Will white people vote for Black politicians? That question looms over NC redistricting
North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature is wrapping up redistricting. This is a once-in-a-decade process — unless courts step in and order it to be redone — in which politicians use the latest census data to draw the state’s political districts.
Will the state’s major cities get broken up into pieces, with their residents spread out among various rural-leaning districts? That’s what we saw last week in several early draft versions of congressional maps drawn by GOP leaders in the state Senate.
The GOP-drawn maps that were posted online would have led to Republicans winning either 10 or 11 of the state’s 14 U.S. House seats in 2020, despite just under 50% of the combined statewide vote that year going to Republican candidates, according to analysis by Dave’s Redistricting App.
But while Democrats are worried about the potential that Republicans might pass a map with a lopsided partisan split, there’s a separate-but-related concern that could be the basis for lawsuits against the maps.
And that’s race.
Before the map-drawing began this year, GOP leaders passed several rules to govern the process. Democrats quibbled with some, agreed with others and strongly contested one: The decision to ban lawmakers from using racial data when drawing the maps.
They worry it might end up leaving North Carolina with an all-white congressional delegation even though nearly 4 in 10 North Carolinians are non-white. That requires the assumption, standard in U.S. politics for decades, that states need to draw majority-minority districts. Democrats questioned how Republicans plan to do that if they don’t use any racial data.
Republicans, however, say the era of “racially polarized voting” is over. There’s no reason to consider race in the maps, they say, if a candidate’s race doesn’t matter to voters.
Consider Democrats skeptical.
“It’s certainly not as bad as it was in 1965,” Raleigh Sen. Dan Blue said in an interview. “But that’s not to say it doesn’t exist.”
Blue is the top-ranking Democratic state senator and, 30 years ago, served as North Carolina’s first and so far only Black speaker of the house. He said some parts of the state might have moved beyond racial polarization, especially the more urban areas, but certainly not the entire state.
Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College who recently published a book on redistricting in North Carolina, agreed.
“I’m not sure we are completely past racially polarized voting in this state,” he said.
What does racial polarization mean?
It’s a well-established fact of modern American politics that Black people overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and a majority of white people vote for Republicans. But that’s not what “racially polarized voting” means.
It’s a specific legal term that essentially asks whether white people are largely unwilling to vote for Black politicians — and therefore if states need to purposefully draw majority-minority districts to more or less guarantee a certain number of seats for Black politicians. Although it applies nationally, the idea actually stems from a 1980s North Carolina gerrymandering court case called Thornburg v. Gingles.
Following that court ruling, North Carolina has had at least one Black representative since 1992, when Eva Clayton won a version of the rural, majority-minority district in northeastern North Carolina that Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield now represents. Before her, it had been nearly 100 years of all-white congressional delegations for North Carolina.
Republicans say there’s simply no proof that Black candidates need a majority-minority district to get elected anymore.
“No evidence has been presented to the committee of racially polarized voting,” said Republican Sen. Ralph Hise of Spruce Pine, a chairman of the Senate’s redistricting committee, at a recent meeting.
Democrats say the reason there’s no evidence is because legislative leaders have chosen not to look for any.
Several Democrats on the Senate’s redistricting committee asked during a meeting in early October to conduct a statewide study of the issue. Hise shot that idea down, and the committee started its race-blind map-making the next day.
“They’re just sticking their heads in the sand,” Blue later told The News & Observer in an interview.
Why it matters
North Carolina has two Black representatives in Congress — Butterfield and his fellow Democrat, Rep. Alma Adams of Charlotte. Both represent majority-minority districts, although neither district is specifically majority-Black.
But can they win reelection in a majority-white district, if that’s what Republicans draw for them?
Questions like that already have voting rights attorneys publicly bringing up the threat of lawsuits.
Earlier this year, in a speech to the UNC School of Law, former Attorney General Eric Holder all but promised North Carolina would be sued again this year once lawmakers pass the maps. Holder now leads a Democratic group that funds anti-gerrymandering lawsuits, including two successful ones in North Carolina in 2019.
“North Carolina really is, in some ways, ground zero for partisan and racial gerrymandering,” Holder said, the N&O reported at the time. “And the only way, I think, to crack that which is happening in North Carolina is through the courts.”
That was before the map-drawing even started. After it did start, Durham voting rights attorney Allison Riggs of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice spent some of the early days watching Hise draw a map. She wrote on Twitter that an early version of his map would get rid of Butterfield and possibly Adams, creating an 11-3 or even 12-2 split in favor of Republicans.
“There’s a pretty obvious disregard for taxpayer dollars,” she said in a later interview, referencing the likelihood that North Carolina will be sued for racial gerrymandering if lawmakers don’t try to protect Black voters and politicians. “But maybe they will reconsider. Hope springs eternal.”
Later, after that map was finished and lawmakers made the data for its districts available, an analysis of the map showed Butterfield’s district would shift from 48% to 61% white and Adams’ district would shift from 43% to 65% white. Both new versions of the districts would be competitive but expected to elect Republicans, according to the analysis from Dave’s Redistricting App.
The three Democratic seats in that map would all be majority-white. So would North Carolina go back to an all-white congressional delegation? Or could a Black candidate win in one of those majority-white yet Democratic districts?
Republican lawmakers say it’s not just them claiming there’s no proof of racial polarization — but also Democrats themselves.
Republican Rep. Destin Hall of Lenoir, who chairs the N.C. House redistricting committee, said that in a recent court case it was the liberal challengers suing the legislature who said that there was no evidence of “legally significant” racial polarization in North Carolina.
Plus, The Wall Street Journal reported in September that some national Democrats want to split up districts that had been majority-Black — the same thing Democrats here are fearful of. The national Democrats quoted in that story said it might help “make the party more competitive in some states” by spreading Black voters out.
What did I miss?
To GOP leaders in North Carolina, recent history has shown they might actually be more likely to get in trouble in court for disenfranchising Black people when they use racial data. So the decision not to use that data makes sense from a litigation point of view.
Republicans used racial data to draw new maps in 2011. Those maps were later ruled unconstitutional for racial gerrymandering. They then redrew the maps in 2017, that time without racial data. And while those maps were also later ruled unconstitutional, it was for partisan reasons and not racial ones. Lawmakers were then forced to redraw the maps again in 2019, and again chose not to use racial data. Those maps were upheld and used in 2020.
“We’ve drawn maps in both 2017 and 2019 not using racial data at all, and those maps have been approved,” Hall said.
And in 2020, Democrats flipped two seats in the congressional delegation under those new, race-blind maps.
But what about racial polarization in those districts?
In both districts, which are majority-white, the Democratic primary featured both white and Black candidates, and voters nominated white women.
However, there’s also recent evidence of Black candidates winning in majority white areas.
In 2018, all seven of North Carolina’s largest counties elected Black sheriffs for the first time ever, The News & Observer reported. Four of those counties are majority-minority, but three are majority-white — including Buncombe County, home to Asheville, which is 83% white yet elected a Black man, Quentin Miller, as sheriff with 62% of the vote in a race that pitted him against two white candidates.
So with anecdotal evidence pointing in both directions, Democrats say they want a study into whether — and if so where — racially polarized voting still exists in North Carolina. Republicans have said they don’t plan on doing that study but will consider any evidence that people want to bring to them.
How can I be heard?
GOP leaders have scheduled public hearings for Monday and Tuesday, at which people can address the issue of racial polarization or any other topic related to redistricting.
Democratic Rep. Zack Hawkins, a Black Democrat from Durham, asked earlier this month for more time. As it stands, the maps need to be done soon. Candidate filing for the 2022 elections is in early December, and lawmakers want to have the maps done at least a month in advance.
But the December deadline only exists since the 2022 primaries are scheduled for March. And there’s nothing stopping lawmakers from moving the primary back by a couple months, giving the public more time to weigh in on the maps. Hawkins asked for exactly that.
Hall said it won’t happen, and people will just have to work with the fast-moving timeline, since there is no appetite among his fellow Republicans for changing the deadlines.
“I certainly understand the gentleman’s argument, that perhaps it gives us more time to get it done,” Hall said. “But at the same time, same token, you’ve got folks who have been running, maybe for statewide offices, or who plan to run at given times.”
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published October 25, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Will white people vote for Black politicians? That question looms over NC redistricting."
