Democrats fear losing out amid new wave of gerrymandering ahead of House election

Gerrymandering is a time-honoured part of the American political system.

Almost soon as the country was born almost 250 years ago there were allegations that political opponents had sought to arrange boundaries so as to deny a seat in Virginia to James Madison – a move which, had it been successful, could have meant there would have been no US Bill of Rights.

Manipulating constituency boundaries to give your side a better chance in elections for the House of Representatives that come around every two years can be appealing to both main parties.

This is even more the case when Republicans and Democrats are neck and neck in the existing Congress.

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The current tiny House majority enjoyed by Republicans is due in the main to the party gaining three seats in New York against expectations in a Democrat-dominated state at the midterm elections last year. This came about after an attempt by Democrats to redraw constituency maps backfired.

A court in New York cried foul over the move to amend boundaries in a way that would have given Democrats an advantage over Republicans.

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The Brennan Centre for Justice, an independent, non-partisan law and policy organisation that seeks to reform and defend democracy, describes gerrymandering as “deeply undemocratic”.

It says there are two basic techniques employed in gerrymandering constituencies – “cracking and packing”.

Cracking splits groups of people with similar characteristics, such as supporters of one party, across multiple constituencies thereby diluting their voting strength and reducing their potential for electing their chosen candidates.

Packing is a strategy aimed at achieving the opposite. It seeks to cram certain voting groups into as few constituencies as possible. These “packed” constituencies will more than likely elect candidates that are favoured by people in these areas. However, the voting strength of those backing that particular party will be weakened elsewhere.

Which brings us to North Carolina where a new election map for the next congressional election could, some experts believe, help Republicans to capture potentially up to four seats currently held by Democrats in the state.

This strategy, if successful, could go a huge way towards helping the party to hold on to its majority in the US House of Representatives next year – despite all the chaos in recent weeks which saw Republican infighting leaving the chamber gridlocked and unable to pass legislation for three weeks.

The moves in North Carolina could also offset gains that Democrats may make elsewhere in the US where courts have insisted that fairer constituency maps be put in place – moves that could cost Republicans some seats.

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I spent the week in Lexington, in Davidson County in North Carolina.

Highly placed figures in the locality explained that Davidson County is considered to be a Republican-voting conservative part of the state, unlike the city of Winston Salem, which is more liberal.

The legislature in North Carolina has a Republican supermajority although the state is hotly contested politically.

Former president Donald Trump won the state by just over one percentage point in 2020, and Republicans won the last two Senate elections by two and three points.

In many parts of the US, judges are elected. And crucially last year Republicans won the elections for two seats on the North Carolina supreme court, giving it a conservative majority.

Currently, under constituency maps drawn by a court for the 2022 election to replace ones it considered to be illegally gerrymandered, Republicans and Democrats each hold seven of the 14 seats assigned to North Carolina in the House of Representatives in Washington.

The new Republican-controlled supreme court in the state reversed this position and allowed the party to change boundaries once more to its advantage.

The revised maps establish 10 constituencies which should have solid Republican support and three likely to elect a Democrat. Another offers a potentially more competitive contest.

The new boundaries could see the state’s delegation to the House of Representatives split 11-3 in favour of Republicans – with existing Democratic members of Congress losing out.

The Brennan Centre calculated that the new House of Representative election boundary revision in North Carolina “easily ranks, along with Texas’s, as one of the two most extreme congressional maps currently in place”.

“Indeed, the Republicans’ new North Carolina gerrymander is so durable that even an exceptionally strong Democratic wave year would not dislodge it.”

It said Democrats could win a solid majority of the ballots cast for Congress, but their candidates would win fewer than 30 per cent of seats.

This time next year millions will go to the polls to decide who will control the House of Representatives until 2026. However, the eventual outcome may be determined, not necessarily by how voters cast their ballot but by how political operatives, lawyers and computer programmers in different parts of the country have drawn up the maps.