North Carolina has once again become a flashpoint in the national debate over voting rights and partisan gerrymandering, as Republican lawmakers moved swiftly this week to approve a new congressional map that could reshape the state’s political landscape for years to come. The new map, passed on October 22, 2025, is designed to increase Republican representation in the U.S. House, shifting the delegation from a 10-4 Republican-Democrat split to 11-3, with only three Democratic-leaning districts remaining in the urban hubs of the Triangle and Charlotte, according to reporting from NC Newsline and The Assembly.
Public opposition to the redistricting was overwhelming and immediate. During a tense legislative session, more than a dozen North Carolinians pleaded with lawmakers to reconsider the mid-decade redistricting, while State Rep. Brenden Jones, a Republican and House redistricting committee co-chair, appeared disengaged, looking down at his phone. State Sen. Ralph Hise, who chairs the Senate elections committee and served as the sole mapmaker, stared blankly ahead as Democratic colleagues accused Republicans of heeding former President Donald Trump’s call to redraw maps in the GOP’s favor. By Wednesday, Republicans cut off House floor debate after just an hour and voted along party lines to implement the new maps before lunchtime, despite a foot-high stack of over 12,280 public comments—nearly all of them against the process.
“The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: draw a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation,” Hise said, as quoted by The Assembly. “Republicans hold a razor-thin margin in the United States House of Representatives. If Democrats flip four seats in the upcoming midterm elections, they will take control of the House, and torpedo president Trump’s agenda.”
The new map’s most contentious changes center on the First and Third Congressional Districts. The First District, long a symbol of Black political representation in the state, would shift from a competitive district—where Trump won 52% of the 2024 vote—to one where he would have earned 55%. The Third District, meanwhile, becomes less Republican, moving from a 60% Trump vote in 2024 to 56%. But the real controversy lies in the shifting demographics: the proportion of Black voters in the First District drops from about 41% to 33%, while the Third District’s Black voter proportion rises to 29%.
These changes have not gone unnoticed by voters and advocacy groups. On October 24, 2025, just one day after the legislature approved the new lines, voters filed a legal challenge in federal court, seeking to add the new plan to an ongoing lawsuit over racial gerrymandering in the First District. The amended complaint, as reported by NC Newsline, argues that the new district “dismantles a bloc of Black voters that has helped send a Black Democrat to Congress since 1992.” The complaint further alleges, “Whatever the General Assembly’s partisan aims, they have—once again—chosen to target Black neighborhoods and communities to achieve them.”
The First District’s history is deeply entwined with the fight for civil rights in North Carolina. Since Eva Clayton’s groundbreaking victory in 1992—the first Black candidate to win a U.S. House seat from North Carolina since 1898—the district has reliably elected Black representatives, including Frank Ballance, G.K. Butterfield, and most recently, Don Davis, who narrowly won reelection in 2024. The new boundaries, critics say, threaten to end this legacy by diluting Black voting power in both the First and Third Districts, making it increasingly unlikely that Black residents will be able to elect the candidate of their choice.
Throughout the legislative week, Democrats hammered home the point that the maps were drawn to dilute Black voting power. State Rep. Rodney Pierce, a Democrat from Halifax, noted the First District’s long-standing role as home to the highest concentration of Black North Carolinians since the Antebellum era. “You have all these cases about political representation, namely Black political representation, and the only thing pretty much protecting that is Section 2 (of the VRA),” Pierce said, referencing the Voting Rights Act. “So I just don’t see that as a coincidence.”
Republicans, for their part, have consistently denied using racial data in drawing the maps. Hise insisted that no racial data was used in the computers that generated the new districts. But Pierce and other critics counter that it’s not necessary to use explicit racial data to know where Black populations are concentrated. The new map, they argue, intentionally splits communities, combining mainland agricultural areas with coastal regions that have “different priorities, different needs, different economies, different lives in general, different cultures.”
The legal battle over the new maps is already underway. The Elias Group, a prominent voting rights law firm, added a supplemental complaint to its ongoing lawsuit, Williams v. Hall, on October 24, 2025, alleging that the new map is not only a partisan gerrymander but also a racial gerrymander. The group argues that mid-decade redistricting without a court order is unconstitutional, as it fails to account for population shifts since the last census. The complaint highlights that the new maps move four counties with Black voting age populations ranging from 30-39% out of the First District, replacing them with six counties from the old Third District that have Black voting age populations of just 2-19%.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, along with the 1986 Supreme Court decision in Thornburg v. Gingles, forms the backbone of the legal challenge. Plaintiffs must show that the minority group could constitute a majority in a properly drawn district, that they are politically cohesive, and that white voters typically vote as a bloc to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate. But recent court rulings have made this a high bar: in a related state legislative case, a federal judge found that voters in northeastern North Carolina tended to vote along partisan, not racial, lines.
Adding to the uncertainty is the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court may soon rule on the constitutionality of Section 2 itself. If that protection falls, other legal avenues—such as claims of intentional racial discrimination under the 14th Amendment—may become more prominent, but the path forward would be even more fraught.
Despite the outcry—an estimated 84% of North Carolinians oppose partisan gerrymandering, according to recent polls—popularity isn’t a legal consideration. The governor has no power to veto redistricting legislation in North Carolina, leaving the courts as the only check on the legislature’s actions. For now, experts like Andy Jackson of the John Locke Foundation expect the courts to allow the new map to stand for at least the 2026 election cycle while litigation proceeds, to avoid disrupting candidate filing deadlines and election logistics.
For many activists and community members, the fight is far from over. Trish Todaro, who traveled from Surf City to protest the redistricting, likened the struggle to historic battles for rights and representation. “We’re going to lose Democratic representatives, which is going to trickle over to having a Congress that is just going to say ‘Yes, sir, no, sir,’” Todaro warned. “There’s not going to be a voice of opposition.”
As the legal and political battles rage on, North Carolina’s redistricting saga stands as a stark reminder of the enduring tensions between partisan power, racial representation, and the evolving landscape of American democracy.
