RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina evenly split its U.S. House delegation in Tuesday’s midterm election, with Democrats and Republicans each winning seven of the 14 seats up for grabs.
But with Republicans flipping control of the state Supreme Court on Tuesday, it’s highly likely state lawmakers will be allowed to redraw the maps next year in a way that more aggressively favors Republican candidates for elections throughout the rest of the decade.
“The Republican Party has made a significant investment in judicial elections the last two cycles, and it has paid off,” said Bob Orr, a former Republican justice on the N.C. Supreme Court who has become a critic of his former party in the last few years. “For better or worse, whether you like it or not, they have put together a strong slate of candidates, with a lot of funding, and they have won.”
Republicans swept every statewide judicial race in both 2020 and 2022. Those wins gave the N.C. Court of Appeals a stronger GOP majority and flipped the Supreme Court from a 6-1 Democratic majority in 2019 to, starting in 2023, a 5-2 Republican majority.
On Tuesday Trey Allen defeated incumbent Justice Sam Ervin IV for one seat, and Richard Dietz defeated Lucy Inman in the other seat up for grabs.
Elections for the court are staggered, and all three Republicans currently on the court won in 2020. Since justices serve eight-year terms, that means that unless two or more Republican justices leave the court early, Democrats won’t have another chance to take back control until the 2028 elections.
Republican politicians have not tried hiding their anger at the Democrats on the court for handing them a number of high-profile losses in political cases recently. After the election they reveled in taking back control — and the implications that will have for elections throughout most of the rest of the decade.
“There will be two Presidential, two U.S Senate, two governors and three General Assembly elections before @NCDemParty has even a chance to flip the soon to be @NCGOP state Supreme Court,” tweeted Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the state Republican Party, on Wednesday.
Earlier this year, the Democratic majority on the N.C. Supreme Court struck down Republicans’ original congressional map — which would’ve likely given the GOP a 10-4 advantage in congressional races here even with less than 50% of the statewide vote — as unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering.
The court replaced it with a map drawn by a group of outside experts that included Orr. Heading into Tuesday night it appeared likely to lead to an 8-6 advantage for Republicans. But in the end, Democrat Wiley Nickel pulled off an upset against Republican Bo Hines in a toss-up district in the Raleigh suburbs.
The eventual 7-7 split in U.S. House races came as Republican Ted Budd won the state’s U.S. Senate race with approximately 50.7% of the vote.
Republican leaders view that as unacceptable.
“When it comes to congressional maps, 7-7 does not reflect the will of the voters of North Carolina,” N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore told reporters the morning after the election.
“Republicans have openly admitted their plan to gerrymander future maps without a check from a conservative court,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Bobbie Richardson said in a written statement. “That’s bad for North Carolina and we will hold them accountable for stripping voters of their voice in our democracy.”
Orr and Michael Bitzer said it’s likely that the new GOP majority on the court will allow lawmakers to draw a map giving their party a 10-4 advantage in future elections for U.S. House seats — similar to the map that the Democratic-led N.C. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional this year.
“I think 10-4 is probably a baseline,”said Bitzer, a Catawba College political scientist who specializes in state politics and recently wrote a book on the history of gerrymandering in North Carolina.
“I think (Republican legislators) may try for 11-3 if they can figure something out,” he added. “The way that North Carolina voters have sorted themselves, I could see the possibility of either 11-3 or 10-4.”
Based on the map GOP lawmakers originally drew for 2022, the Democrats who won seats in Congress on Tuesday — but who may see their districts redrawn to elect Republicans in 2024 — include Nickel, Charlotte’s Jeff Jackson, Greensboro’s Kathy Manning and potentially also Don Davis, who won the state’s historically Black northeastern district Tuesday.
Democrats don’t have the numbers in the legislature to block redistricting maps, and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper isn’t allowed to veto them. The main question for Democrats, once Republicans pass the new maps, is whether a lawsuit can succeed in striking them down.
In federal court, challengers can only make racial gerrymandering claims, which can be difficult to prove. Since 2019, when North Carolina Republicans won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case on the topic, federal courts aren’t allowed to hear lawsuits alleging partisan gerrymandering. That’s now up to state courts to sort out — at least for now. Another case out of North Carolina, evaluating the “independent state legislature” theory that could limit state courts’ power, is pending before the nation’s highest court.
A state court decision on partisan gerrymandering is what happened earlier this year, when the Democratic majority on the court tossed the 10-4 map Republicans drew. Every Republican on the court dissented against that ruling, saying it wasn’t a question courts should rule on at all.
If even just one of the two new Republicans on the courts takes the same approach, then the court is likely to rule against any challenge to the new maps.
In recent years, the court has frequently voted along pure party lines in political cases. Orr said there’s no reason to think that will change in the near future. While the current Democratic majority on the Supreme Court has been aggressive in striking down laws as unconstitutional, the Republican justices — Paul Newby, Tamara Barringer and Phil Berger Jr., the son of the N.C. Senate leader — have all dissented in all of the most high-profile cases.
“Certainly Chief Justice Newby’s approach has been to be hands-off with the General Assembly,” Orr said. “And then Justice Barringer is a former state senator. And Justice Berger’s father is his father.”
With two new Republican justices joining the court, it’s impossible to know exactly how they’ll vote in lawsuits that don’t even exist yet. But if one or both of Dietz and Allen vote the party line on redistricting, then whatever maps the legislature draws next year could be used in the 2024, 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections.
“Whatever maps they draw next year will likely be what we get for the rest of the decade,” Orr said.
Bitzer, however, cautioned that a map that looks like a 10-4 or 11-3 split in 2022 might not be the same in 2028 or 2030. He noted that the true political battlegrounds are no longer rural areas, like they were a decade or two ago. Now it’s the suburbs, which used to be reliably Republican but are shifting left as more people move to the metro areas.
“Now, the question long-term is, ‘Where is the growth in this state?” he said. “And it is not in rural North Carolina, unless something dramatic happens.”
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