The sad story of how democracy got drained out of one NC Congressional district | Opinion

Democrats say putting former President Donald Trump back in the White House would endanger democracy, but that danger has already arrived.

The damage isn’t only being done by Trump. State lawmakers and right-wing justices are also doing their part. Partisan gerrymandering is crippling representative government. The U.S. Supreme Court could have outlawed it in a 2019 North Carolina case, Rucho v. Common Cause, but declined by a vote of 5-4.

To see the consequences, consider the mess in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.

The district covering southern Wake County, all of Johnston County and parts of Wayne and Harnett counties was drawn by court order after the then-Democratic majority state Supreme Court rejected gerrymandered maps passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. As a result, the 13th District in 2022 was compact and politically balanced.

Wiley Nickel, then a Democratic state senator, won the district by 3% over Republican Bo Hines, who gained his party’s nomination on the strength of Trump’s endorsement. But after Republicans took control of the state Supreme Court in 2022, Republican lawmakers were given a green light to gerrymander again.

Three North Carolina Democratic members of Congress decided not to seek reelection after looking at their redrawn districts. One of them was Nickel. The new 13th District district takes in much less of Wake and adds several Republican-leaning counties. In 2020, President Joe Biden was supported by voters in the previous district by 1 percent. Voters in the new version favored Trump by 17 percent.

With Nickel out and no real chance for a Democrat, 14 candidates piled into this year’s District 13 Republican primary. None received the 30 percent necessary to win outright. Kelly Daughtry, a Johnston County lawyer came close with 27%. Brad Knott, a former assistant U.S. attorney from Wake County, took second with 18 percent. Knott requested a runoff.

Daughtry and Knott traded negative ads about who was the real conservative, but when Trump stepped in and endorsed Knott, Daughtry’s lead in the polls evaporated. Last week, she suspended her campaign despite having loaned it $4.3 million. She announced her support for Knott.

Daughtry’s father, the former longtime Republican state lawmaker Leo Daughtry, said his daughter saw no path to winning after Trump endorsed her opponent. “That was that,” he said. He accepted the outcome with resignation. “In politics,” he said, “somebody wins and somebody loses.”

But in this race, the real loser was democracy.

In the 2022 general election, more than 277,000 people voted in the congressional race. Fewer than one-third of that number (83,894) voted in this year’s GOP primary. Of that group, only 15,664 voted for Knott.

Those numbers mean that in a district in which more than 270,000 people are likely to vote in November’s election, Knott has already won by drawing support from a small fraction of district voters. It also means that in a district of more than 700,000 residents, Knott will effectively represent a constituency of one – Donald Trump.

A once politically balanced district has become a MAGA fiefdom.

“It’s such a shame,” Nickel told me on Monday, “because the (race) I won was one in which voters had a choice. The district could have gone either way.”

Nickel, who served the White House national advance staff under President Barack Obama, is a progressive, but the politics of his district made him work in the middle.

“I learned there are so many people who are not on the far left or far right. They just want someone to make positive change for the district and work across the aisle,” he said.

That kind of representation will be ending in District 13.

Even if Daughtry had stayed in the race, it was assured that the district’s next representative would be a Trump loyalist. But it’s even worse that the outcome was determined by line drawers in the legislature, enablers on the state Supreme Court and a nod from Mar-a-Lago.

Democracy had nothing to do with it.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ news observer.com