They Called Their Shot: The Babe Ruth Era of Redistricting Is Here

Last week, the North Carolina House of Representatives gave final approval for yet another congressional redistricting plan, one that will almost inevitably end up in court.

Here are six takeaways from the new map:

1. The vast majority of our congressional map will remain unchanged. North Carolina has 14 congressional districts. Under the new map, the geography of 12 of them will be identical to what it was before. The changes are in the 1st and 3rd Districts—covering where about 14 percent of the state’s population lives. 

Under the new map, the 3rd District becomes a little less Republican, but the politically consequential change is shifting the 1st District safely into the GOP column. This laser-like focus on a single district for partisan gain is exactly what the Republican members of the General Assembly said they would do. As House Speaker Destin Hall put it: “President Trump earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican congressional seat.” 

Like Babe Ruth calling his shot, GOP leaders told us what they would do and then did it.

2. The real target of this new map is Don Davis. Under the previous map, the 1st District was the only toss-up not just in North Carolina, but in the entire Southeast. Under the new map, legislators moved about 71,000 people who voted for Trump in 2024 from the 1st, which is currently represented by Democrat Don Davis, to the 3rd, which is represented by Republican Greg Murphy, and replaced them with about 108,000 Trump votes from the 3rd. The number of Harris voters in each, however, remained about the same. 

This sort of shifting is possible because congressional districts have to equalize total population, not voters or votes, and some counties have higher turnout than others.

3. To add insult to injury, Davis himself was drawn out of the 1st District and into the 3rd. Davis, a former mayor of Snow Hill, lives in Greene County, which was shifted from the 1st to the 3rd District under the new map. Living outside of his district doesn’t preclude Davis from running in the 1st; unlike members of the General Assembly, members of Congress do not have to live in the district they represent. But it does present him with an additional choice. 

Davis can run in the 1st District, which contains more of the voters he has previously represented, or switch to the 3rd, where he resides. Research on congressional elections doesn’t provide a clear best path forward. Incumbency helps election prospects, which might suggest a run in the 1st, but living in and having local roots in your district can help as well. 

4. The map reduces the Black population of the 1st District. As previously drawn, about 40 percent of the voting age population in the 1st District identified as Black, making it the North Carolina district with the largest share of the Black population. Under the new map, that proportion dropped to about 32 percent. 

About 76,000 Black voters are shifted from the 1st to the 3rd, and about 32,000 Black voters are shifted from the 3rd to the 1st. Critics will argue that these alterations deny Black voters the ability to pick a candidate of their choice. Legislative leaders say they drew the map without consulting racial data.

5. Saying the quiet part out loud is strategic, not accidental. State Sen. Ralph Hise, the primary architect of the new map, began his speech in support of it by saying, “The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: Draw a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation.” 

While some may be surprised that he was so explicit, this unequivocal appeal to partisanship was likely a strategic decision guided by the inevitable court fight to come.

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In 2023, the North Carolina Supreme Court similarly determined that claims of partisan gerrymandering are political questions and thus not appropriate for the court. 

So it’s unlikely Democrats could successfully challenge the map on the grounds that it’s a partisan gerrymander. Hise likely feels safe in making the aims clear—just as Senate GOP leader Phil Berger and Hall did when announcing that the redraw was coming.

Critics of the new map could argue that it unfairly and illegally dilutes the votes of Black residents. But GOP mapmakers have said race wasn’t part of their considerations. And they may feel emboldened by a recent federal court decision over Senate districts in the same part of the state that found no evidence of racial vote dilution, nor the legal conditions for it, known as the Gingles test. 

6. This map is unlikely to backfire on Republicans. There’s been some speculation that this map might create a so-called dummymander—a gerrymander that results in the party that drew it losing. 

The logic of a dummymander is that electoral assumptions about various groups’ voting behavior shift in such a way that the minority party is able to flip or hold a seat unexpectedly, as Robin Hayes did in North Carolina’s 8th District in 2002. But a mid-decade redistricting, such as this one, doesn’t allow much time for change before North Carolina redraws its maps again, which will happen by 2031 at the latest. 

In addition, voting patterns have become more predictable and calcified since the term was coined in 2005, making the kind of partisan change required for a dummymander less and less likely. To wit, no Democrat in Congress currently represents a district that leans as heavily toward the Republican Party as North Carolina’s redrawn 1st District.