Raleigh, North Carolina – Republican legislative leaders in North Carolina completed a redrawing of maps of the state’s U.S. House districts on Wednesday, intent on picking up another seat to help President Donald Trump’s efforts to retain GOP control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
New boundaries that were previously approved State Council It could thwart the re-election of Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis, who currently represents more than 20 Northeastern counties. The state Senate already approved the plan on a party-line vote on Tuesday.
Before the vote, some members of the public They escorted him out of the House of Representatives chambers After the session was interrupted while lawmakers were preparing to vote on the new map.
Republicans hold majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, and Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, under state law, cannot veto redistricting maps. So the GOP proposal will go ahead after a positive vote in the House, unless a potential lawsuit by Democrats or voting rights advocates stops it. Applications for 2026 candidates are scheduled to begin on December 1.
Republican lawmakers have made the goal of the proposed changes very clear — it’s an attempt to meet Trump’s call for GOP-led states to secure more seats for the party nationwide, so Congress can continue pushing his agenda. Democrats responded with competing moves in blue states. Historically, the president’s party loses seats in midterm elections, and Democrats currently need just three seats to flip control of the House.
“The purpose of this map is to get a seat for Republicans. We’ve stated that over and over again,” State Sen. Ralph Hice, who helped draw the revised map, said this week.
Republican-led states Texas and Missouri have already reviewed their districts in the US House of Representatives in an attempt to help Republicans win additional seats. Democratic-led California responded in kind by asking state voters to approve a revised map to elect more Democrats.
North Carolina’s replacement map would swap several counties in Davis’ current 1st District with another coastal district. Statewide election data suggests this would favor Republicans winning 11 of the 14 House seats, up from the 10 they hold now, in a state where Trump received 51% of the popular vote in 2024.
Davis is one of North Carolina’s three black state representatives, and his 1st District includes several majority black counties. Critics of the map have suggested that this latest GOP map could be challenged as an illegal racial gerrymander in a district that has elected African Americans to the U.S. House of Representatives continuously since 1992.
Davis is already vulnerable: He won his second term by less than 2 percentage points, and the 1st District was one of 13 congressional districts nationwide where both Trump and a Democratic House member were elected last year, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
On Tuesday, Davis called the proposed map “out of the ordinary.”
Hundreds of Democratic and liberal activists invaded the legislative complex this week, criticizing GOP lawmakers for doing Trump’s bidding and criticizing what they described as a power grab through a quick and unfair redistricting process.
Demonstrators walk from the Capitol during a march to protest a proposed redistricting map on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
AP Photo/Chris Seward
“If you pass this, your legacy will shred the Constitution and destroy democracy,” Karen Ziegler of the grassroots group Democracy Out Loud told senators this week. Instead, she added, “we will let Donald Trump decide who represents the people of North Carolina.”
Democrats claim the proposed map creates racial gerrymandering that would dismantle decades of progress in voting rights for people living in North Carolina’s “Black Belt.” Republicans counter that no racial data was used in forming the districts, and that the redrawing was based on political parties, not race.
Based on arguments presented last week before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Louisiana redistricting case, Democrats may lose this line of attack. A majority of the justices appear poised to neutralize a key tool of the Voting Rights Act that for decades has protected political boundaries created to help black and Latino residents elect preferred candidates, who tend to be Democrats.
State GOP leaders say Trump won North Carolina’s electoral votes all three times he ran for president — albeit by a narrow margin last year — and thus deserves more potential support in Congress to implement his agenda.
“It’s an appropriate thing for us to do under the law and in conjunction with essentially listening to the will of the people,” Senate Leader Phil Berger told reporters.