better job at finding candidates for various swing seats who present as down to earth and moderate in rhetoric, even if they're truly more progressive and an academic or "elite". I think especially with female candidates, Dems have been quite good at running "I'm a normal mom" type candidates.

Long term I think Dems hold SD-18; Biden only lost it by 2, Beasley by 1; I think he narrowly carries it in 2024 because it's right at the part of Wake County that's seeing pretty rapid liberal spillover.

When do you think SD-07 falls?