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But in North Carolina, the election results were really weird.
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These squares represent all the voters in North Carolina.
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They were voting for these 13 seats in Congress.
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About half voted for Republicans.
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And about 48 percent voted for Democrats.
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So you might think, of the 13 Congressional seats, maybe Democrats would've won 6 seats,
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and Republicans would've won 7.
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But no.
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Democrats only won 3 of 13 seats — way less than half.
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This imbalance was because North Carolina's Congressional districts had been "gerrymandered."
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It means that these voters had been grouped into districts very strategically
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with the goal of benefiting one party.
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Gerrymandering has pretty much always happened in America.
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That's because, every 10 years the political districts are redrawn.
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And in most cases, those new lines get drawn
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by whoever holds power in state governments at the time.
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That's what happened in 2010.
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Republicans won control of lots of state governments, and redrew the political lines to favor themselves.
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And over the next few years, redistricting helped them hold onto almost all those states.
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This shifted the balance of power.
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And it turns out that behind a lot of this, was one guy.
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This is Thomas Hofeller:
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The mapmaker who helped Republicans gerrymander districts over the last decade.
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When Hofeller died in 2018, his daughter found thousands of his emails and files, which she
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shared with activists.
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The files show that Tom Hoeffler’s fingerprints are all over the way America’s political
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maps look today.
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But North Carolina was his masterpiece.
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And if you want to understand why gerrymandering is a such a big problem in the US,
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that’s a good place to start.
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The basics of gerrymandering are actually pretty simple.
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If you're a Republican trying to keep power, you want to do two things.
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First, "pack" as many Democratic voters as possible into a single district.
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If you have a district where almost everyone votes Democrat, that means almost half of
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those votes are basically wasted.
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You can also "crack" big Democratic areas into separate districts — where there are
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slightly more Republicans.
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So even though an area has a lot of Democratic votes, they would actually lose in this district
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and in this district.
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These are the two elements of classic gerrymandering: Packing and cracking.
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And Hoffeler employed these techniques masterfully in North Carolina.
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In 2011 he was hired to redraw the state's political lines.
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And for congressional districts, he came up with this map.
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Now, I just want to focus in on District 12, this weird skinny shape.
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In order to make sense of this shape, we have to look at another map.
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This map shows the percentage of black people in each neighborhood.
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The bluer areas are where more black people live.
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Hofeller basically gathered up black people in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Charlotte
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— and packed them into one district.
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So that's how District 12 happened.
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Hoeffler also did this with North Carolina’s state representatives and state senators.
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For example here are the state senate districts.
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Here, he packed Winston-Salem into one district.
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And then packed Greensboro into its own district.
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These new districts helped Republicans get a stranglehold on power in the North Carolina statehouse.
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And over the next few years, they were able to pass crucial legislation.
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A strict new voter ID law in North Carolina.
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Which bathrooms transgender individuals can use in North Carolina.
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In 2016 and 2017, federal courts ruled both of these maps were unconstitutional.
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They said what North Carolina Republicans did wasn't just gerrymandering — it was
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racial gerrymandering, done to deliberately dilute the political power of black people.
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The courts said that the Republicans in the North Carolina statehouse now had to redraw
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the lines without looking at racial demographics.
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So they went back... to Tom Hofeller.
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This time, Hofeller couldn't look at race.
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Instead, he looked at which areas voted for Democrats and which areas voted for Republicans.
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Instead of a racial gerrymander, it would be a partisan gerrymander.
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Here's that map, using data from 2014.
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The bluer an area, the more Democratic voters there are.
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Now, if you zoom in here, to Greensboro, you can see one of the highest concentrations
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of Democratic voters in the state.
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Hoffeler drew a congressional district line to crack this community in half.
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This meant Democrats here, were now the minority in their district.
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And Democrats here were also the minority in their district.
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Hoffeler employed these techniques all over the state to create North Carolina’s new
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political districts.
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And the first big test for these new maps would be the 2018 election.
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Democrats were expected to turn out in droves.
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Democrats are vying for a potential blue wave.
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The wave that Republicans fear is going to wipe them out.
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So, how did the maps do?
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For state representatives, Democrats got 51 percent of the vote.
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They won only 46 percent of seats.
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For state senate, they received half the vote — and won just 42 percent of seats.
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And for Congress?
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You already know how that one turned out.
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Democrats won nearly half the votes — but won only three out of 13 seats.
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A year later, in 2019, the Supreme Court weighed in.
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They said it was beyond their reach… that it wasn't their job to fix it.
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All of this raised an existential question:
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If Republicans could continue drawing the lines to stay in power, how could they ever
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be elected out of office?
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But the Supreme Court ruling left open the possibility for state courts to rule on partisan
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gerrymandering.
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And in September 2019, that's exactly what North Carolina's Supreme Court did.
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The court found that partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution.
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In the court’s decision, it was Hofeller's files that helped prove that North Carolina
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Republicans drew these lines with the clear intention of benefiting themselves.
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Ultimately, the court said North Carolina Republicans had to redraw the state house
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and state senate maps one more time.
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This new map approved by North Carolina legislators is much less biased toward one party — even
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though it took some extreme measures, and nearly a decade, to force politicians to draw
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a fairer map.
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In the last few years, the courts in several states, like Florida and Pennsylvania, have
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made partisan gerrymandering much harder.
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And now that's also the case in North Carolina.
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Hofeller is gone now.
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But in other states across the country, many maps he helped draw are still in use.
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And while there's now a clearer strategy to challenge those maps in state courts...
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… many voters are still, effectively, not choosing their representatives.
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It’s like Hoeffler said:, the representatives are choosing the voters.
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"... of course, redistricting is democracy at work.
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Redistricting is like an election in reverse.
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It's a great event."
