Morning Digest: North Carolina GOP passes new legislative gerrymanders—and some Democrats join them
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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar. LeadMorning Digest: North Carolina GOP passes new legislative gerrymanders—and some Democrats join them
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar. Leading Off ● NC Redistricting: On Tuesday, North Carolina's Republican-led legislature passed new state House and Senate districts after a state court struck them down earlier this month for discriminating against Democrats in violation of the state constitution. Shown here, the new Senate map redraws the 21 invalidated districts out of 50 total. However, as Daily Kos Elections' Stephen Wolf has demonstrated in an extensive post, many of the districts in both chambers still bear the signs of partisan gerrymandering in violation of the court's order. Campaign Action Making matters worse, most Senate Democrats voted in favor of the GOP's new stealth gerrymanders of the upper chamber on Monday, undermining the cause for fair maps and giving the GOP political ammunition by praising the process itself. However, Senate Democrats unanimously voted against the new House map on Tuesday, and House Democrats almost uniformly held firm against both maps. Furthermore, the court retains final say over whether to approve the new districts, and it has already appointed a nonpartisan expert to draw the lines for it if necessary. The court's criteria mandated that any new maps make a «reasonable» effort to draw lines that «improve the compactness» of the legislature's districts and split fewer precincts compared to the illegal versions. Mapmakers were allowed but not required to consider preserving the integrity of municipalities and avoid pairing incumbents in the same districts. Critically, they were prohibited from preserving the cores of the illegal districts or relying on any partisan or election data, but Republicans likely found covert ways around that, given some of the choices behind their maps. To assess the impact of any new lines compared to the old districts, we have calculated the 2004-2016 statewide elections results for every district. These results, along with the GOP's failure to strictly follow the court's criteria compared to nonpartisan alternatives Wolf has drawn, indicate that a considerable number of districts still show signs of gerrymandering. That's especially true in the state House, and it's likely that the GOP's new maps will be challenged ahead of the court's Sept. 27 deadline for objections. Read more