What will it take to take back North Carolina? A lot, probably | Opinion
Republicans are digging North Carolina into a hole. From neglecting public schools to restricting bodily autonomy and targeting the LGBTQ+ community, this quintessentially purple state is looking redder than ever. The response from many progressives has been anger and, in some cases, despair.
But if democracy promises one thing, it’s that another election cycle is always just around the corner, giving voters a chance to turn things around. 2024 is coming, many Democrats have warned. We’ll vote them out then. It’s both a rallying cry and a reassurance for those distressed by the direction the state is heading.
Taking back North Carolina will not be that simple, nor that short-term. And with new electoral maps on the horizon and a firmly Republican judiciary, will it even be possible anytime soon?
New maps, new challenges
The next time North Carolinians elects a new legislature, it’s unlikely to be a fair fight.
Last month, the state Supreme Court’s new Republican majority reversed the previous court’s decision in Harper v. Hall, a 2022 ruling that declared partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional. Now, Republican lawmakers will have the chance to redraw legislative and congressional maps with few guardrails in place to guarantee they do so fairly.
Those maps haven’t been drawn yet, but it’s likely they’ll favor the General Assembly’s current GOP supermajority. The original maps that lawmakers drew in 2021 — before the court ordered them redrawn — were skewed to give Republicans a majority and possibly even a supermajority in the legislature. North Carolina should expect the same again.
“I feel fairly comfortable saying that maps certainly aren’t going to look any better for Democrats than the ones that we currently have,” Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper told me. “The odds are very good, I feel, that the Republicans will keep the supermajority.”
That, of course, makes it much more difficult for democracy to do its thing. Gerrymanders are designed to make maps less responsive to voters, said Jonathan Mattingly, a Duke University math professor who has served as an expert witness in several redistricting lawsuits over the past decade.
“The maps that the legislature has put forward in the past lock in certain outcomes so dramatically that, over the normal changes in public opinion that one sees in the state of North Carolina, very few people lost their seats,” Mattingly told me.
Gunther Peck, a historian from Duke University, said gerrymandering presents a “strategic dilemma and deeply ethical problem.” Peck was a plaintiff in the gerrymandering lawsuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause.
At some point, Peck said, there may be a wave election that breaks through that gerrymander, though the possibility of that happening in the next election cycle is rather remote. History tells us that the party in power tends to overreach with policies that are deeply unpopular, in some cases enough to repel moderate and independent voters who otherwise might support them. We see the beginnings of that in North Carolina already, with new abortion restrictions that run contrary to public opinion and may ultimately backfire on Republicans in the long run.
“It’s like building a dam against water that flows. It’s gonna break at some point,” Peck explained.
The Supreme Court dilemma
Throughout the past decade, judicial oversight at both the state and federal level has been North Carolina’s last line of defense against egregious partisan gerrymandering. But so long as the state Supreme Court has a Republican majority, the courts are likely to be more of a green light than a stop sign.
Of course, the courts aren’t the only way to prevent gerrymandering. Lawmakers could, at any time, pass reform legislation to create an independent redistricting commission and take map-making out of politicians’ hands entirely. That doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.
Democrats will have to start winning statewide judicial elections, which were swept by Republicans in the past two election cycles. None of the five Republican justices currently on the court will be up for re-election until 2028, when Justices Paul Newby, Phil Berger, Jr. and Tamara Barringer will reach the end of their terms. Justices Trey Allen and Richard Dietz, who were elected in 2022, will not be on the ballot again until 2030.
Before they’ll get a shot at retaking the majority, Democrats will have to defend both seats they currently hold. Just last week, Michael Morgan, one of the court’s two remaining Democratic justices, announced that he would not seek re-election in 2024. That’s not a seat Democrats can afford to lose. Nor can they afford to lose the seat held by Justice Anita Earls, who will be up for re-election in 2026.
“Democrats better make sure they don’t go farther in the hole on the state Supreme Court if they’re going to have a chance to take it back in 2028,” said Cooper.
‘It’s about putting up a fight’
So what do progressives — or anyone else troubled by the direction the state is taking — do in the meantime?
It’s not a stretch to say the future of North Carolina hinges upon the Democratic Party’s ability to succeed, especially at the state level. That puts a lot of pressure on leaders like new state party chair Anderson Clayton, who promised to radically change the party’s strategy when she was elected earlier this year.
Clayton acknowledges that pressure, and she has enough hope to go around.
“Giving up won’t ever be my mentality. It’s about putting up a fight,” Clayton told me. “And we’ve always been the party of resistance. We’ve got to resist and keep resisting and keep fighting.”
Many of the Democratic Party’s losses in North Carolina have stemmed from the party’s failure to start building a foundation years ago, to see organizing as a year-round activity instead of a tool to be employed during election cycles. In 2022, North Carolina Democrats left more than 40 state legislative races uncontested, greatly underinvesting in rural counties where coalition-building is critical. Clayton doesn’t the party to repeat that mistake in 2024.
“Yes, 2024 matters. But the wins in 2028 are gonna matter just as much, and the seeds that [Democrats] are planting now will bloom in 2028, or they’ll die,” Cooper said.
North Carolina is probably not one election away from changing. After all, it took a lot more than that to get us here. And it’s easy to let such a bleak outlook lure us into cynicism and despair. But politics is a long game, and the surest way to lose is to stop playing altogether.
“What else do we do? Do we lay down and play dead? Like, is that it?” Clayton said. “We don’t have another option than to keep going.”
This story was originally published May 23, 2023 at 5:00 AM with the headline "What will it take to take back North Carolina? A lot, probably | Opinion."
