Member-only story
Gerrymandering and North Carolina
After the 2010 elections, the Republican Party gained a majority in the state legislature of North Carolina for the first time since shortly after the Civil War. They promptly gerrymandered both their own districts as state legislators and the state’s Congressional districts.
In the 2012 Congressional elections, Republicans picked up three seats — in spite of the fact that the Republican share of the vote statewide dropped by 4 points. North Carolina’s delegation shifted from 7D-6R to 4D-9R.
As you can see from the side by side comparison of the maps before and after, many districts already featured bulging inclusions and exclusions and were not particularly compact. In both cases, the 1st and 12th districts were deliberately designed as majority-black districts.
The narrow snake-like 12th district (violet in the above map) accomplished this by collecting together neighborhoods of black voters in a various cities and counties from Greensboro to Charlotte along the I-85 corridor. The jagged lines interfacing between the 1st district (dark brown) and 3rd district (light brown) had the effect of packing additional black voters into the 1st district.