NC and the redistricting wars: An interview with Tyler Daye

In October, leadership in the North Carolina General Assembly passed a radical new gerrymander of the state’s Congressional maps, pulling the state into the national redistricting wars which started in Texas. To better understand the history of gerrymandering in North Carolina and the state’s path forward on this crucial issue, Lekha Shupeck, Director of Programs at the Institute, interviewed Tyler Daye. Tyler is Common Cause N.C.’s Policy and Civic Engagement Coordinator and a lead author of a piece on redistricting reform in the Institute for Southern Studies' 2025 Blueprint for a Stronger Democracy report. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity. You can watch the full interview on the Institute's YouTube channel.

Right now we are in a gerrymandering battle that's happening all across the country. All of these different states are pretty much saying “We are intentionally politically gerrymandering our maps to directly affect the outcomes of the 2026 election.” And obviously places like California are involved. Texas is involved. And now North Carolina is part of this arms race of gerrymandering. How did we get into this situation? What are the circumstances that made it such that we are in a world where we have all these states saying “We are going to intentionally politically gerrymander our maps,” which is something that isn't really acceptable to most of the public?

I think that that is an excellent question, and you could write a book about how we've gotten to where we are. But I think one of the, one of the things that really has gotten us to where we are is the 2019 case, Common Cause v. Rucho. That was a case out of North Carolina in which Common Cause, along with other plaintiffs, sued the state legislature over claims that their districts were partisan gerrymanders and that that violated the U.S. Constitution.

That was a case in which legislators said point blank that they were drawing partisan gerrymanders. There is a clip on our YouTube channel of former Representative David Lewis, saying that, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a 10-3 Republican advantage, because I don't believe it's possible to draw an 11-2 advantage.” He literally said that during a committee meeting. And so it was very clear he's saying, “Yeah, we're drawing this for partisan gain.”

And so we took them to court, and the case went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering is bad. It's really bad for the country. It's bad for representation. But they said that they could not do anything about it, and that it was not something that could be adjudicated in federal court, and that it would be something that could be worked on at the state level. States may rule differently, but at the federal level, they effectively permitted it with their ruling in Common Cause v. Rucho.

We have a census in 2020, and after every census, we redistrict, so 2021 was a redistricting year. And the state legislature here in North Carolina redrew our districts, our congressional and state legislative districts, and they once again drew partisan gerrymanders. And Common Cause and other plaintiffs sued once again, but this time we did so in state court, because the U.S. Supreme Court told us before, “We're not taking this anymore, but you can go to state court,” and state courts can rule differently.

So that's exactly what we did, and we had a trial, and that case ultimately went all the way up to the North Carolina Supreme Court. And in 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering violated North Carolina's state constitution, and they outlawed partisan gerrymandering in the state. So that was a big win for us. That resulted in a map, because that year, the state courts ended up drawing a map after they gave the legislature an attempt to fix their gerrymander. Legislators did not do so, and so state courts had to step in, and we ended up getting a congressional map that year that elected seven Republicans and seven Democrats, which is pretty reflective of the purple nature of what is one of the most tightly contested battleground states in the country.

But later that year, we had elections for North Carolina's Supreme Court, and the power on the court changed. So there had been a Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court, and Republicans took a majority on the state Supreme Court. And after the 2022 elections, the state legislature — recognizing the change in power on the court — petitioned the court to rehear our case from 2022 which had ruled that partisan gerrymandering was illegal … The state Supreme Court said we are going to rehear this case. None of the facts had changed in the case. The only thing that had changed was who was on the court, and in 2023 they reheard the case, and they ruled the opposite way. They said that partisan gerrymandering is permissible in the state of North Carolina.

That is why now legislators like Senator Ralph Hise, who drew this latest congressional map, are able to blatantly say, yes, we're doing this for partisan gain. And I think it's very troubling. And, I think that it was certainly the wrong decision by our state Supreme Court and is the wrong decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. But it shows you the power that our state and federal courts have when it comes to this. Ultimately, we really do need a sweeping solution that will ban partisan gerrymandering in this state and nationwide.

You gave such a great historical perspective, and just to dig in a little bit more — North Carolina has a really long history of political and racial gerrymandering from the earliest days. So many of the major legal cases in this country around gerrymandering and redistricting have come out of North Carolina, because we've been such a ground zero for this issue. Why do you think that this was never addressed before? There were 100 years of this happening before 2019, so why do you think North Carolina has this reluctance to deal with this issue?

Well, for decades, whichever party that's in power has had the power to draw our congressional and state legislative districts in North Carolina. So one of the things that is unique about North Carolina is that the state legislature has all the power. In many states — in most states — the governor has the power to veto the maps, so that can act as a check on the legislative branch in some situations. But in our state, the governor has no such power, and so the only check is the courts.

And so it's an inherent conflict of interest to have legislators drawing their own districts and drawing districts to support people in their political party. To me, I can't think of a bigger conflict of interest in our government. We don't allow students to create their own tests, but that's what we're doing here, essentially.

And, at this point, state courts have said this is permitted. This is permissible partisan gerrymandering. Racial gerrymandering is still illegal, but partisan gerrymandering is permissible. So, it's just too tempting. There's nothing stopping us, so we might as well continue to do it.

The other thing is that when we talk about pushing for reforms like an Independent Redistricting Commission — which we talk about in the Blueprint report — one of the things that's unique about North Carolina is we don't have citizen-initiated referendums, which means that citizens don't have the ability to collect petition signatures and get a reform on the ballot.

In places like Michigan, where they have an independent commission, they were able to do this because they collected thousands of petition signatures to get that on the ballot. It went before Michigan voters, and Michigan voters overwhelmingly supported it.

Based upon polling that we have seen for many years in this state, people really don't like gerrymandering and I have no doubt that if we had that ability to collect petition signatures and get a reform measure on the ballot that it would pass overwhelmingly. So there are a lot of headwinds, unfortunately in this state, that make it more difficult for us.

And I will just point out one fun fact that I think just really illustrates the point. As I said, both parties have done this. Democrats did it when they were in power, and when Democrats were doing it they were against redistricting reform. They didn't see it as an issue. But the current leader of the Senate, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, in 2009 he was not the leader of the Senate. He was in the minority. At that time, he supported an independent commission bill. You can look it up. It's on the General Assembly website, the Horton independent redistricting commission bill. At that time, Democrats were not supportive of it. He was. And now it has changed. So I liken it to a game of musical chairs, essentially that we play, where the party in power says, “Oh, the system's fine. We don't need to do anything,” and the party that's out of power is ready to change the system.

You mentioned the redistricting reform article that's in the Blueprint report. The report is there to provide a positive vision for what's possible in democracy in North Carolina. Now that you set the ground and told us the history and our current situation, can you tell me a little bit about what the reforms in the article would do to help prevent the very extreme gerrymandering we're seeing now?

Sure. Our reform that we are advocating for is an independent redistricting commission, and so it would be made up of an equal number of Republicans, Democrats and those not affiliated with either of the two major political parties — because right now, unaffiliated voters, our voters of third parties, don't have any representation when it comes to the redistricting process.

The commission would be made up of citizens, not politicians, so you wouldn't be able to be a lobbyist and be on this commission, and we have several stipulations that would count you out from being on the commission if you had conflicting interests with legislators. So that's really the notion here, is that we have citizens, not politicians. We don't have a majority of any political party on the commission.

And also, they would be forbidden from drawing partisan gerrymanders. They would be required to take into account communities of interest, which, to me, should be the number one thing that we're looking at. After equal population — obviously the districts have to be equal, obviously the districts need to comply with the Voting Rights Act and so forth. But to me, after those legal requirements, the number one thing that a district should do is to comprise a community, a local community, and our current districts don't do that.

I'm in a district with the good folks in Boone. I live in Greensboro. And I love Boone, I love the mountains in North Carolina. But that is not a local community. It's a good 100 miles away. And the reason why we're paired in the district together is because of the fact that they're drawing these districts to split up communities because they're prioritizing partisan gain. So communities of interest — it would be a requirement that they take that into account.

It's Senate Bill 698 that we reference in the article, and also House Bill 20, both of them are bills that would implement independent redistricting commissions. One of the things I really like about it is that it requires that the Commission provide a written account after they draw districts of how they listen to public comment and complied with communities of interest, and keeping minority groups together to ensure that historically-marginalized groups that have been targeted by gerrymandering countless times in the past are being adequately represented and represented how they asked to be represented. This is just a sea change compared to what we do now.

We say it's the state legislature that draws the maps — it's not really the state legislature that draws the maps. It is state legislative leaders, a small group. And in the case of the last redistricting, according to committee testimony, it was only Senator Ralph Hise that drew the map that we got.

So there are very few people that are involved in that process, and there are certain things they have to follow. The districts have to be of equal population. They have to comply with the Voting Rights Act – although there are concerns about its longevity, I know that there's a case pending with the US Supreme Court, so there are concerns about that – but currently, they have to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and districts have to be contiguous, meaning that they have to be connected. But beyond that, they are free to use whatever criteria they want.

This new map that Ralph Hise drew did make a major change, because there is a long-standing congressional district in the northeast of North Carolina [N.C.'s 1st Congressional District] that was drastically changed by this map. Could you talk a little bit about the historical significance of that district, that region, and why is this such a huge and consequential change?

That's a great question. So, Congressional District 1 has historically represented what is called the Black Belt of North Carolina. So that's an area in northeast North Carolina where there's a high Black voting age population, and it includes counties like Northampton, Halifax, Nash and Edgecomb and Martin and Bertie and that part of the state.

And one of the things that we're concerned about is that in places like this, when you have what's called racially-polarized voting, which means that minority voters vote for different candidates than white voters in the same area, it creates a situation in which minority voters are not able to elect candidates of their choice.

I should note that the map that was in effect until this latest redraw had already chipped away a little bit of the Black voting age population of the previous district by adding in counties like Currituck and Camden out in the far northeastern part of the state. Those are counties that have a very low Black voting age population.

Those were added in and that already diluted the Black voting-age population of the district some, but what they did now is they really severely diluted it by adding in a portion of the more southeastern part of the state, going all the way into the southeastern Outer Banks. Places like Emerald Isle and and Morehead City are now in the same district as the Black Belt with places like Rocky Mount and Halifax County and that whole Black Belt region.

So the effect, essentially, is that the Black voting age population of the district has gone down by about 8%, and it's going to make it a lot more difficult for Black voters in that part of the state to elect a candidate of their choice. And we do have data from the last election, the 2024 President presidential election, that showed that Black voters overwhelmingly chose different candidates for Congress and for President compared to white voters in the same region.

Again, this really goes to the heart of the Voting Rights Act, why it's so important, and the importance of having districts that are drawn in ways that make it possible for minority voters to have their voices heard. Because if you don't have a district that's drawn in a way that does that, then you have these minority voters never have their voices heard. They're always going to be drowned out. The previous district chipped away at it some, there were already concerns, and this new one just completely obliterates the ability for Black voters in that part of the state to elect a candidate of their choice.

Your organization, Common Cause North Carolina, recently announced that it is going to be suing over these new congressional maps. What kind of outcome are you hoping to see from that case?

I should note that this is a continuation. We never got a ruling on our previous case because we had sued the legislature over their 2023 maps, which they also drew mid-decade and purely for partisan gain.

This is an addendum to that, with the new map that they've drawn at the congressional level. And I am hopeful that the courts will see everything that I've talked about, that this is dismantling the ability for voters to be heard, to be represented and be heard as communities.

One of the things that I think is uniquely significant about what we're dealing with now is that legislators are changing these districts in relation to the latest election data. Senator Hise talked about how, specifically, they moved congressional district one from a district in which 51% of the voters there voted for Trump, to a district where now 55% of the voters voted for Trump in the 2024 election.

It's already bad enough that legislators have the ability to draw partisan gerrymanders at the beginning of each decade after the U.S. census. But they're just doing this in the middle of the decade and now using even more precise data from the last election to shut out voters.

If they're allowed to do this, I just think that it goes to the heart of what a representative democracy is all about. It violates the ability for voters to be heard. It's saying, “Hey, we don't like the way you voted. We're going to move you around so that you don't have a chance to elect candidates that you want to elect anymore.” That's retaliation, really, against voters. And I hope that the court will see that, and see the dangerous precedent that this type of mid-decade redrawing poses.