TarHeelymander

The next installment of the Most Important Election of Our Lifetime is 18 months away, but the maneuvering and back-channel fuckery is well underway, if it ever ceased. 

I’ll try to keep this brief, because y’all come to this space for political yammering the way guys go to strip clubs for the cheeseburgers. Here in North Carolina, late last week the state Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling against partisan gerrymandered districts. That decision is expected to green-light the Republican-heavy legislature to re-draw districts that will give the GOP more seats in the House of Representatives in the 2024 elections. 

North Carolina is one of a handful of states building conservative legislative majorities disproportionate to actual voter trends, along with Wisconsin and Ohio, and to a lesser degree Georgia, Texas and Florida. The current redistricting kerfuffle began following the 2020 census, when NC’s population increased to the point where the state merited one more seat in the House, a 14th rep. The Republican-led legislature drew up maps that would have all but cemented 10 or 11 GOP seats. Dems and voting rights groups challenged. 

The very same state Supreme Court ruled in Feb. 2022 that state courts may reject district maps that give an unfair advantage to one party in a narrowly divided state and re-affirmed that decision late last year. 

A quick clarification – not the very same state Supreme Court. The previous court was split 4-3 with Democrats in the majority. Elections last November flipped the breakdown to a 5-2 Republican majority, and that was the margin last week. The chief justice wrote that the previous court overstepped its authority to find that the state constitution prohibited partisan gerrymandering, and that voting districts should come under the purview of the legislature. 

“There is no judicially manageable standard by which to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims,” wrote chief justice Paul Newby, which is some judicial jiu-jitsu that all but eliminates oversight and redress by anyone outside the gerrymandered legislature. 

North Carolina ought to be a purple state. It’s not. Some numbers: in the 2020 Congressional elections, 2.66 million people voted for Democrat candidates for the House of Representatives, and 2.63 million people voted for Republican candidates. Results seated eight Republican reps and five Democrat reps because of the way district maps were drawn (the results were 10 Rs and 3 Ds in 2018, when vote totals were 50.4 percent Republican and 48.3 percent Democrat). 

When the courts rejected the Republicans’ proposed maps after the 2020 census and used maps drawn up by judges and a more impartial election panel in the 2022 mid-terms, 1.94 million people voted for GOP candidates, 1.76 million voted for Democrats, and the state delegation to Washington D.C., was split 7-7. 

That ain’t happening again, largely because of the Supreme Court ruling and makeup of the state legislature. As of April 2023, Republicans control the NC House 72-48 and the state Senate 30-20, veto-proof margins against a Democrat governor or a rubber stamp for a GOP governor, again because of the state voting district map. The state GOP will get its 10 or 11 House seats. 

If you’re still reading and your eyes haven’t glazed over, you might point out that this is nothing new and that both parties are guilty of gerrymandering. Maryland, New York, Illinois and Oregon are current examples of Democrat district tinkering. Politics and all that. But on the Republican side of the ledger, I’d argue that the current setup is less about convincing voters that their positions are attractive and more about preserving power and limiting access to the “wrong” sort of voter, through legislative monkeying backed by a judiciary increasingly stacked with Dollar Tree Scalias. 

North Carolina is at the forefront of these efforts. Judges tossed a state voter ID measure in 2016 because they found that it “would target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” A Republican strategist named Thomas Hofeller, a California native who eventually settled in Raleigh, was one of the modern gurus of gerrymandering, working in North Carolina and multiple states to create bulletproof conservative districts. His estranged daughter obtained many of his files following his death in 2018 and released them to various media outlets. In a case that originated in NC, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last term on so-called “independent state legislature theory,” a movement that would prohibit state judges and other officials from changing the rules on Federal elections. It’s unclear whether the court will rule on the case, now that the state Supreme Court has reversed its previous ruling. And in a tandem decision late last week, the state court also threw out a prior ruling that restored voting rights to convicted felons no longer in prison but who have not completed their parole or probation, a move that observers say likely will remove tens of thousands from voter rolls. 

The old saying goes that people get the government they deserve. My concern is that the slow march toward artificially constructed majorities will lessen the impact of overall vote counts, and we’ll end up with government we don’t.