- A three-judge federal panel has rejected critics' request for an injunction blocking North Carolina's new congressional map.
- Barring a successful appeal, the map will be used for the state's 2026 congressional elections.
- Candidate filing for the elections starts Monday.
A three-judge panel has denied a request for an injunction blocking North Carolina’s new congressional election map. Barring a successful appeal, the decision late Wednesday afternoon clears the way for the map to be used for 2026 elections.
The ruling arrived five days before candidate filing is scheduled to open for next year’s elections.
The Republican-led General Assembly redrew the congressional map last month with Senate Bill 249 by shifting voters between Congressional Districts 1 and 3 in eastern North Carolina. Their stated goal was to help a GOP candidate win in District 1, a seat now held by Democratic US Rep. Don Davis. A Republican win in District 1 could shift the state’s US House delegation from 10-4 in Republicans’ favor to an 11-3 GOP advantage.
State Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, responded within minutes of the ruling.
“As Democrat-run states like California do everything in their power to undermine President Trump’s administration and agenda, North Carolina Republicans went to work to protect the America First Agenda,” Berger said in a prepared statement. “North Carolinians voted to send President Trump to the White House in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and this new map reflects that support. President Trump deserves a Congress that will fight for American citizens and move his agenda forward. Today’s decision thwarts the radical left’s latest attempt to circumvent the will of the people.”
US Appeals Court Judge Allison Jones Rushing and District Court Judges Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder issued a 57-page order Wednesday, one week after holding an injunction hearing in Winston-Salem. The same panel issued a 181-page order last week rejecting arguments two set of plaintiffs made against a congressional map and state House and Senate maps drawn for the 2024 elections.
The latest order rejected each argument for an injunction. Some arguments came from plaintiffs led by the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and left-of-center activist group Common Cause. A second group identified as the Williams plaintiffs worked with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm.
Judges tackled the complaint that a mid-decade redistricting process led to “malapportionment,” a situation in which some congressional districts would have too many voters while others would have too few to comply with federal one-person, one-vote standards.
“According to Williams Plaintiffs, because S.B. 249 was ‘an unnecessary, mid-decade change to districts that had already been enacted by the state legislature,’ the General Assembly was barred from relying on the ‘legal fiction’ that census data remains accurate for ten years and, without reliable data, could not redistrict at all,” the judges wrote.
“We are not persuaded. First, Williams Plaintiffs have presented no evidence showing the current population of the 2025 plan’s congressional districts, much less any evidence that any population deviations are constitutionally severe,” the court order explained.
“[M]ore fundamental, Supreme Court precedent cuts sharply against Williams Plaintiffs’ argument that the General Assembly was not entitled to use the 2020 census data in enacting S.B. 249,” the panel added.
The federal judges also rejected the plaintiffs’ First and 14th Amendment claims.
“The gist of Plaintiffs’ claims is that the General Assembly violated the Constitution by engaging in mid-decade redistricting to punish them for being Democrats, and to favor Republicans, without a legitimate reason for doing so,” the judges wrote.
“Plaintiffs have not made a clear showing that they are likely to succeed on the merits of any of these claims,” the order explained. “Claims of excessive partisanship in redistricting present political questions not suitable for resolution in federal courts. And the Supreme Court has rejected the argument that a mid-decade redistricting undertaken for partisan reasons presents an exception to this rule.”
Supreme Court precedents, including the 2019 decision in North Carolina’s Rucho v. Common Cause, “present formidable obstacles to Plaintiffs’ claims,” the judge noted. “Plaintiffs have not shown that their First Amendment claims and Fourteenth Amendment partisanship claim are likely to be justiciable, much less successful.”
The panel also rejected the plaintiffs’ claims that the new congressional map “intentionally dilutes the voting strength of black North Carolinians” in Congressional Districts 1 and 3.
“[W]e conclude that Williams Plaintiffs, at this stage of the case, have failed to make a clear showing that the General Assembly likely enacted S.B. 249 with the intent to ‘minimize or cancel out the voting potential’ of black North Carolinians living in CD 1 or 3,” the judges wrote. “We therefore deny their motion for a preliminary injunction on their Fourteenth Amendment intentional vote dilution claim.”
Judges emphasized that the new congressional map shifted entire counties between the two targeted districts.
“[N]one of the counties moved between CD 1 and 3 are majority black, and none belong to what Plaintiffs characterize as the Black Belt,” they wrote. “Moving whole counties, as opposed to smaller blocks of voters, within this region does not raise an inference of racial targeting.”