Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

BIG CITY: Mapping the future in local politics

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Staff

by Kirk Ross

This is a family newspaper, so I’ll just say, What The Hey?
The new redistricting plans for the North Carolina House and Senate were released last week, and it turns out that Democratic Reps. Joe Hackney and Verla Insko live in the same newly drawn House district. Fancy that.
Having listened to a lot of back and forth on the new redistricting plans, I can tell you that the explanation for why so many top Democrats ended up double-bunked with partisan allies is as thin as the ice on University Lake in July. I’m paraphrasing, but it goes something like this:
“In order to comply with the Voting Rights Act, we had to double-bunk a lot of top Democrats. Also, the Democrats did stuff like this.”
So, there you have it. Perfectly reasonable.
By the time all the legal wrangling is over, the maps as drawn may change somewhat, but that’s more likely to happen in areas under tighter Voting Rights Act scrutiny than ours. The NAACP and others are challenging an overall strategy that packs some districts with Democratic voters, leaving surrounding districts more competitive for Republicans. The legality of this strategy could become the heart of the court case to come.
In a recent discussion with reporters, Hackney said he wasn’t worried about his own situation, preferring instead to blast the whole scheme as pure partisan hardball.
He doesn’t need to worry, because even though he lives on the edge of southwestern Orange County, Hackney, who has a working farm in Chatham County, has legitimate claim to residence there, as well as a long family lineage. The current House minority leader and former speaker went to Silk Hope High School back when there was such a thing. Kinda hard to get more Chatham than that. Pencil him in for the new District 54.
Inside Orange County, the redrawn district lines are much different than they are today, with District 50, now represented by Bill Faison, losing its Carrboro precincts as well as a skyscraper-looking section of District 56 that runs up N.C. 86, takes in most of Hillsborough and extends into the farmland a few miles north. Chunks of northern Durham are also shifted into District 50. In western Orange, the line cuts roughly north and south. Heading out of Carrboro on N.C. 54, you cross into District 50 just before the American Stone Quarry. North of that, Maple View Farms is in District 50, while their ice cream parlor is in District 56.
Assuming that Hackney makes the leap across the county line, none of the new maps should look particularly threatening to area House incumbents.
That is not the case with the Senate maps, where apparently the GOP-led redistricting committee has determined that the Voting Rights Act mandates that Democratic Sens. Ellie Kinnaird and Bob Atwater be double-bunked.
This has got to feel like déjà vu for Kinnaird, who faced a tough primary race as a result of court actions in the last redistricting. The courts, you may recall, agreed that counties should be kept whole as much as possible and eliminated districts with more than one senator. The upshot was an unpleasant Democrat vs. Democrat race between Kinnaird and Howard Lee, which came down to a recount.
Potential intra-party conflict aside, the new Senate District 23 does re-link Orange and Chatham counties, which have much greater ties and more in common than Orange and its other neighbors.
The way the districts are drafted now may change, but even after an adjudicated adjustment, they portend a back-and-forth in legislative politics for the next decade, with high-turnout presidential election-year results pulling the General Assembly in the Democrats’ direction and back toward the GOP in years with lower turnout.

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme