A Detailed Analysis of North Carolina’s New Congressional Map
October 24, 2025 · 9:35 AM EDT
If there’s one state that’s accustomed to mid-decade redistricting, it’s North Carolina. The Tar Heel State drew itself new congressional districts for the 2016, 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections — and so it’s not too surprising that it’s jumping on the bandwagon of the 2026 cycle’s gerrymandering wars as well. As part of President Donald Trump’s push for Republican-led states to draw more red districts to try to hold the House for Republicans, this week North Carolina passed yet another new congressional map — one that makes Democratic Rep. Don Davis’ 1st Congressional District more Republican-leaning.
There are still a few pieces of North Carolina’s 2026 political picture that have yet to fall into place. For instance, while Davis has said he will run for re-election, he hasn’t yet announced where; the new map actually places his home in the new 3rd District, which has gotten less red under the new lines. In addition, the reconfiguration of the historically Black 1st District may run afoul of the Voting Rights Act, and advocates have already filed a legal challenge against the new map. (However, the Voting Rights Act itself is in danger of being weakened or struck down by the Supreme Court next year.)
For now, though, this new map is on track to be used in the 2026 midterms. Assuming Davis runs for re-election in the 1st District, Inside Elections is changing its rating for the seat from Toss-up to Tilt Republican. If Davis runs elsewhere or retires, we will likely move this rating even further toward the GOP.
North Carolina’s 1st is the seventh district significantly and officially redrawn by Republicans nationwide to help a GOP candidate. Democrats significantly redrew five districts in California to help Democrats, but that map won’t be official unless voters pass it in November. Democrats need a net gain of three seats in 2026 to win a House majority.
Overview
One reason it maybe was surprising that North Carolina redrew its congressional map is that the state was already gerrymandered to within an inch of its life. After the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the state constitution did not prohibit partisan gerrymandering, Republican legislators passed a new congressional map that was heavily skewed toward the GOP.
According to Inside Elections’ Baseline, our measure of the baseline partisanship of states and congressional districts, the map used in 2024 had 10 seats that were R+5 or redder and just three seats that were D+5 or bluer — with just one seat, Davis’ 1st District, in the competitive zone in between. The map also had an efficiency gap of R+26 (based on the 2024 presidential election results), meaning 26 percentage points fewer Republican votes were “wasted” under the map than Democratic votes. (A “wasted” vote is any vote cast for the losing party or cast for the winning party after it already won a majority.)
If anything, the new map is an even more aggressive gerrymander. It still has an efficiency gap of R+26, but it now has 11 seats with a Baseline of R+5 or redder and three seats with a Baseline of D+5 or bluer.
District By District
North Carolina’s new congressional map is a more targeted redraw than Texas’, California’s, or Missouri’s. Twelve of the state’s 14 districts are exactly the same; only the 1st and 3rd districts, based in Eastern North Carolina, are changing shape.
Specifically, the two districts swung a 10-county trade: Six heavily Republican, coastal counties (Beaufort, Carteret, Craven, Dare, Hyde, and Pamlico) are moving from the 3rd to the 1st, while four more evenly divided inland counties (Greene, Lenoir, Wayne, and Wilson) are going from the 1st to the 3rd. To make the math work, a tiny bit of Onslow County is also moving from the 3rd to the 1st.
As a result, the 1st District has gone from an evenly divided Baseline (technically, it was ever so slightly Democratic-leaning at D+0.3) to R+8. Some Democratic candidates over the past decade, including current Gov. Josh Stein in 2024 and former Auditor Beth Wood in 2020, would have still won it under the new boundaries, but they are the exception rather than the rule: Republicans would have carried it in 50 of the last 56 statewide elections.
In the 2024 presidential election, Trump would have carried the new 1st District by 12 points. That’s a daunting, but not insurmountable, margin for Davis, should he choose to run here again. Davis won re-election in 2024 by 2 points even as Trump was carrying his district by 3 points. If he overperforms by the same amount in 2026 (not a given, since many of his constituents will be new to him), he would need the underlying political environment to shift 7 points toward Democrats in order to win.
Going into this week, three Republicans had declared campaigns against Davis: Rocky Mount Mayor Sandy Roberson, state Sen. Bobby Hanig, and Lenoir County Commissioner Eric Rouse. Hanig has confirmed that he will still run in the 1st District under the new map, and Roberson seems like a safe bet to do so as well (his hometown wasn’t affected by the redraw). But Rouse’s hometown is now in the 3rd District, so it’s unclear what he’s going to do.
For its part, the 3rd District is now almost as competitive as the 1st. With the loss of many of its reddest counties, the seat has gone from a Baseline of R+19 to R+10. Like the new 1st, Stein would have carried the new 3rd District by 3 points in 2024, but Trump would have won it by 14.
Republican incumbent Rep. Greg Murphy has already declared his intention to seek re-election in the 3rd, which could deter Rouse from switching. Despite its tightening, no new Democrats have expressed interest in running for the district since it was redrawn, but former state House candidate Chris Schulte was already running. For now, we are keeping the 3rd District rated Solid Republican, but that would change if Davis decides to switch seats.
Potential Challenges
The dismantling of the 1st District may be especially offensive to Democrats because of the racial politics involved. Northeastern North Carolina has a significant Black population, and since 1992, the 1st District has been home to enough Black voters to ensure it elects their preferred candidate (Eva Clayton, then Frank Ballance, then G.K. Butterfield, and now Davis).
Even through multiple prior rounds of redistricting, Republicans left the 1st District’s Black population largely intact. (In fact, at one point, the GOP tried to pack the district so full of Black voters that their voting power was diluted in other parts of the state, an overzealousness that was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court.) This time, however, they slashed it: The Black share of the voting-age population goes from 40 percent to 32 percent under the new lines. That could open up the map to a challenge under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that racial minorities must have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
However, with the meaning of “equal opportunity” subject to lots of interpretation, courts have settled on a complex series of criteria for whether the Voting Rights Act requires that a district be drawn to favor a minority group — and North Carolina’s 1st District may not meet them. Northeastern North Carolina’s Black population has declined in recent years, and it is no longer possible to draw a Black-majority district in the region that isn’t geographically contorted. Yet in the 1986 Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles, the court held that minority groups, in order to be protected by the Voting Rights Act, must be “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district.”
(Note that minority-opportunity districts aren’t required to be majority-minority; it just has to be possible to draw them that way. For instance, a district that is only 40 percent Black could still functionally be a minority-opportunity district if Black voters are a majority of the Democratic primary electorate and the Democratic candidate consistently wins in the general election.)
All this may not matter anyway if the Supreme Court neuters Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act next year, as many court observers expect it to do in the case Louisiana v. Callais; either way, the legal case against North Carolina’s new map will inevitably collide with that one. In the meantime, though, it’s possible that a lower court stays the North Carolina map until its legality can be fully assessed based on whatever the Supreme Court decides. In other words, there’s still plenty of uncertainty surrounding Davis’ future and the future of the 1st District, and we will keep our ratings updated accordingly.