When Trump Says Jump

Republicans claimed 220 of 435 U.S. House seats in 2024, a lead so narrow that Democrats would have controlled the chamber had they won just three more races. 

One could argue that the GOP owes its majority to the North Carolina Supreme Court. 

In 2023, the court’s Republican justices allowed the General Assembly to draw new congressional and legislative districts that enabled the GOP to pick up seats. That decision reversed the court’s ruling from the year before that partisan redistricting violated the state constitution. 

Republicans netted three seats in North Carolina last year, changing the state’s congressional delegation from an even 7-7 split to a 10-4 GOP majority. 

Now Republicans are looking to pad that margin. On Monday, Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall announced that lawmakers would follow “President Donald Trump’s call” and vote on a new congressional map when lawmakers return to Raleigh next week.

They released a proposed map on Thursday afternoon.

Last month, Berger denied a rumor that he’d agreed to redraw the state’s districts in exchange for Trump’s endorsement in his looming primary against a hard-right, Trump-aligned sheriff. To date, Trump hasn’t endorsed anyone in Berger’s race. 

With or without a carrot, state Republicans seem to fear Trump’s stick. 

Lawmakers “have to do it because they don’t want to be attacked by the president,” a North Carolina GOP operative told Politico. 

The White House and its allies have openly pressured GOP lawmakers across the country to gerrymander ahead of the 2026 midterms, hoping to cushion Republicans against expected losses. Historically, the president’s party tends to lose seats in a midterm. Trump is also unpopular compared to past presidents at this point in their terms, and the economy faces potential headwinds—all of which augur poorly for Republican candidates next November. 

Republicans have argued that a Democratic U.S. House would stifle Trump’s agenda, launch investigations, and likely impeach him for a third time. 

At Trump’s behest, Texas has redrawn its map to secure five additional GOP seats. Missouri added another likely Republican seat. Ohio, Kansas, Indiana, Florida, and Louisiana might also redistrict to boost Republicans. Now it’s North Carolina’s turn. 

In late September, the high-profile conservative group Club for Growth Action launched a digital ad campaign urging North Carolina Republicans to “pass Trump’s plan for new maps.” 

North Carolina Republicans have framed their move as defensive. They pointed to California, where Democrats placed a referendum on the November ballot that, if passed, would likely add five blue seats.

“Our state won’t stand by while Democrats like [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom redraw districts to aid in their effort to obtain a majority in the U.S. House,” Hall said in announcing North Carolina’s redistricting. “We will not allow them to undermine the will of the voters and President Trump’s agenda.”

Newsom said his referendum was a direct response to Texas. In other states, Democrats have few options to keep pace in the redistricting wars. Republicans appear likely to net at least nine seats through the redistricting announced so far.  

That might be enough to maintain GOP control of the House even if there’s a backlash to Trump’s policies a year from now.  

“In case of emergency, break glass—and what you’re seeing right now is the breaking of the glass,” said Dave Daley, the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and a senior fellow at FairVote, which advocates for electoral changes like proportional representation and ranked-choice voting. 

The Target

In theory, Berger and Hall could have attempted to eliminate all four of the state’s Democratic districts. But the more aggressive they went, the greater the risk, said Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer, author of Redistricting and Gerrymandering in North Carolina: Battlelines in the Tar Heel State.  

Republicans achieved the state’s 10-4 congressional delegation last year after the map they drew in 2023 packed Democratic voters into three overwhelmingly blue districts concentrated in Durham, Raleigh, and Charlotte. They then drew 10 comfortably red districts that stretched across the state, and one swing district in the northeast corner.

In 2024, Trump won the state by 3.2 points and the swing district by 3.1. He lost the three blue districts by an average of 43 points and prevailed in the 10 red districts by an average of 16.5, according to The Assembly’s analysis of data from the elections website The Downballot.  

To maximize GOP gains, Bitzer said, lawmakers could reverse their strategy: crack instead of pack those urban areas. In other words, they could split blue cities into multiple districts to dilute Democratic voting blocs. 

The current map already does this in Guilford County. But taking that approach statewide might lead to a so-called dummymander—a gerrymander that accidentally makes safe Republican seats competitive. 

Democratic voters have to go somewhere, and they account for about half of the state’s electorate. The more districts Republicans target, the smaller their advantage would be in each. That could leave some candidates vulnerable if there is a blue wave next year. 

Nationally and in North Carolina, polling shows that Democrats have only a slight lead going into next year’s congressional elections. But that could change. 

“The great unknown is, what’s the political environment like a year from now?” Bitzer said. “If the president’s approval rating is in the low 40s and the economy is not doing anywhere near well, that’s a double whammy that might help Democrats get a little bit more push behind them.”

Republicans played it safer with the map they released on Thursday, targeting only the First District, the state’s only competitive U.S. House seat. It spans a large swath of the state’s northeast corner, stretching from a tiny piece of Granville County to Currituck County on the coast, then winding its way down to Lenoir County in the Coastal Plain. 

Encompassing the rural Black Belt, the First District currently has the largest percentage of Black residents of any district in the state, at about 40 percent. About 47 percent of its voters are registered Democrats—the second-highest percentage of any district in the state. (Because of the state’s high percentage of unaffiliated voters, registered Republicans comprise no more than 37 percent of voters in even the reddest districts.)

The district is hardly a liberal stronghold, however. Trump won it in 2024 by about three points. If the current boundaries had been in place in 2022, Republican candidates for U.S. Senate and the state Supreme Court would have won it by about six points. President Joe Biden would have won it by 1.3 points in 2020, according to a legislative analysis. 

Republicans redrew the First District in 2023 after Don Davis, a moderate Black Democrat, defeated a scandal-plagued, far-right candidate. They made the district about six points more GOP-friendly, mostly by removing Pitt County. 

Davis won reelection in 2024 anyway, besting another right-wing challenger by 6,000 votes, or about 1.7 points. He was one of only 13 Democrats across the country to win a congressional district that voted for Trump last year. 

To reasonably ensure a GOP victory in the First District, no matter the political headwinds, Republicans need to give their candidate at least a 10-point advantage, Bitzer said. 

Lawmakers also wanted to minimize disruptions to other Republican-held districts to avoid protests from incumbents. 

The map Republicans unveiled on Thursday accomplishes both goals. It affects only the First and Third Districts, which trade some counties. The First District acquires coastal counties such as Dare, Hyde, and Carteret. The Third District, represented by Republican Greg Murphy, scoops up Wayne, Greene, Lenoir, and Wilson counties. (Davis’ website says he lives in Greene County, though there’s no requirement for members of Congress to live in the districts they represent.)

In the Third District, which Trump won by 22 points in 2024, Republicans will now have about a 14-point advantage, according to a legislative analysis. The First District, meanwhile, will become a lot redder. Trump would have won it by about 12 points in 2024, rather than 3.1.    

The Law 

It’s almost certain that the new map will face litigation alleging racial gerrymandering, or redistricting that dilutes Black voting power. Indeed, there’s still an active lawsuit over the last round of redistricting. 

When Republicans redrew the First District in 2023, they maintained its Black population compared with the map in place in 2022, while still making it redder. (GOP lawmakers said they did not use race to draw the districts, though they evaluated their racial characteristics afterward.) They thought doing so would help mitigate racial gerrymandering claims. 

This time around, the First District appears likely to lose some Black voters, though the documents the General Assembly released on Thursday did not include information about the new districts’ racial compositions.   

Even so, legal challenges will face a more hostile climate than they would have a few years ago.   

The U.S. Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in a 2013 ruling that eliminated a requirement that states with histories of racial discrimination receive the federal government’s approval before changing their voting laws. 

North Carolina’s General Assembly responded with a law that, among other things, required voter ID, eliminated same-day registration, and shortened early voting. A federal court struck down the law as racially discriminatory, but lawmakers passed new laws to enact voter ID and curtail early voting. 

Then, in a 2019 case that originated in North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts could not decide whether partisan gerrymanders were unconstitutional, though state courts could. Three years later, the N.C. Supreme Court, which had a Democratic majority at the time, determined that partisan gerrymanders violated the state constitution. But after Republicans won a majority on the court in 2022, they reversed that decision. 

Racial gerrymandering has long been deemed unconstitutional. But the Republican legislative leaders say that their goals are political, which is permissible, and that they haven’t considered race when drawing the new districts. 

Federal courts have been sympathetic to that argument.  

Just last month, North Carolina Democrats lost a racial gerrymandering lawsuit that challenged state legislative districts in the northeastern part of the state. 

U.S. District Judge James Dever ruled that the General Assembly did not have to create majority-Black districts because across the state, Black representatives had been elected from districts with a Black voting-age population below 50 percent. 

Among the Black candidates Dever cited: Davis, who has been elected twice in a majority-white district.  

“It is not 1965 or 1982 in North Carolina. It is 2025,” Dever wrote. “Due in part to societal progress on race and due in part to the [Voting Rights Act], North Carolina is a very different state politically and socially than it was in 1965 or 1982.”

The Voting Rights Act could soon be weakened again. This time, the U.S. Supreme Court could curtail racial gerrymandering claims.   

On Wednesday, Louisiana asked SCOTUS to nullify a key section of the law. Louisiana asked the court to declare that states cannot consider race in redistricting and to block federal courts from requiring majority-minority districts. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice has argued that ensuring minority representation amounts to “affirmative action” and said states should be able to draw districts based on partisan interests.  

The court’s conservatives appeared likely to side with Louisiana, though it’s not clear whether they will make racial gerrymandering cases more difficult to prove or prohibit race-based redistricting altogether. It’s also unclear whether the court’s decision will come in time to affect the 2026 midterms.   

The New York Times estimates that, should SCOTUS prohibit race-based redistricting, Republicans could gain 12 seats in the South. A report from Democratic voting rights groups, which Politico obtained, put that number as high as 19, which would likely guarantee Republican control of the House.  

North Carolina Republicans believe the case’s outcome won’t directly affect their plans for the First District, which is not majority-minority and which they say hasn’t been redrawn based on race. But the decision could influence how lower courts assess any litigation that follows.    

The Pushback 

There’s not much that Democrats, including Gov. Josh Stein, can do to prevent the new congressional map from becoming law. The constitutional amendment that gave North Carolina’s governor the veto in 1997 exempted redistricting legislation, which remains the sole responsibility of the General Assembly. 

Democrats could threaten to scorch the earth in retaliation. For example, Stein could promise to veto all legislation Republicans pass, and legislative Democrats could pledge to sustain those vetoes, even if they’d otherwise support the legislation on its merits. 

But this tactic seems unlikely to succeed. It wouldn’t stop Republicans from redistricting, and with Republicans just one vote shy of a veto-proof supermajority in the state House, Democrats probably couldn’t make good on the threat.

Instead, Democrats have issued statements arguing that Republicans “are abusing their power” (in Stein’s words), “are hellbent on consolidating as much power as they can” (House Minority Leader Robert Reives), and are “rigging elections instead of doing their jobs” (Senate Minority Leader Sydney Batch).  

Polling indicates that partisan redistricting is unpopular. 

A September poll from the GOP-aligned firm Opinion Diagnostics found that 76 percent of North Carolina voters believe that partisan gerrymandering should be illegal, 82 percent believe Black voters should be protected from redistricting discrimination, and 70 percent believe redistricting should be handled by an independent commission rather than lawmakers. 

A partner at Opinion Diagnostics, political consultant Patrick Sebastian, has been linked to efforts to oust Berger. But other surveys have produced similar results.    

That doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will suffer a backlash, Bitzer said. Voters oppose gerrymandering in theory, but it’s not always a priority. And some voters think differently when they realize that their preferred party benefits.  

“That’s just the partisan default,” Bitzer said.

For gerrymandering opponents, the ballgame arrives in 2028, when control of the state Supreme Court is up for grabs ahead of legislative and congressional redistricting in 2030. 

“North Carolina’s democracy, in many ways, depends upon a handful of down-ballot judicial elections down the road,” said Daley, the gerrymandering author. “It’s a long-term mess, and North Carolina is ground zero right now.”