North Carolina Rep.-elect Raymond Smith (left), with Sen.-elect Roy Cooper (credit: Raymond Smith campaign site) Democrat Raymond Smith has emerged as the victor in yet another stunning upset in North Carolina—and for the first time in a long time, a bona fide dummymander is to blame.
On Wednesday morning, Republican Rep. Greg Murphy conceded defeat to Smith, a former state representative and Army combat veteran. Murphy had prematurely declared victory a week earlier, but he acknowledged his loss as new tallies that included provisional ballots showed him trailing by 293 votes in the 3rd Congressional District—a gap of just 0.1% of the vote.
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The outcome capped a mesmerizing election for Tar Heel Democrats, and a devastating one for the GOP. Republicans went into the midterms with 10 of North Carolina’s House seats already in hand and designs on flipping an 11th. Democrats, by contrast, held just four.
The state’s delegation to the next Congress is indeed likely to feature an 11-3 split—in Democrats’ favor.
Making the outcome all the more astonishing is the fact that last week’s elections were held under maps that Republicans had gerrymandered to their benefit not once but twice. And it’s the most recent remap that directly led to Murphy’s demise, due entirely to GOP greed.
In 2022, not long after Republicans drew new congressional boundaries that heavily favored them, the state Supreme Court struck them down, ruling that partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution. Instead, the courts imposed their own nonpartisan map, resulting in each party winning exactly half of the state’s seats in the 2022 elections—a fitting outcome for a perennial swing state.
But that same night, Republicans also regained control of the Supreme Court. Just a few months later, the new GOP majority overturned the court’s own decision banning gerrymandering, once again giving lawmakers the green light to enact skewed maps.
That’s precisely what Republican lawmakers did. They proceeded to craft new districts that made reelection virtually impossible for three of the state’s seven Democratic House members—all of whom opted not to run again—and seriously endangered a fourth, 1st District Rep. Don Davis.
Davis, though, hung on in 2024 despite the GOP’s efforts to tilt the map against him. But while Republicans struggled to defeat him at the ballot box, they weren’t done trying to oust him with the cartographer’s pen.
After Donald Trump began exhorting red states to redraw their maps last year to target Democrats, North Carolina readily complied. Republicans, though, had already locked in nearly all the gains they imagined they could squeeze out of their state. So unlike their counterparts in places like Texas and Florida, who passed wholesale overhauls of their congressional maps, the North Carolina GOP opted for a more surgical approach.
That involved adjustments to just two districts: Davis’ 1st and Murphy’s 3rd, adjacent constituencies in the state’s eastern reaches. To make Davis’ district redder, Republicans added conservative turf along the Atlantic coast that had been in Murphy’s district. But to achieve equal populations, the 3rd had to absorb four bluer counties in the inner Coastal Plain that were previously in the 1st.
As a result, the 1st, which had voted for Trump by a narrow 51-48 margin in 2024, would have instead backed him by a much wider 55-44 spread, according to calculations from The Downballot. Conversely, the 3rd, which Trump carried 60-39, would have given him a smaller 56-43 edge.
Murphy did not hide his displeasure at the changes.
“I’d say I was very disappointed because the way that the Senate drew the map in Raleigh basically took the 3rd District and split it in half,” the congressman told a local radio program called Talk of the Town in October. “This has always been a coastal district. I’ve always represented coastal interests.”
In fact, Murphy had contemplated running in the 1st instead, but according to Punchbowl, the White House pressured him to stay put. (Murphy denied that any such thing had happened.) Davis, meanwhile, had considered seeking reelection in the 3rd, since his home had been moved there, but ultimately stayed in the 1st.
The GOP’s new map soon prompted developments that would prove highly consequential to Murphy, who hadn’t drawn any noteworthy Democratic challengers when the old lines were still in place. That, however, changed after the new map became law, as both Smith and Allison Jaslow, an Iraq War veteran and former executive director of the DCCC, jumped into the race.
Smith prevailed in the primary, and over the summer, the House Majority PAC released a poll showing Murphy with just a 3-point lead. But HMP and other deep-pocketed Democratic groups largely stayed out of the race and instead focused on protecting Davis in the 1st.
In the end, though, Republicans collapsed across the board in North Carolina. Not only did they fail to dislodge Davis, who won 50-47, but they lost at least six of their own districts, including the 3rd. (Democrat Chuck Hubbard also narrowly leads GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx in the 5th District, though that race has not yet been called.)
Yet had they simply left Davis alone, Murphy would very likely have survived, and might not have drawn Smith as an opponent at all.
Instead, Republicans created a classic dummymander—a gerrymander that backfires and winds up benefiting the other party. While the term was originally coined by political scientists to describe a gerrymandered map that erodes over the course of a decade, it’s since come to include redistricting plans that boomerang much more quickly, just as North Carolina’s did.
Across the country, new GOP-drawn maps performed terribly compared to their creators’ expectations, with Republicans flipping no more than three of the 15 Democratic districts they targeted.
But nearly everywhere, Republicans were careful not to weaken the districts they already held to the point that they’d become vulnerable—the crucial ingredient that defines a dummymander.
Indeed, examples of such maps have been rare, as cautionary tales from the not-so-distant past have tended to act as a check on partisan avarice. And North Carolina Republicans only wound up paying a price during a record-setting wave election.
But pay a price they did—and one that will be long remembered.
We once again went live for this week’s episode of The Downballot podcast, and boy are we glad we did! While we were in the middle of our livestream, Mississippi’s Senate race got called for Scott Colom, an epic upset that reinforces why Democrats need to reinvest in long-neglected areas—especially with Black voters.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard explain why Colom’s victory opens the door for Democrats in major races throughout the South that are coming up next year. They also dive into the shocking Democratic victory in North Carolina’s 3rd District, the purest example in ages of a dummymander—a gerrymander that backfires on the party that created it.
Stay on top of every uncalled race by bookmarking The Downballot’s continually updated tracker.
MS-Sen: Democrat Scott Colom has made history by defeating Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi. The Downballot sent out a breaking news email to our readers on Wednesday afternoon with the news of Colom’s massive upset in what’s long been one of the most conservative states in the nation—and one that hadn’t elected a Black politician statewide in 153 years.
MN-01: Democrat Jake Johnson holds a 321-vote lead over Republican Rep. Brad Finstad with just about all the ballots tabulated in one of the final uncalled House races in the nation, but it will be a while longer before the contest for Minnesota’s 1st District is fully settled.
Finstad said last week he would request a recount after officials certify the results on Nov. 19. Johnson’s team responded with a statement to the Mankato Free Press saying, “No U.S. House recount in over 40 years has resulted in a change that large to the vote totals.”
SC-02: Republican Rep. Joe Wilson has narrowly won reelection to South Carolina’s 2nd District, a conservative constituency he appeared to be in no danger of losing before polls closed.
But it instead took a recount to confirm that Wilson, who has represented the Columbia suburbs since 2001, fended off Democrat Zyon Khalifa 50-49, a margin of just 2,840 votes. Wilson’s unexpectedly tight race coincided with his son, Attorney General Alan Wilson, beating Democrat Jermaine Johnson 52-47 in the contest for the state’s open governorship.
TN-04: Democrat Victoria Broderick holds a 280-vote advantage over Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais in Tennessee’s 4th District, and she has reason to feel optimistic that she’ll soon win a massive upset.
The Tennessee Lookout writes there are about 700 provisional ballots left to tabulate in the district, with roughly 600 in Nashville’s Davidson County. Election officials in Davidson, where Broderick leads 75-23, are set to finish their count on Monday morning.
Broderick, who works as a customer support specialist, lost to DesJarlais in a 70-27 landslide just two years ago in the previous version of the 4th District. That contest marked the latest in a series of easy wins for DesJarlais, who has remained in office well over a decade after the HuffPost reported in 2012 that while he was a practicing physician, he had allegedly engaged in affairs with several of his patients and tried to convince one to get an abortion.
DesJarlais seemed as safe as ever this spring even after the GOP passed a new gerrymander that lowered Donald Trump’s margin of victory from 71-28 to a still-imposing 61-37 spread, a move aimed at strengthening their hold over the nearby 5th District. But while the GOP did indeed keep the 5th, the entire political world was stunned when Broderick finished election night with a small lead.
The candidate herself felt the same way. Broderick told The Guardian: “I’m a working-class mom. I was supposed to go to work today, and I had to message my boss.”
Orange County, CA Board of Supervisors: Democrats in Orange County, California, appear to have defended their 3-2 majority on the Board of Supervisors in this former Republican stronghold.
Republican Diane Dixon conceded to Democratic Supervisor Katrina Foley on Tuesday in the officially nonpartisan election for the 5th District. Foley, whose tight victory in 2022 gave Democrats their first majority in 46 years, leads 52.6 to 47.4.
Democrat Connor Traut is ahead by a similar spread in the 4th District, though Republican Tim Shaw has not conceded. Traut would succeed termed-out incumbent Doug Chaffee, a Democrat who has frequently clashed with his party.
Following a report that she might resign from the Texas Supreme Court and potentially flip control to Democrats, Republican Justice Debra Lehrmann pushed back on the story but did not entirely foreclose the possibility of an early departure.
Lehrmann told Bloomberg Law on Tuesday, “I have to make a decision by early summer” about whether to serve out the rest of her term, which expires on the final day of 2028. The next day, however, she issued a statement saying she has “no plans” to quit.
“For decades, I have strictly applied the law to the facts of every case and diligently adhered to the rule of law,” Lehrmann wrote. “I look forward to doing so for years to come and have no plans to step down from the court.”
Last week’s elections dramatically reshaped that court, as all four Republican incumbents on the ballot lost to Democratic challengers, which will shrink the GOP’s majority to a bare 5-4 edge. If Lehrmann were to resign after outgoing Republican Gov. Greg Abbott leaves office in January, Democrats could take charge because his successor, Democrat Gina Hinojosa, would be able to name a replacement.
Such a nominee would normally be subject to confirmation by a two-thirds vote of the GOP-controlled state Senate, but an appointment made while the Senate is in recess could allow her pick to take office without prior confirmation.
Even if Lehrmann, the most moderate Republican on the court, stays put, she’ll only be on the bench for a few more years. While she’s eligible to seek reelection in 2028, Texas law requires justices who turn 75 during the first four years of their six-year term to retire at the end of their fourth year. Lehrmann would therefore have to leave office in 2032.
Whatever she decides, her seat and two others held by fellow Republicans will also go before voters in two years, giving Democrats the chance to build on their gains and win a majority at the ballot box.
