Last week, a federal three-judge panel in Winston-Salem unanimously allowed North Carolina’s recently redrawn congressional districts to take effect.
The ruling ends two suits to block Congressional districts redrawn by North Carolina’s legislature in October. The chamber’s Republican leaders redrew their state’s election map expressly to gain an advantage ahead of the 2026 midterms, joining a wave of other states gerrymandering their Congressional districts.
The new map specifically targets flipping North Carolina’s first congressional district, a historically Democratic and majority-minority district held by Rep. Don Davis. Plaintiffs trying to block the maps requested a preliminary injunction to block the maps and let their suits proceed to trial. The issue moved before a three-judge panel in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
The judgment decided two lawsuits. In N.C. NAACP v. Berger, the state chapter of the NAACP and anti-gerrymandering group Common Cause accused Republican leaders of “punishing” NC voters for favoring Democrats, and violating their First Amendment rights by gerrymandering them. The second, Williams v. Hall charged NC’s maps with racial gerrymandering. The plaintiffs said the state was violating federal protections and relying on five-year-old census data.
At a hearing in Winston-Salem last month, the defense argued that the maps were not racially discriminatory and that North Carolina’s participation in the nationwide partisan gerrymandering battle was beyond the scope of federal jurisdiction.
The judges — all three Republican appointees — were skeptical of the plaintiff’s arguments during the hearing, and later rejected the plaintiff’s request for an injunction. They found no evidence that the maps discriminated against any NC voters or that the map violated voters’ First Amendment rights.
“We are not persuaded,” the judges wrote. “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 panel also found that the plaintiffs’ arguments were unlikely to succeed if the injunctions were granted and their larger suits proceeded. They cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, kicking partisan gerrymandering complaints out of federal courts as “formidable obstacles to Plaintiffs’ claims.”
Raleigh Reacts
The decision arrived days before the filing window opened for candidates running for office in the 2026 midterms. NC’s State Board of Elections had asked the judges to deliver a decision by Dec. 1 to determine what the state’s Congressional districts would look like for candidates running in a crucial midterm election for the next Congress.
The ruling also hands a major victory to Republicans fighting to pick up seats in swing states like North Carolina. North Carolina’s Republican state senate leader Phil Berger celebrated the ruling in a statement.
“North Carolinians voted to send President Trump to the White House in 2016, 2020 and 2024, and this new map reflects that support,” Berger said. “President Trump deserves a Congress that will fight for American citizens and move his agenda forward.”
Others criticized the decision as a dangerous precedent to set for Congressional redistricting. Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, still argued that the maps punish voters along partisan lines.
“This ruling gives blessing to what will be the most gerrymandered congressional map in state history, a map that intentionally retaliates against voters in eastern North Carolina for supporting a candidate not preferred by the majority party,” Phillips said.
It is unclear if the plaintiffs will appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which recently overturned a lower Texas panel’s decision to block the state’s gerrymandered.
