Republicans put party registration before compactness and community cohesion in a new Guilford County Commission redistricting map rushed through the General Assembly this week.“The county’s citizens would also be best served if the districts were balanced in regards to political parties as much as possible based on party registration, and the ratio for the county in the districts should have an equal number of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, unaffiliateds, and even conservative voters — all based on the ratio of voters outside the voting rights districts in the county,” said Jeff Hyde, a founder of Conservatives for Guilford County, who ran unsuccessfully for NC Senate last year.
Hyde condemned a map submitted by Skip Alston, the commission’s Democratic chairman.
“Your current map stuffs, stacks and packs based on party affiliation and voting history,” he said. “This is the practice that the General Assembly wanted to discourage, and which is why they passed this bill.”
NC Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger responded to a complaint by Alston that he went back on his word by shepherding a bill through the Senate that took away the county commission’s power to draw its own map.
“The understanding I had was that they were going to draw competitive maps,” he said. “Unfortunately, what we saw as a result of that one map that Commissioner Alston had submitted was anything but competitive. There was discussion about a two-pronged process where they were still looking at the possibility of leaving the commission with 11 members.”
Berger said three Republican members of the county commission — Linda Shaw, Billy Yow and Mike Winstead — expressed concerns to him about the local redistricting process.
Berger said the purpose of the plan enacted by the General Assembly was to have “a situation where the maximum number of competitive districts were in place.”
Shaw described the plan somewhat differently yesterday.
“This is supposed to be five favoring Republicans and three favoring Democrats,” she said.
The three minority-majority districts are a lock for Democratic candidates. The remaining five districts are almost evenly split between in voter registration between the two parties. But judging by past history, Republican candidates would be favored to win.
The five districts would have consistently been carried by Republican candidates in the 2008 presidential, gubernatorial and US Senate elections, along with the 2010 US Senate election, with only two exceptions. District 5, which snakes up from downtown Greensboro up to Summerfield, would have been carried by Barack Obama in 2008 by a mere 50.0 percent. And Democrat Kay Hagan would carried all five districts in her 2008 US Senate campaign. But Hagan is an anomaly: 2008 was a year of pent-up Democratic mobilization, and as a Greensboro resident, Hagan enjoyed a home court advantage in Guilford County.
The map approved by the General Assembly features district lines that are even more contorted than those in the plan submitted by Alston.
“It’s almost like a bunch of snakes running around because it just meanders and meanders,” Commissioner Kay Cashion observed.
As a result it chops High Point up into three separate districts. The city is currently represented by two district commissioners.
Republican Commissioner Bill Bencini, who lives in High Point, is drawn into a district comprised of only 35.9 percent High Point voters. Another district in the western part of the county, which will be an open seat, has an electorate that is majority High Point voters. About 60 percent of the new District 1, a minority-majority district is in High Point.
Cashion is drawn into a district with Shaw that radiates out from UNCG out to Stokesdale in the county’s northwest corner. Democrats hold a slight edge in voter registration in the new District 3, but Republicans John McCain, Pat McCrory and Richard Burr would have carried the district respectively in the 2008 presidential election, 2008 gubernatorial election and 2010 US Senate election.
Berger blamed the Voting Rights Act for the tortured electoral lines evident in the map enacted by the General Assembly. But maps submitted to the county redistricting committee by the Guilford County Republican Party and by Keith Brown, a blogger who is active in the Republican Party, feature compact districts.
“I did and have seen that map, as well as other maps that have been available,” Berger said. “You know, I’m not saying that there’s only one way to do this. I do think the map adopted by the General Assembly is competitive. That’s the primary concern of those who called me. That was the primary focus of their attention. They wanted a situation where the quality of the candidate and the quality of the message would be the deciding factor for how elections turn out.”
Consistent with their rhetoric throughout the redistricting process, Democrats have charged that the Republicans are using race to maximize their partisan advantage. Sen. Don Vaughan, a Greensboro Democrat, echoed that complaint in remarks about the Guilford County Commission redistricting plan enacted by the General Assembly.
“It’s a pattern of segregation: Putting minority folks all into the same area for voting purposes,” he said. “It’s packing.”
In fact, the three minority-majority districts in the map adopted by the General Assembly share similar contours with other proposed plans, including some submitted by Democrats. The new map increases black voting age population in two of the districts only slightly in two districts: From 47.7 percent to 50.7 percent in the district represented by Davis, and from 63.7 percent to 64.3 percent in the district represented by Commissioner Carolyn Coleman. In a third district, represented by Alston, black voting age population decreases from 62.0 percent to 59.9 percent.
Considering that Guilford County is covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the county attorney is required to submit the map to the US Justice Department for preclearance. Part of what the Justice Department will be scrutinizing is whether the plan is retrogressive, that is, whether it makes black voters worse off than before.
The process, if not the contents of the map, could present a challenge.
“Under the regulations governing Section 5, one of the required pieces of information is, what role did minorities play in the development of the plan and the enactment of it?” said Gerry Cohen, director of bill drafting for the Fiscal Research Division in Raleigh. “So that’s one of the things that the county attorney is going to have to submit. I would guess he or she will be checking with folks here or in Greensboro to find out if that happened.”
There was no public hearing on the map before the General Assembly approved it, and the bill that was enacted does not allow the Guilford County Commission to put the matter to a referendum by the voters.
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