Campaign Corner Issue # 11: December Redistricting Updates
North Carolina and Georgia have new maps, and several states are on the verge of one as well
After the wrap up of the November elections I haven’t been able to write a lot due to job/holiday stuff, but recently there have been major developments in redistricting for several states, so I wanted to provide some updates. One state has completely finalized drawing a new map, while several others have made significant progress on drawing new ones. With a lot of news to cover, it seems like it’s a good time to discuss it and talk about the new/upcoming maps and their potential impacts on the 2024 elections.
North Carolina
The state that has fully finalized its new maps is North Carolina. The congressional and state legislative maps used in 2022 were drawn by the state courts, much to the chagrin of the state Republicans. In 2022 the Democrats did well in the congressional races, bringing the state’s congressional delegation to a 7-7 tie, but simultaneously the Republicans won control of the state courts and they expanded their majorities in the state legislatures allowing them to gain veto proof majorities. This meant that the safeguards that prevented them from enacting a gerrymander for the 2022, since the governor doesn’t have a veto for redistricting and the courts were basically encouraging them to overturn the previous map. After a brief drawing session, the state legislature unveiled their new congressional maps.
The map is about as brutal of a Republican gerrymander as can be expected. There are 3 safely Democratic districts in this map (districts 2, 4, and 12), 1 tossup district (district 1), and everything else voted for Trump by at least 10% in 2020. This includes districts 6, 13, and 14, all of which have Democratic incumbents.
The basic idea of this map that the North Carolina Republicans were clearly going for was to try to cram as many Democrats in 3 areas (Charlotte, Raleigh, and the Research Triangle) into as many districts, and while they didn’t want to risk a VRA challenge by lowering the Black population of district 1 too much, they did go out of their way to make the white population of it more conservative by removing more D leaning areas like Greensville and replacing it with more Republican areas along the coast and around Goldsboro. That district did vote for Biden, but by a significantly lower margin than than the old version did. That district being drawn is very blatantly an attempt to dilute the influence of Black voters in order to raise the chance of a white Republican winning.
Beyond those four districts, this map splits the other major D leaning areas of the state (the suburbs of Charlotte and Raleigh are split across multiple districts, the Piedmont Triad is split across four districts, Fayetteville is split across two districts), and pairs them with inelastic, heavily Republican exurbs or rural areas. The only major Democratic strongholds that aren’t split are the ones that are either too big and too blue to do that without making other districts too tenuous, or the ones like Asheville that are surrounded by Republican leaning areas anyway and thus it’s not necessary to do anything crazy to make their districts R leaning. The districts that are drawn to be Republican leaning also seem designed to be future proofed- while several of them have areas that are trending towards the Democrats, they are balanced out by rural areas that are either static or trending to the right. The 10 districts that are drawn to elect Republicans will do just that, and they will do so unless the court’s composition changes.
The Democrats who were targeted in this redraw have reacted about as expected. Kathy Manning, Wiley Nickel, and Jeff Jackson have all announced they will retire because their new districts are unwinnable for them in their new form, although both Nickel and Jackson have announced they will run for statewide offices instead (Nickel will run for the senate in 2026 while Jackson will run for Attorney General in 2024). The only targeted Democrat who is running for reelection is Don Davis, primarily because he is the only one in a district that a Democrat has a chance at winning.
Come next year, Davis’s district will be very competitive in the general election, but the other 3 districts I mentioned will not be. Those districts will flip to the Republicans, it’s just a matter of which Republicans they nominate.
Georgia
Next door to North Carolina is Georgia, which has also had its map redrawn recently. Georgia’s congressional and state legislative maps were challenged on racial gerrymandering grounds, with plaintiffs arguing that more majority Black districts should be drawn in the Atlanta area. The courts agreed, and presumably after seeing what happened with Alabama when they tried to get around court rulings and failed miserably, the Georgia state legislature redrew their maps and added a new majority Black district.
The main change on this map is the 6th district, a newly created district in the western Atlanta suburbs. This district is majority Black and would reliably elect a Black Democrat. However, there’s a catch. The Republicans didn’t want to give up any other congressional districts they already had, so in exchange for this district being drawn, they eliminated the 7th district, a minority coalition district in Gwinnett county represented by Black Democrat Lucy McBath. For those who want more opportunities for black voters in the Atlanta area to be represented, this redraw is a lateral move, not an increase.
The plaintiffs from the original court case argued in court that this map wasn’t what the original ruling was looking for, but on December 28th, the judge accepted the map, saying that going any further would’ve caused a partisan change and he didn’t want this case to turn political. This map is thus set as Georgia’s new map, and while a few incumbents (namely Lucy McBath) will have new districts to figure out, the partisanship of the map will stay the same, with 9 heavily Republican leaning districts and 5 heavily Democratic leaning districts, with the only change being that the Democratic districts will go from having 4 of them be majority Black and one be a minority coalition district, to having all 5 be majority Black.
Louisiana
Louisiana is yet another southern state that has a lawsuit over how many majority Black districts it has. Earlier this year a federal court struck down the map, and attempts to get that ruling overturned have gone no where, so the state is set to redraw that. The main block for the state drawing a map right now is that the state is about to get a new governor, so the plan purportedly is to wait until Jeff Landry is inaugurated as governor to get the redraw going.
For a long time it was assumed that if a redraw happened, the cut Republican would be Julia Letlow because a) her district has several heavily Black areas that would be easy to put into a new majority Black district (particularly around the Monroe area), and b) because she has the least amount of seniority. But according to Politico, rumor has it that Garret Graves is the most likely to be cut. This is mostly just for factional reasons- Graves is very close to Kevin McCarthy, and more conservative Republicans like Landry want him gone for that reason, and the redistricting lawsuit gives them a good excuse.
Regardless of where the majority Black district ends up though, the new map should result in one being drawn, and thus a new, fairly Democratic district will be added.
Utah
Utah is undergoing a redistricting lawsuit on partisan grounds. The state previously passed a constitutional amendment regarding redistricting, and for the 2022 map, the state ignored it. The map that the legislature passed for 2022 has been litigated for the past few months, but it’s unknown when the courts will issue a decision on it.
Florida
Florida’s congressional map has been challenged because of how it drew the northern portion of the state. In the 2010s, there was a district that went from Tallahassee to Jacksonville that was designed to unite various Black communities in this part of the state. In redistricting, this district was eliminated. Ron DeSantis said this was about making the map more compact, but he also went out of his way to split the city of Jacksonville to ensure the city’s Black community couldn’t elect a member of their choice, even though the city is more than large enough for one district to be entirely within it, and that district would in all likelihood elect a Black Democrat. That decision is being challenged in court, because eliminating a performing minority access seat that could’ve still been drawn is known as retrogression, which is illegal in the Florida constitution.
I’d write more about this, but instead I will recommend you read Mathew Isbell’s substack for further updates. He works in Florida politics and is very well informed on the state’s happenings. Were I to write more about this, I’d just be repeating his work. The most recent two articles that Matthew Isbell wrote about the subject can be found here and here, and I highly recommend you read them if you have any interest in Florida’s redistricting.
New York
New York will have new congressional maps come 2024. A few weeks ago, the state’s court ruled that the state would have to redraw its map for a simple reason: the state’s map was supposed to be drawn by either a commission or the legislature, and instead it was drawn by a special master. This means that the independent redistricting commission will make new maps, and if it fails to pass new maps then the legislature will get a chance to draw
Michigan
Michigan’s state legislative maps were struck down earlier this month. The reason being is that when the state drew its legislative lines, the map drawers made the decision to have a bunch of districts that went from the heavily Black portions of Detroit to whiter areas in the suburbs. The idea was to try and increase the amount of Black opportunity districts, but this plan failed because the whiter areas turned out better, thus causing Black representation in the Detroit area to drop. This lawsuit struck down the Detroit part of the map, with the intention of trying to bring the amount of Black legislators representing the city back up. This lawsuit shouldn’t affect the math of the state legislature too much because the areas that were drawn in with Detroit were fairly D leaning white areas, but it will affect a lot of primaries in the state legislature next year in the state house and in 2026 for the state senate.
North Dakota
Similarly, North Dakota’s state legislative maps were struck down because of racial gerrymandering issues. In the state legislature, one district was packed with Native Americans in a way that limited representation to only that one district. The court agreed this constituted a violation of the Voting Rights Act and struck the map down. The courts gave the legislature until December 22nd to enact a new map, and that deadline passed with no action taken. It’s not clear what happens next, so I am not going to begin to speculate, but there should be more movement here soon as the courts and legislature figure out what they do now.
Wisconsin
I already wrote a separate article about Wisconsin’s state legislative maps getting redrawn, so I’ll be brief here. This case is one part about the state legislative maps not being contiguous (because the state legislature adhered way to much to city level lines despite many city lines having weird holes and exclaves in them) and one part about the map being a partisan gerrymander. The map will be redrawn in order to correct both issues, and while the majority on the court has said the main focus will be on the contiguity, when they redraw the map they will keep partisan fairness in mind. This is a major development because for the past 13 years, state legislative races in Wisconsin have been thoroughly uncompetitive due to the Republicans drawing a map where they can’t lose. This redraw has by far the biggest implications of any that we’ve discussed, because it’s the one that most changes the legislative body that’s being fought over (basically every district will be redrawn), it’s the one that has the biggest partisan change, and if there are more competitive races now in Wisconsin, that changed campaign dynamics in a state that will be very close in its presidential and senate races.
Those are all of the major redistricting updates that have happened in the past couple months. If any more states announce their maps will be challenged or redrawn, more updates will come.