In the run-up to Indecision Day 2024, one of the candidates for our seat on the Raleigh city council stopped by for a chat and asking for my vote. In fact, he was the only candidate that bothered knocking on the door (so to speak as I’d actually intercepted him on the driveway).
After chatting with him a bit and finding him intelligent and thoughtful and demonstrating the ability to think quickly on his feet, I didn’t have any problem giving him a promise I fully intended to keep to mark the ballot for him.
I probably should have warned him that having my vote isn’t such a great thing as wanting it because it’s usually the kiss of death for that candidate and indeed that was the case in the race for District C. I won’t out the poor gent but you at least know who I didn’t vote for!
North Carolina is considered one of the most “purple” states on the electoral map where we’ve consistently had the narrowest margins between the parties and my results in this year’s voting continued this purple trend from the mid-terms two years ago.
The ballot that I was offered is attached below and here’s the post-mortem:
- 29 total races / referenda on the ballot
- 5 races were unopposed leaving 24 that were theoretically competitive but in actuality rarely was
- I picked the winning candidate in 11 races and the library bond issue passing for a total of 12
- I picked the losing candidate in 10 races and voted against the silly constitutional amendment that’s a solution in search of an actual problem for a total of 11
- I split the Raleigh city council at-large seat picking 1 winner out of the 2 candidates I could select so that’s a push that I’m not going to count in the final tally.
So, 12 winners out of 23 contested races with a clear result leaves a winning percentage of 52.1379%, just slightly lower than the 2022 mid-term winner rate of 58.6957%.
With the change in methodology eliminating the race that was a push (rather than counting the split as half as I did in the mid-terms of 2022) would increase the 2022 winning percentage to 59.0909%.
That’s still way better than my usual average somewhere in the 20% range!
So there’s your purple ballot voted in the most purple state in the nation.
But thanks to the hyper-partisan gerrymandering of our US House of Representatives districts and the United States Supreme Court throwing us to the wolves in it’s decision in Rucho v Common Cause, that purple ballot and millions like it are sending a delegation that will be 10-4 gerrymandered in favour of the Republicans to Washington DC.
Making matters even worse is that of the 14 US House districts, only one was even close to competitive. NC’s 1st District which is a sprawling district covering most of the northeastern counties that packs a majority of African-American voters so that their voting strength can be severely diluted elsewhere to result in Republican majorities that don’t actually reflect the population accurately had the maps been fairly drawn.
We knew exactly who was going to win in all of the other districts well before the first ballot was ever cast. That’s why Jeff Jackson was running for NC Attorney General (yay…I’ve been a fan of his since he was in the General Assembly for his pragmatic approach to legislating and ability to come to a reasoned and reasonable compromise with the party opposite) and why Wiley Nickel is currently out of a job…they were gerrymandered out of their districts by the Republican super-majority in Raleigh.
At least it appears the gerrymandered super-majority the Republicans designed for themselves in the General Assembly has been broken so that incoming governor Josh Stein will actually be able to sustain a veto of the most egregious legislation the Jones Street mob are capable of enacting.
“I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”
— Rep David R Lewis, co-chairman of the General Assembly redistricting committee
It looks like former Rep Lewis (now a convicted felon for lining his pockets with campaign funds, lying to a bank, and failing to file a tax return) finally got his wish when it comes to our US House delegation.
It only took a decade’s worth of cases at the US Supreme Court and then engineering a Republican majority on the NC Supreme Court once the Rucho decision made it clear that Chief Justice Roberts was washing his hands of the issue and leaving us to the partisan whims of our justices who refuse to check the worst impulses of the General Assembly when it comes to them picking the voters they want.
The following images show the evolution of our House delegation.
In 2020, the Republicans took a 8-5 majority to Washington (which was originally going to be 10-3 had the NC Supreme Court not intervened and struck down the 2016 and 2018 maps).
A Democrat majority on the NC Supreme Court threw out the 2020 maps and in the 2022 mid-term election, the map was as balanced as it’s ever been in recent history splitting our delegation right down the middle 7-7 with the new seat that had been added due to the 2020 Census.
Since then, the Republicans took over the NC Supreme Court and almost immediately reversed the previous decision (so much for stare decisis at the state level!) which led to yet another redrawing of the maps to their current configuration in 2024 sending 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats to DC even though the state is as purple as can be.
Is it any wonder that those of us in North Carolina who just want electoral maps where the voters choose the politicians rather than the other way round often despair of ever finding any relief from the maps drawn by scoundrels for partisan political advantage.
Granted, drawing fair electoral maps is hard especially in states that are subject to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and a couple of the congressional maps in the past decade that had us before the US Supreme Court included racial gerrymanders drawn with “surgical precision” as anyone who remembers the travesty that was the extremely narrow and snake-like 13th District that spanned multiple counties along I-85).
But it’s not an impossible task and there have been plenty of map drawing experts in our various map court cases that showed how to draw maps that truly reflected the composition of the people that lived there without favouring any particular party.
If we had *THOSE* maps at the Federal and state level, then it’d be much easier to accept the results of the way those districts vote as being valid and reasonable with the politicians having to convince a majority of voters they didn’t choose that their policies are what the voters choosing them actually want.
What we have now is anything but and reflects a desire on the part of the Republican Party that is increasingly out-of-step with the voters of this state to cling to political power they do not win fairly and thus deprive the citizens of this state of representation that actually represents *THEM*.
