The ruling on Monday may have left many North Carolinians confused, but few were surprised that their state would be the venue for last-minute, high-stakes maneuvering over voting and district boundaries. Fights over those issues have roiled the state for decades, during periods of both Republican and Democratic control.
Recently, though, Republicans in the State House have gone farther, seeking out what Dr. Bitzer described as “any and every means at their disposal to solidify their power.”
That power diminished in November 2016, when Roy Cooper, a centrist Democrat, unseated the incumbent Republican governor, Pat McCrory. Mr. Cooper’s victory was fueled in part by popular anger over a Republican-backed public restrooms bill that critics said discriminated against transgender people.
Democrats are hoping that voters will once again punish the Republican Party for going too far by pushing state constitutional amendments that would diminish the governor’s power to appoint judges and members of the state elections board. All five living ex-governors, including two Republicans, criticized the move this month as a legislative power grab.
Pope McCorkle III, a professor of public policy at Duke University, said it sometimes seemed as though “everything that happens in the Legislature ends up being adjudicated in the courts.” “It’s just dizzying,” he said. “You can’t keep up with what’s happening, today or tomorrow.”
So it was this week for the state’s congressional candidates and their advisers.
Art Pope, an influential Republican donor, said party leaders were not yet “hitting the panic button.” “There’s lots of contingency planning going on,” said Mr. Pope, a lawyer who has advised Republicans on map-drawing. “I think most people are going to wait a couple of days to see if it gets stayed.”
He said the possible remedies outlined by the judges would be hugely disruptive. “To have the election for new congressional districts, with no primaries, would be chaos,” he said.
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