North Carolina’s GOP Gerrymander Goes to Court

As Donald Trump continues to pressure states to gerrymander their 2026 congressional maps, voters and voting rights activists have moved the battlefield into the courtroom.

Opponents of the GOP-backed map in North Carolina got their day in court Wednesday, asking a panel of three federal judges to block what they describe as a racial gerrymander drawn at the expense of Black voters.

In the case, two groups of plaintiffs*, including the NAACP, are arguing that Republicans surgically dismantled a historically Black congressional district when creating their map. 

“In one fell swoop, the General Assembly wiped North Carolina’s historic Black Belt Congressional District off the map, silencing Black voters by denying them any reasonable opportunity of electing their candidate of choice to the U.S. House of Representatives,” a complaint filed by the NAACP plaintiffs alleges.

The four-hour hearing concluded around 5 p.m. local time Wednesday. The court faces a quick timeline to decide the case — likely by Dec. 1 — because of upcoming 2026 election dates, according to Kathleen Roblez, an attorney with Forward Justice, which represents a group of advocates who filed an amicus brief opposing the gerrymander.

Opponents of the new map believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. 

Eva Clayton, a Democrat who formerly represented the affected district, criticized the gerrymander as “blatant discrimination.”

She slammed North Carolina Republicans for moving the First Congressional District’s Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.) into a neighboring district represented by a Republican – and for making it “almost impossible” for voters in the area to elect a Black representative again.

During a brief press conference after the hearing, Hasani Mitchell of the North Carolina Black Alliance, echoed her urgency.

“We won’t stop, we won’t rest until we have fair maps in the state of North Carolina,” he said.

‘Sudden, rushed, and widely opposed’

North Carolina was the third state — after Texas and Missouri — to rush redistricting into law solely at Trump’s behest. But the state GOP says race played no role in their gerrymander. Rather, they claim they were trying to counteract California’s decision to redraw its maps to give Democrats five more congressional seats — which itself aimed at counteracting the Texas gerrymander, which gave Republicans five additional seats.

North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger initially announced the GOP plan Oct. 13, saying they would be “[p]icking up where Texas left off.” A federal court blocked the Texas map Tuesday, the day before the hearing on the North Carolina map.

The new map represents the “culmination” of the General Assembly’s years-long effort that “intentionally decreased” the number and percentages of Black voters in the district, the plaintiffs’ complaint stated.

They argue that the latest gerrymander violates the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which prohibit racial discrimination in redistricting. 

A group of North Carolina advocates, including Repairers of the Breach and the North Carolina Black Alliance, filed an amicus brief last week telling the court that the gerrymander was passed in a “sudden, rushed, and widely opposed process over a breathtakingly short period from introduction to law – just over 48 hours – marking the first time in our state’s history that the North Carolina General Assembly has ever engaged in mid-decade redistricting without a court order to do so.” 

Forward Justice’s Roblez told Democracy Docket that this wasn’t a typical redistricting proceeding.

“The legislature has actually never done this before, where they’ve decided out of nowhere to draw new maps – not because of a census, not because of a court hearing,” she said after the hearing. “And you could tell that the court was really asking a lot of questions to try to understand how do they analyze what happened here.”

GOP-appointed judges

The case was heard Wednesday by Judge Allison Jones Rushing, Judge Richard E. Myers II and Judge Thomas D. Schroeder. All three judges were appointed by Republican presidents, including two by Trump.

Rushing, a Trump appointee, ruled in April to allow him to fire over 25,000 probationary federal workers. 

But others have taken positions unpopular with Republicans. Myers, another Trump appointee, ruled earlier this year against Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin in his efforts to overturn the North Carolina Supreme Court election he lost to Democratic Justice Allison Riggs. And Schroeder, appointed by former President George W. Bush, temporarily blocked the state from rejecting voters’ address verifications after just one undelivered notice. 

Regardless of the outcome in court, the gerrymander isn’t popular with North Carolinians. 

An October poll of North Carolina voters from Common Cause North Carolina found over 80% of respondents said it was “very important” for districts to fairly represent all communities and political viewpoints. 

And 81.7% of respondents said it’s important that courts help guard against racial discrimination in the way North Carolina’s maps are drawn. 

The Elias Law Group (ELG) represents a group of plaintiffs in the case. ELG Firm Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.