Update: A panel of judges on November 26 unanimously sided with Republicans and allowed the new congressional map to be used in 2026.
In a Winston-Salem federal courtroom, arguments over North Carolina’s recently passed congressional map boiled down to whether it was retaliatory against predominantly Black voters or just legal partisan gerrymandering.
The nearly four-hour hearing took place before three judges—U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Allison Jones Rushing and two federal district court judges, Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder. Rushing and Myers were appointed by President Donald Trump, and Schroeder was appointed by former President George W. Bush.
The judges have been asked to decide whether to temporarily block the map, which gives Republicans a likely 11-3 advantage in next year’s midterm elections. The judges said they would issue a ruling soon, likely by the end of November.
Their decision will be closely watched. The map was created at Trump’s request to GOP-leaning state legislatures so that Republicans have the best chance of maintaining control of Congress next year. Republicans currently have a 219-213 advantage in the U.S. House.
Wednesday’s hearing took place a day after a three-judge panel threw out Texas’ new congressional map. In a 2-1 opinion, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee, concluded that Texas state legislators redrew the map based on racial considerations, which constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The map would have yielded five additional Republican congressional seats.
Texas legislators had redrawn the map earlier this year, prompting California to place a new congressional map on the ballot this month as a referendum that would virtually guarantee five more Democratic seats. States usually redraw districts every 10 years after the Census, but Trump’s request to GOP states to create new districts mid-decade triggered a national race to gerrymander.
Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise, co-chair of the Senate Elections Committee, was the primary architect of North Carolina’s new map. And in testimony Wednesday, he made it crystal clear why state Republicans came back to Raleigh to redraw the map.
“Partisan advantage,” he said, a phrase he repeated over and over during his brief testimony. Partisan gerrymandering is legal, but racial gerrymandering is not.
Looking at the current map and 2024 election results, state Republicans instinctively knew what they were going to change to get that partisan advantage, he said. They targeted the 1st and 3rd congressional districts in eastern North Carolina, Hise said.
He insisted they did not use any racial data and began swapping voters and counties, keeping districts as compact as possible, to create about a 55% Republican majority in each district. The result: the 1st District, now represented by Democrat Don Davis, turned from purple to likely red. The new map created 11 safe Republican House seats, instead of the 10 safe Republican seats in the former map.
State Republican legislators passed the new congressional map in both chambers of the General Assembly within 48 hours.
Advocacy groups, including the NAACP, and individual voters immediately challenged the map, calling for a temporary block, known as a preliminary injunction. Hillary Klein, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, called the new map an “unprecedented escalation” and a retaliatory attack against predominantly Black voters in the 1st Congressional District.
“It’s a new kind of harm,” she said.
Klein also argued that state Republicans can’t deny any racial intent, considering that they targeted the 1st District, which had the largest percentage of Black residents of any district in the state, at about 40%. And this isn’t the first time state Republicans redrew the district, They did so in 2023 after Davis beat a scandal-ridden, far-right candidate.
Klein said if this congressional map stands, it means that every time state Republican legislators don’t like the election results, they can go back and retool the congressional map again.
That argument didn’t seem to sway the judges. They repeatedly interrupted Klein, asking what evidence she had that this had been harmful to voters, and whether she would be making the same argument if it were Democrats who had drawn the map.
Myers asked whether the plaintiffs are simply against partisan gerrymandering. Klein said it isn’t that simple. This case is different from others because state Republicans gerrymandered because of the election results, not because of a new Census or a court order, she said. State legislators violated voters’ First Amendment Rights and used race to redraw the map, Klein argued.
Lali Madduri, another plaintiffs’ attorney, said that Black people in the 1st District were moved into the 3rd District at higher rates than white voters, regardless of their political affiliation.
Phil Strach, attorney representing state Republican legislators, said that’s false. Strach repeated Hise’s argument that the new map had nothing to do with race; it had to do with party.
And that argument is more persuasive now because of a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court ruling coming out of another North Carolina redistricting case—Rucho v. Common Cause, said David Daley, a senior fellow at FairVote, a nonpartisan election reform organization, and author of the book, Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count.
Before that ruling, judges routinely threw out partisan gerrymandered congressional maps without any regard to which political party was responsible, he said. But now, state legislators can hide the ball, use race to gerrymander districts, and then say it was all about politics, Daley said.
“The court gave lawmakers a ‘get-out-of-jail free’ card because it allows them to slice and dice voters based on race but then claim they were really doing it just on partisanship,” Daley said. “It has become much, much harder, as a consequence, to have any stopgap against maps that are designed to entrench one party over another.”
Daley said North Carolina’s new congressional map will end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as Texas’ map. Texas state officials have already appealed the three-judge panel’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The country’s highest court is also considering a redistricting case out of Louisiana that critics fear could provide an opportunity for the conservative majority on the court to dismantle the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The question is less about how this three-judge panel in North Carolina will rule and more about how the U.S. Supreme Court will decide, Daley said.
“Ultimately, the [Supreme] Court will decide how and to what extent race can be considered when it comes to drawing district lines,” he said.