The Republican US House majority will be extremely narrow going into 2025. But Speaker Mike Johnson can thank North Carolina Republicans that there’s a majority at all. Without the General Assembly’s mid-census congressional redistricting, three new Republican seats would have remained in Democrat hands, and the US House gavel would have changed hands. And of course, that was only possible because Republicans were able to take the majority on the state Supreme Court and reverse previous rulings again legislative maps.

While it’s true this was all necessary to keep the US House’s Republican majority, there’s a lot more to the story.

Before the election, there was a tight margin of 221 Republicans to 214 Democrats. This, at times, made it difficult to govern, like when North Carolina’s outgoing congressman from NC-10, Patrick McHenry, had to take over as interim speaker due to factional fighting that prevented agreement on a permanent speaker.

Well, that thin majority will now likely narrow further to 220 to 215. There is still one undeclared race, California’s 13th District, but the betting odds give the Democratic challenger a 97% chance of maintaining his 190-vote lead and defeating the Republican incumbent. That means after all the campaigning and TV ads and turnout operations, the US House is exactly where it started, save for one Republican net loss.

However, instead of a 220-215 Republican House, it could just as easily be a 218-217 Democratic House if not for Republicans’ three pickups in North Carolina. And these were due not to flipped competitive seats but to redistricting that created more safe Republican seats. I wondered on election night if these three pickups might end up making all the difference, and it appears they did.

Dave Wasserman, the senior editor and elections analyst of the Cook Political Report, among many others, made this observation about North Carolina’s maps and their impact on the US House results.

US Rep. Wiley Nickel of North Carolina’s 13th District, being one of the three Democrats who lost their seat, also couldn’t help but notice.

Matt Mercer, the NC GOP communications director, responded on X, saying, “That seat belongs to the people, not aspiring career politicians. You didn’t even have the courage to contest it this year.”

Nickel, along with fellow Democratic Party US Reps. Kathy Manning of the Triad area and Jeff Jackson of the Charlotte area, seeing the writing on the wall, decided not to contest their redrawn districts.

But for Democrats to blame unfair North Carolina maps for their losses, their scope of analysis has to be very limited in time and space, ignoring their identical behavior. For example, if you look at the history of North Carolina mapmaking, it’s been a tale of Democrat-controlled legislatures creating maps that favored Democrats, virtually uninterrupted from Reconstruction until 2010.

In 2010 Republicans were able to seize both chambers of the state legislature at a very opportune time — directly after the once-a-decade census, when the General Assembly gets to redraw the maps. In 2010, just to show how unfavorable the congressional maps were to Republicans, despite getting 54% of the vote, they only got five of the state’s 13 congressional districts; while Democrats got eight of the seats, despite only getting 45% of the vote.

And the map, for reference, looked like this:

Image from Wikipedia’s 2010 NC congressional elections page.

For comparison, the current map is below:

So North Carolina Republicans were not the first in the state to draw maps favorable to their own party. And nationally, they are hardly the only ones currently doing so. In fact, in many other states, it’s Democrats benefiting big.

In California, for example, you see a state that voted 60-39 this cycle sending 42 Democrats and only nine Republicans to Washington. The difference between the nine they have and the 20 a proportional map would yield is far greater than the three many blame for shifting the balance of the US House.

Illinois is another lopsided example. The voters of the state went 47% Republican and 53% Democrat in their congressional vote, a fairly close split. But the Illinois congressional delegation will be 14 Democrats and only three Republicans. A proportional share would have yielded Republicans eight seats, five more than they received.

If the Illinois map looks as if it were purposefully drawn to maximize Democrat seats, that’s because it almost certainly was.

But, these states, and North Carolina as well, don’t mandate proportional representation for their congressional delegations. Truth be told, it’s not all that easy to create a system that everyone agrees is “fair” and that everyone will agree to implement. Is the goal to be as close to proportional as possible, or to make sure different communities receive representation, or some other goal?

What if, as is the case in North Carolina, one party is highly concentrated in the cities and completely non-competitive in large swathes of the state? Are the mapmakers, even if from the opposing party, obligated to come up with a way to remedy this problem for them?

Fairness is in the eye of the beholder and often one only begins to look for it once the map-drawing pen has been forfeited.