This week, North Carolinians gathered virtually to condemn Republican lawmakers bending the knee to President Donald Trump by gerrymandering the state’s congressional districts. The event, featuring voting rights and democracy advocates, laid out how the manipulation of the congressional map by Republicans is a blatant effort to diminish the voting power of North Carolinians and rig elections to favor power-hungry politicians.
The newly drawn map zeroes in on the first congressional district, which is currently represented by Democrat Don Davis, and divides it in a way that removes Democratic counties with a higher population of black voters and replaces them with more Republican-leaning counties.
As a part of Trump’s country-wide push to get more Republicans in Congress, state Republicans redrew the map to gather more Republican voters into the district in hopes of adding one more Republican seat to the state’s congressional delegation in the 2026 midterm elections.
Though the move has received praise from Trump, who says he is “strongly supporting” the map, advocates and voters at the virtual event see the move as unprecedented and unacceptable. Melissa Price Kromm, Executive Director of NC For The People Action and one of the speakers at the event, pointed to how out of place it is for the state to go through redistricting right now.
According to Kromm, redistricting usually only occurs in two situations: after a census in order to rebalance the population under the Fourteenth Amendment to uphold the concept of one person, one vote, or when a court orders changes to fix legal violations.
“What’s happening right now is neither,” Kromm stated during the press event. “Republicans have openly admitted that this redraw isn’t about population balance.”
Republican lawmakers have indeed made their intent clear. “The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular,” said Senator Ralph Hise (R-Mitchell) as he introduced the redistricting bill. “Draw a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation.”
Republicans already control 10 of the state’s 14 congressional districts, in addition to having majorities in the state House and Senate. The disproportion in representation is the result of a party in power that has redrawn the state maps five times in just six years, thanks to the GOP-leaning North Carolina Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that legalized partisan gerrymandering. The ruling, which was forecasted to “likely cement Republican power in the state”, came shortly after the state Supreme Court flipped to a Republican majority.
Prior to that ruling, North Carolina’s 14 congressional districts were evenly shared by seven Democrats and seven Republicans. The new maps will leave the voters who make up the purple, 50/50, battleground state of North Carolina with 11 Republicans and 3 Democrats to represent them in Congress. Though gerrymandering is not new to North Carolina, Tyler Daye from Common Cause North Carolina said the difference in this map is that Republicans are pursuing “the only truly competitive district”.
“This is cheating, and disgraceful, and it should be illegal,” Daye said.
Shortly before lawmakers announced their plan to manipulate the map for Trump, Common Cause NC released a poll on gerrymandering that was conducted by a right-leaning polling firm, Opinion Diagnostics. The poll showed 84% of voters in North Carolina, regardless of party affiliation, are against partisan gerrymandering, and 74% of voters would like to see it outlawed.
“They are not drawing districts to represent us. They are drawing them to divide us,” stated Sy Davis, a voter from Elizabeth City, North Carolina. “That’s what modern voter suppression looks like; it’s not always someone blocking the door to a polling place. Sometimes, it’s a line on a map. Sometimes it’s a law passed quietly in Raleigh.”
He compared the voter suppression that would occur under the new map to what he experienced when Republican candidate Judge Jefferson Griffin attempted to throw out the votes of 60,000 North Carolinians, including Davis’, after losing the North Carolina 2024 Supreme Court race to incumbent Justice Allison Riggs.
The six-month-long legal battle only ended after Chief U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers II, a Trump appointee, ruled against Griffin.
In his ruling, Myers stated that “Permitting parties to ‘upend the set rules’ of an election after the election has taken place can only produce confusion and turmoil [which] threatens to undermine public confidence in the federal courts, state agencies, and the elections themselves.”
Griffin conceded after the Myers ruling, and Davis’ vote, along with the tens of thousands of other challenged votes, got to count.
However, the Griffin case was just one example of power-hungry Republican politicians prioritizing political games over the will of the people.
“This isn’t about one ballot; it’s about the entire future of democracy in North Carolina,” Davis explained. “If they can erase 60,000 votes once, what’s to stop them from doing it again or changing the rules so that those votes are never casted at all”.
Other speakers at the event pointed to the lack of priorities by Republican lawmakers. As North Carolina is one of the only two states in the country without a state budget, this leads to a lack of funding for teacher raises, Medicaid, public schools, and disaster relief.
“While teachers are waiting to see if they can even afford to stay in this profession, politicians are working overtime to rig the system to benefit themselves,” stated Tamika Walker Kelly, NCAE President. “While students are stuffed into overcrowded classrooms, legislators are bending over backwards to appease Senator Phil Berger and his lust for power. Unfortunately, this is an all too familiar story for North Carolina.”
Despite the public outcry from advocates, protestors, and the 12 thousand voters who left comments on the NC General Assembly’s public portal, Republicans in the state House and Senate quickly passed the bill to gerrymander our congressional maps. The bill, which cannot be vetoed by Governor Josh Stein, was heard in committees and voted on in both chambers with little time for public comment or time for Democrats to debate.
“This gerrymandering, or perhaps a better phrase for it, ‘election fraud’, ‘ election manipulation’, ‘election subversion’ must be stopped,” stated Daye. “It is disintegrating the integrity of North Carolina’s elections”.
You can watch the full virtual event here.
