Two Black incumbent senators in eastern North Carolina have no chance of winning reelection in their newly drawn districts, according to an analysis by UCLA political scientist Jeffrey B. Lewis, who testified for Republicans in the Superior Court redistricting trial this month.
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redistricting
redistricting
This week saw the beginning of another season in North Carolina: redistricting lawsuit season. Experienced followers of North Carolina politics expect it; it is every bit as reliable—maybe more so these days—than the shift from fall to winter. For those new to the state, prepare yourselves for stormy political weather.
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Three-judge panel to rule on plaintiffs' claims of illegal gerrymandering next Tuesday The trial on North Carolina redistricting ended with the bombshell that blew a hole in Republican claims of transparency, and included testimony from an array of mathematicians that computer programs could rarely, if ever, reproduce GOP-approved plans.
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Filing season for the 2022 elections opened in true North Carolina style Monday, with the state Court of Appeals suspending filing for newly-drawn congressional and legislative districts under court challenge. That didn’t prevent filing from opening at noon as scheduled for North Carolina’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, just as a shakeup in both the Republican and Democratic primaries has narrowed the field and the focus of the contests.
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Several Democratic lawmakers of color now reside in districts that strongly favor Republicans More than a half dozen of North Carolina’s Black legislators are in danger of losing their seats, as Republican legislators decided not to draw election districts to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act as legislatures had in the past.
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Voters ask redistricting mapmakers to respect community ties One of the proposed maps for new congressional districts lumps parts of Wake County with North Topsail Beach, 135 miles away, in Onslow County. That same map creates a district by taking slivers of Triad counties in the Piedmont – the western third of Guilford and the southern quarter of Forsyth – and extends it west, with a little, crooked finger...
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WASHINGTON—This year’s round of redistricting is already crumbling into partisanship and court challenges in multiple states, even as voters pay more attention than ever to new political maps that will shape elections for a decade. Hopes were high initially. Advocates in several states pushed measures over the last few years that they hoped would lessen some of the acrimony in the struggle for political power every 10 years.
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As lawmakers began drawing voting district maps last week, voting rights advocates and Republican lawmakers differed sharply on the fairness and adequacy of the process. According to the advocates, the process is flawed and fails to deliver on the promise of transparency or to adequately consider community input.
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The Polis: Center for Politics at the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Duke Department of Mathematics recently held a special two-day conference on Redistricting and American Democracy. This segment features four of the national experts invited to participate: Kathay Feng, National Redistricting Director, Common Cause; David Wasserman, Senior Editor, Cook Political Report; Dr. Michael Bitzer, Professor of Politics and History, Catawba College and Guy-Uriel Charles, Charles Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard University.
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It’s hard to pinpoint the most maddening thing about the rushed, convoluted and opaque redistricting process that North Carolina Republican legislative leaders have been running in recent weeks, but there are several leading contenders. First has been the disregard for the pandemic. When so much of modern life has moved online due to COVID-19, it’s ridiculous that the public was forced to attend crowded in-person hearings...
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