The Republicans who control the North Carolina general assembly recently announced that they would introduce new maps replacing those currently used to elect North Carolina 14 representatives to the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC.
We have completed a first round of analysis on the proposed map comparing it to the recent maps used in North Carolina elections. We find it to be the more politically gerrymandered map of any of those considered. While nonpartisan maps would regularly elect 7 Republicans and 7 Democrats to represent North Carolina in Congress, the proposed map largely locks in a delegation with 11 Republicans and 3 Democrats. It removes the one district in the previous map produced by the legislature that was regularly in play; shifting between Democratic and Republican control depending on the will of the electorate. It is worth remembering that in the 2022 election when the court appointed a nonpartisan expert to draw the maps, the result was a congressional delegation with 7 Republicans and 3 Democrats.
Further Undermines Democracy
When compared to the current map, the proposed map further suppresses the ability of the electorate to change who represents them in Congress. Both the 2022 map drawn by the court’s nonpartisan expert and the collection of nonpartisan maps we created all have the property that as the political opinions shift in the party we historically have seen in North Carolina, party elected in some of the districts changes. We regularly see the number of Republican swing from 11 to 6 out of 14 depending on how the votes are distributed across the state. However, the proposed map all but locks a 11 Republican and 3 Democrat result over almost all of the historic elections we considered, even when the statewide vote fraction swings between 46% and 52% Democratic vote share. This makes the proposed map even less responsive to the changing opinions of the electorate than the current map, which was already largely ignored by the changing opinions of the electorate.
The lack of response to the changing will of the electorate is further demonstrated in the following movies. A particular voting pattern from a historical election shifted using a uniform swing to shift from 47.5% to 52.5% statewide Democratic vote fraction. As one would expect, the ensemble of nonpartisan maps shown in the blue histogram and the nonpartisan map drawn by the court’s expert both change the number of each party elected as the votes change their preferences. The proposed map, like the current map, largely ignores the change in the electorate’s opinion locking in the election results. The proposed map locks in an even more extreme Republican bias than the current map.
By Jonathan Mattingly & Greg Herschlag
