How democracy dies, right here in America

The Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature recently approved a bill redrawing the state’s 14 congressional districts. The map makes it quite likely that, in a state almost equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, the GOP will win 10 or 11 House seats in 2024.

“There is no doubt the congressional map that’s before us today has a lean toward Republicans,” Destin Hall, the GOP chair of the redistricting commission acknowledged. Former Attorney General Eric Holder characterized the map a bit differently: North Carolina, he declared, “is now one of the most egregiously gerrymandered states in the country.”

The North Carolina gerrymander, moreover, is a born-in-the-USA example of how the will of the majority has been thwarted — not with a bang, but a whimper.

Gerrymandering — “packing” or “cracking” election districts to predetermine the outcomes in favor of the candidates of one political party — is as old as the United States. The practice is named for Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Democratic-Republican politician, and Vice President of the United States under James Madison. As governor of Massachusetts in 1812, Gerry signed the bill creating a misshapen district in Essex County to dilute the impact of Federalist votes. “It looks like a salamander,” said one Federalist. “No,” said another, “it’s a Gerry-mander.” A drawing of the district appeared in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812.

Used by dominant political parties for two centuries, gerrymandering has become a coordinated GOP electoral strategy. In 2009 to 2010, ahead of the midterm elections, the Republican State Leadership Committee launched Project REDMAP. This initiative, financed by wealthy donors, secured and sustained majorities in state legislatures, which redraw maps of the election districts of their own members and members of the House of Representatives every ten years.

REDMAP has been wildly successful. In the “red wave” 2010 landslide, powered by the Tea Party and opposition to Obamacare, the Democrats lost 702 seats in state legislatures throughout the country. Before 2010, Democrats controlled 60 state legislative chambers, Republicans 36. After 2010, the numbers were 40 for the Democrats, 55 for the GOP, with two tied. Republican control of both houses in a single state — and therefore over the redistricting process — increased from 14 to 25.

Hypercharged by advances in mapping technology and voter identification, REDMAP gerrymandering made these gains permanent. After maps were redrawn in 2011, Republicans controlled 47 of the 70 congressional districts deemed “competitive.” In 2012, President Obama carried Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — but each of these states sent a disproportionately Republican delegation to Congress.

In the 2010 election, Republican representation in the North Carolina’s House of Representatives increased from 52 to 67 members and in the state Senate from 19 to 31. To preserve these majorities, lawsuits alleged, the legislature drew maps diluting the overall impact of predominantly Democratic Black voters by packing them into a small number of districts.

In 2019, in a case involving North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering “presents political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” Writing for a 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that the practice leads to results that “reasonably seem unjust,” but maintained that there are “no legal standards” to limit state redistricting policies.

“We are in Mad Max territory now,” proclaimed Justin Levitt, an elections specialist at Loyola Law School.

By 2022, Republicans controlled the redistricting process for 187 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats in 75.  State courts provided the only possible recourse for challenges to partisan gerrymandering.

In 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, with all the Democratic justices in the majority and Republicans in dissent, rejected the legislature’s post-2020 census redistricting plan as a violation of the state constitution. The court ordered that maps be redrawn to “give the voters of all political parties substantially equal opportunity to translate votes into seats.” With those maps, North Carolinians sent 7 Democrats and 7 Republicans to Congress.

A year later, with five Republican justices now on the bench, the state Supreme Court reversed itself. In an echo of Roberts’s opinion, Chief Justice Paul Newby maintained that North Carolina’s constitution did not provide a “judicially manageable standard by which to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering. Courts are not intended to meddle in policy matters.”

In dissent, Justice Anita Earls wrote that the decision tells citizens the courts “cannot protect their basic human rights to self-governance and self-determination.” The court’s efforts to “downplay the practice,” Earls added, “do not erase its consequences and the public will not be gaslighted.”

In addition to providing the Republicans 10 or 11 seats in the House of Representatives — enough, perhaps, to maintain majority control of that body in 2024 — the redistricting maps approved in October also protect and may even extend the lopsided majorities of the GOP in both houses of the state legislature.

Few options remain for opponents of partisan gerrymandering. This week, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, announced a legal challenge, but convincing the Supreme Court’s conservative justices that the state’s redistricting plan constitutes unconstitutional racial (as well as partisan) gerrymandering may be difficult. According to Republican state senator Ralph Hise, “the maps were drawn to protect the state from lawsuits alleging racial gerrymandering”.

In the meantime, and for the foreseeable future, legislatures in North Carolina and around the country have locked in a gerrymandered tyranny of the minority, with enormous implications for whether laws, including restrictions on abortion and gun control, pass or fail, in both state capitals and in Congress.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”