When legislative Republicans redrew the state's 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts last fall in an effort to give the party an advantage in both of them instead of just one, they were clear about their purpose.
"The end result is a map that should perform to elect 11 Republicans," Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, told the Senate Elections Committee while presenting the map last Oct. 20.
The map actually elected 11 Democrats.
And beyond that, the specific decision in fall 2025 to strengthen Republicans' advantage in northeastern North Carolina's 1st Congressional District not only failed to unseat incumbent Democratic Rep. Don Davis, but also helped Democratic challenger Raymond Smith defeat incumbent Republican Rep. Greg Murphy in the neighboring 3rd Congressional District.
This is what political scientists refer to as a "dummymander," a term coined in 2005 by political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas L. Brunell to refer to situations where a party's effort to give itself an electoral advantage by redrawing maps ends up favoring its opponents.
"You almost couldn't draw up a better textbook example than what they did in the 1st and the 3rd because it did not touch any other district in the state," said Chris Cooper, the director of the Haire Institute for Public Policy at Western Carolina University. "They said the point of it out loud, to get Don Davis out of office to get another Republican in and to hold onto the 3rd. And they failed and they failed."
If Republicans had simply not redrawn the map, it appears likely that Murphy would have been re-elected to Congress.
While it's impossible to make a direct comparison because candidate quality and incumbency both matter, Republican challenger Laurie Buckhout won the six counties moved into the 1st Congressional District by a margin of 18,023 votes. That's well more than the 293-vote margin by which Murphy is trailing after provisional ballots were counted.
Conversely, Smith won the four counties moved into the 3rd Congressional District by 2,532 votes, largely driven by Wilson County.
Murphy led the race after election day, going so far as to declare victory in the early morning hours of November 4. But Smith flipped the district after provisional ballots were counted, and Murphy conceded Wednesday morning.
"It probably was an effective gerrymander in most years. This was not most years," Cooper said. "So essentially, the Republicans built a big wall and it would have maintained in most environments, but in the 1,000-year flood or the electoral equivalent thereof, it came down."
He was referencing a national environment that significantly favored Democrats.
The North Carolina example is so on-the-nose that the Wikipedia page for the term "dummymandering" was updated early Wednesday, just hours after Smith took the lead, to show the comparison of the state's 2024 and 2026 Congressional maps as its lead image.
"Congrats to @NCGOP on becoming the encyclopedia example of a dummymander. I hope this will motivate you to spend less time suppressing voters and more time delivering for them!," Democratic 2nd District Rep. Deborah Ross wrote in a social media post on X.
A key factor in causing any gerrymandered map to backfire is a wave election, and that's what Democrats accomplished this year, in part due to a national environment that saw Trump's approval ratings hovering around 35% largely due to an inflationary environment caused by the war with Iran.
Voters' disapproval of Trump left incumbent Republican members of Congress vulnerable across North Carolina, often catching them by surprise, said Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee spokesman and North Carolina native.
In North Carolina, the final Elon University Poll before the election put Trump's approval rating at 34% and disapproval at 57%. It also found that if Trump had endorsed a candidate, 43% of respondents would be less likely to vote for that person, compared to 25% who would be more likely to vote for them.
"If Trump were at 39% approval, Virginia Foxx wins, Richard Hudson wins, Murphy absolutely wins, Rouzer's race isn't as close, Republicans potentially beat Davis," Heye said. "But what happened is in large part due to Trump's massive unpopularity."
A 'straightforward' plan
North Carolina's 2025 redistricting took place in a national environment where Republican-controlled state legislatures redrew districts to try to give their Congressional candidates significant advantages, and Democratic-controlled states responded. The trend started in Texas, with California quickly responding.
In North Carolina, like in many states, mapmakers used results from the 2024 presidential election to draw the new districts.
With that in mind, Hise told the committee last October, the 1st District went from one where Trump won 51% of the vote in 2024 to one where he would have won 55%. The 3rd District declined from one where Trump won 60% of ballots to one where he won 56%.
"The motivation behind this new plan is straightforward: The new Congressional map improves Republicans' critical strength in eastern North Carolina'" Hise said.
To do that, the map moved Greene, Lenoir, Wayne, and Wilson counties from the 1st District into the 3rd. In return, it moved Beaufort, Carteret, Craven, Dare, Hyde, and Pamlico counties from the 3rd District into the 1st. One precinct in Onslow County, around Swansboro, also moved into the 1st District.
Relying on the 2024 presidential election to draw the new maps could have been a strategic error, Cooper said.
"Ralph Hise might have made a mistake that a lot of people made, which was to assume that the 2024 election, whether the presidential or anything down ballot, is the norm," Cooper said."What we might have learned last Tuesday is that really the 2024 election was probably the high-water mark for Republicans."
When the new maps were introduced, Democrats and Black voter groups said they were intended to dilute the power of Black voters in the state, many of whom are clustered in rural areas in eastern North Carolina.
Shifting voters out of the 3rd Congressional District and the reaction to the new map left Murphy vulnerable, Heye said.
"They spread themselves too thin, especially in Greg Murphy's district. Also, they energized and activated the Democratic base in a way that was an add-on factor to what Trump had been doing, and they spent time and money — precious resources — trying to do this," Heye said in an interview.
While Democrats knew that Republicans were weakening their advantage in Murphy's 3rd Congressional District, they also knew that the race was unlikely to receive significant national funding, said North Carolina Democratic Party chairwoman Anderson Clayton in an interview.
Ultimately, Murphy and Republican-aligned groups spent $1.46 million on TV and digital ads, according to AdImpact, while Democratic-aligned groups spent about $285,000, including only $7,561 from Smith's campaign.
"What we knew is that we had to put a lot of emphasis on grassroots organizing in districts that were not going to get national support because we were in a cycle where Republicans had tried to disenfranchise voters, not just in North Carolina but across the country," Clayton said.
Smith is a former two-term member of the N.C. House of Representatives who has twice unsuccessfully run for the N.C. Senate, as well as to be Goldsboro's mayor.
But the experience from those previous campaigns showed, Clayton said, including during an event she attended for Smith on a Black-owned century farm in Wayne County.
Smith had known the family for years, Clayton said, and she recalled thinking, "I have no doubt in my mind that he is somebody who could be able to win a seat like this, but it's going to take him getting out there and meeting every single body like he's done."
From dummymander to 'strategic gerrymander?'
Cooper cautioned that 2026 might be the exact reversal of 2024, representing Democrats' best-possible outcomes.
In 2028, Republicans will be aiming to win the 1st Congressional District, the 3rd Congressional District, and six additional districts that were drawn to give their candidates a significant advantage only to flip to Democratic control.
Considering the structural advantage, Cooper said, it is possible that they will win many or even all of those seats.
"What looked like a dummymander in '26 might look like a strategic gerrymander in '28," Cooper said.
Heye, the former RNC spokesman, pointed to Republicans' 1994 red wave, in which GOP candidate Fred Heineman beat then-four-term incumbent David Price. Heineman served one term, then was defeated by Price in 1996, with the Democrat holding the seat for the next 26 years.
"I expect that one or two of the Democrats who won last week will lose in two years, just sort of in the natural order of things," Heye said.
He went on to add that the size of the 2026 blue wave will give the incoming Democratic House members other advantages such as incumbency and the campaign heft of both a U.S. Senate seat and the Governor's mansion.
Heye also said that an incumbent like Davis, who will be serving his third term in the U.S. House, will have more of an advantage because he and his staff will have had more time to familiarize voters with him and his track record.
For her part, Clayton said she's already thinking about how to raise the money needed to protect the seven seats Democrats flipped this cycle, including the 3rd Congressional District. And she's expecting more financial support from national Democratic organizations.
"Now that they've proven that they can win these districts, they need the support to be able to continue to do it," Clayton said.
