The national debate playing out on mid-decade redistricting has been fascinating to watch unfold considering the bad-faith actors on the left who are kicking up the biggest fuss.
Among the worst offenders on the issue of gerrymandering over the years have been states like Illinois, Maryland, California and New York. Yet it is the Democratic governors of those blue states who yelled loudest after Texas Republicans announced in July they were about to commence a redrawing of their maps.
As we’ve talked about before, Texas received a letter in early July from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division regarding four congressional districts they said “were vestiges of an unconstitutional racially based gerrymandering past, which must be abandoned, and must now be corrected.”
Soon after, President Donald Trump said he’d like to see Texas redraw its maps, which ushered forth action by the state legislature.
This prompted a vow of payback from California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is leading the campaign for Proposition 50, which will be on the ballot in a November special election and would allow the state to temporarily suspend its purported independent redistricting commission in favor of wildly partisan maps.
As several other states jumped into the fray, including Illinois, Maryland, Missouri and Florida, North Carolina — which went for Trump three times — initially stayed out of it.
But in late September, Newsom poked the bear, pouncing on an unconfirmed story pushed by a leftist N.C. advocacy group and amplified by N.C. media outlets that alleged state Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Eden) had promised Trump he would redraw the congressional map in exchange for a primary endorsement.
“Donald Trump is swapping endorsements in exchange for rigging elections,” Newsom posted on X.
In response, Berger wrote, “I’ve been watching what’s going on in California with Gavin Newsom trying to steal the Republican majority in Congress. We have drawn four Congressional maps in the last six years in redistricting fights with Democrats because of their sue-until-blue strategy.
“If we have to draw one more map this year, we will. That said, I’ve never spoken to President Trump about this or an endorsement.”
Two weeks later, both Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall (R-Granite Falls) announced they’d be ready to vote on a new map soon, one that would potentially add another GOP seat in the 2026 midterms.
The map, which doesn’t need Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s signature, passed both the House and Senate last week.
Twelve of N.C.’s 14 congressional districts were untouched. The seat GOP legislative leaders targeted for a possible pickup was the 1st Congressional District, currently held by Democratic Rep. Don Davis.
Davis narrowly held onto the seat in the 2024 elections against Trump-backed GOP nominee Laurie Buckhout, who lost by 6,000 votes in a race that saw Libertarian candidate Tom Bailey get 10,000 votes.
In the aftermath of the map’s passage, Berger shared that the actions they took were about more than Newsom’s redistricting scheme; it was a response to decades of Democrats redrawing maps to redistrict Republicans out of Congress — including here in N.C.
Lawsuits undoubtedly will follow. But the race-based arguments Democrats typically put forward in their lawsuits may soon hold little to no legal weight, depending on the outcome of the Louisiana v. Callais case currently being heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case centers around what Louisiana says is a conflict between Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
Whatever the case may be, it will be interesting to see how the inevitable lawsuits on the N.C. map play out in the courts. As Berger noted, it wouldn’t be the House and Senate GOP’s first rodeo on the issue, and with the census counts coming in five years, it certainly won’t be the last.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
