Republicans Try to Even the Score with New North Carolina Lines

Maybe after 2020 NC can draw square districts and have, say, a 10-4 GOP delegation (NC will pick up a Representative next time), but I don’t want ten more years of Blue Dogs calling the shots in Congress.

They're very likely going to pass an Iowa-style redistricting commission bill for the next census.

As you know, there are a lot of different permutations: every time you write, "they HAD to..." it just means they CHOSE to draw the rest of the district in such a way as to result in the district as constituted. There are many ways to skin a cat and it's no accident that, for example, the county with the strongest anti-McHenry sentiment was split in two, with its county seat removed. (Who did McHenry beat in the primary to win his Congressional seat? The Sheriff of Catawba County. Where would a successful McHenry primary challenger most likely come from? Catawba County. What is the voting base of Catawba County? Hickory. Where is Hickory now? Exactly.)

These things do not happen by accident. Let's not kid around.

As for Carteret, other nearby counties were split already and could have been reapportioned, and it does seem to me that that was a split of choice.

Having legislatures redistrict is the worst system—except for all the others. Those Iowa-style commissions are like CBS News: they claim to be unbiased, but always end up helping the Democrats. And the NJ commission is pretty much an incumbents’ protection program.

BTW, I looked up the racial and electoral data for the Wake County precincts in the redrawn NC-04: only 14% black, but a mere 39% for President Bush in 2004. Sticking those voters in the NC-02 would be a Democrat’s dream, and they couldn’t place them in the NC-01 without reducing the black percentage below 50% (or increasing the black and Democrat percentage in the NC-03 or the NC-13).

You’re correct that had redistricters started off with different criteria they could have drawn very different CDs and still have a shot at 10 GOP CDs. But if one tries to (i) draw two black-majority districts, (ii) make it easier for incumbent Republicans to get reelected, (iii) make it harder for incumbent Democrats to win and (iv) keep the basic shapes of districts, this map is quite logical.

Obviously, many people who have been thinking about this for awhile would have drawn the map differently. I would have probably drawn a more gerrymandered map with 9 absolutely safe GOP districts, which you would have hated even more than the map that was adopted. You would have pribably drawn squarer districts that, in my mind, would have left too many CDs vulnerable to a Dem candidate. One can always find faults in any redistricting plan, but I think that this one doesn’t make as many unforced errors (such as, e.g., greedily keeping the PA-13 “winnable” and thus weakening the PA-06, PA-07 and PA-08 in the 2001 PA map) as most plans normally do. NC Republicans tempered their ambition with practicality and avoided the hubris that so often afflicts redistricters, and didn’t slice the GOP vote too thing among districts in an attempt to “get rid of Price” or any other quixotic goal. I think that we’ll end up with 10 Republicans—at worst 9 if McIntyre survives (that’s the one CD that worries me)—and in the end NC will have much better representation in Congress.

Oh, on the whole the map is fine.

It occcurred to me while thinking about this that one reason they made some of the county splits in order to justify splitting up Buncombe County and getting rid of Shuler.

If you read Rucho-Lewis's statement on the proposed map, they have an argument for why they've split up populous counties into multiple districts. (Kind of a silly argument to my way of thinking, but it doesn't have to make sense to anyone except the courts.) Citing prior precedent and trends in population growth, they state that they've tried to split up all urban areas into multiple districts to prevent large district shifts following each census. So they followed that statewide, excepting Wilmington, which is too isolated to be reasonably split.

Yeah, the only way that it would have made sense to have split up Wilmington would be had they drawn a third(very gerrymandered) black-majority district that adds black neighborhoods in Wilmington to black parts of Fayetteville and black and/or Lumbee precincts to its southwest (basically, turning McIntyre’s CD into a black-majority CD that took in most of the non-Charlotte black precincts in Kissell’s CD). And the new NC-07 has enough rural areas in its NW portion that it won’t grow much faster than the rest of the districts.

Regarding the silliless of the Rucho-Lewis justification for splitting urban counties, I don’t think they’ll even need to justify to a court. Even if the NC Constitution prohibited splitting counties in congressional redistricting (which I can’t imagine that it does, given the maps adopted in 1991 and 2001), such prohibition would be overruled by the federal mandate to draw black-majority congressional districts pursuant to the prevailing interpretation of the VRA. You can’t draw two black-majority CDs and one black-influence CD (the NC-04, over 45%of whose Democrat primary voters are black and a majority of whom are non-white) without splitting up urban counties.

BTW, I checked out the 2004 voting performance for the Catawba County precincts that were placed in the NC-05 and those that were kept in the NC-10, and the ones moved to the NC-05 (which you indicated comprised the city of Hickory) gave President Bush 60% while those kept in the NC-10 gave him 69%, so if part of Catawba had to be taken out of the NC-10 in order to accomodate a greater number of Democrat-leaning Buncombe County precincts in the NC-10 then it made sense for it to be slightly-less-Republican Hickory. That obviously sucks for the mayor of Hickory if he wanted to run against McHenry in the GOP primary, but GOP redistricters had bigger fish to fry. Likewise, having Onslow County and half of Carteret County being removed from the NC-03 serves to make the execrable Walter Jones safer (he had previously received a primary challenge from an Onslow County Commissioner), but keeping Jones on his toes was not as important a goal as defeating McIntyre and electing 10 Republican Representatives.

The NC constitution mandates whole counties, etc, as is practicable, for state legislative districts, but Congressional districts have few rules -- outside of VRA & recent court cases. But all the GOP maps will be challenged in court based on ... anything potentially relevant.

I don't mind Walter Jones Jr. -- not my ideal rep but I wish some others would think for themselves a bit more, as he does. Virginia Foxx has been pretty good in practice, in spite of widespread misgivings. McHenry has never held a real job in his life - he went from the College Republican to political hanger-on to state rep to Congressman (he ran for Congress as a "job creating businessman", even though he'd just received his REALTOR's license and never sold a house or hired anyone, and likely never has since); he'll repeat whatever talking point the Speaker or Republican Study Committee or his favorite blog tell him. A pretty sad collection of characters in terms of a political bench ever since Burr moved up. Hopefully we'll get some good new blood in there when the new maps are approved.

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