By Fredreka Schouten, Dianne Gallagher

(CNN) — The North Carolina House on Wednesday gave final approval to a new congressional map aimed at helping Republicans eke out an additional GOP seat to help shore up the party’s majority in the US House after next year’s midterm elections.

Senate Bill 249 passed on a 66-48 vote. Members of the public were escorted out of the chamber after protests broke out shortly before the vote.

State law does not give Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, veto power over redistricting legislation – although litigation over the map is likely.

The new map targets a House district currently represented by Democratic Rep. Don Davis – one of three Black members of Congress from the state. The new district lines are explicitly drawn to give Republicans the advantage for 11 out of 14 US House seats from North Carolina.

Under the map used in last year’s elections, Republicans control 10 seats.

“Now here we are in NC, doing a fifth redistricting in five years. It’s not because of the census. It’s not because of a court order. It’s because of a command from a president. Unprecedented in US history,” state Rep. Marcia Morey, a Democrat from Durham, noted, calling the process “map warfare.”

Republicans acknowledged the motivation behind the new map was helping President Donald Trump.

“Please support this legal proposal to help North Carolina help President Donald J. Trump make America great again,” said Rep. Jimmy Dixon from Warsaw.

The final vote came just two days after Republican lawmakers, who control North Carolina’s legislature, formally opened debate on the map.

The state joined Texas and Missouri in drawing new lines to benefit the GOP, bringing to seven the total number of new Republican-friendly districts created this year.

The Tar Heel State was the latest state to begin work on a once-rare, mid-decade redistricting. The president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections, and Democrats need to flip just a handful of seats to take control of the House after next year’s congressional elections.

North Carolina Sen. Ralph Hise, a Republican who helped oversee the map-drawing, described the high stakes in stark terms.

“The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: draw a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the congressional delegation,” he said. If Democrats take control of the House, they will “torpedo President Trump’s agenda,” Hise added.

Republicans in North Carolina acted swiftly to accede to Trump’s wishes. State lawmakers held the first open meeting about the new map on Monday morning and approved it in the state Senate the following day – despite sharp criticism from Democrats and members of the public who showed up at the state Capitol in Raleigh to protest the move.

North Carolina is a politically competitive state. And Democrats such as Stein and his predecessor, former Gov. Roy Cooper, have captured statewide offices in recent election cycles. But Republican leaders this week framed the lopsided congressional map as an outcome Trump deserved given his electoral success in the state.

“This new map respects the will of the North Carolina voters who sent President Trump to the White House three times,” the state Sen. Phil Berger, the top Republican in the Senate, said in a statement.

State-by-state battle

Legislators in deep-red Texas kicked off the political arms race this year with a map that seeks to send five more Republicans to Congress. Missouri Republicans also have drawn new lines aimed at adding an additional GOP member to the state’s congressional delegation. Both face court challenges, and activists in Missouri are seeking to overturn the map through a petition drive.

So far, the biggest pushback from Democrats comes from California, which launched a redistricting effort in response to Texas. A multimillion-dollar advertising and get-out-the vote campaign now is underway to persuade voters to temporarily override congressional maps drawn by an independent commission next month and create as many as five new US House seats for Democrats.

Republicans have a clear advantage over Democrats in the number of states that could redraw maps. The GOP holds control of the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature in 23 states, compared to Democrats’ 15.

Lawmakers in other Republican states also are contemplating new maps, including Kansas, where legislators have approved $460,000 to fund a special session that would target the lone Democrat representing the state in Washington, four-term Rep. Sharice Davids. Two-thirds of the state House and Senate must agree to call a special session.

In Indiana, where Republicans hold a 7-2 edge in the US House, the White House has repeatedly urged the GOP lawmakers in the majority in the state legislature to target at least one of the Democratic-held seats. Vice President JD Vance has twice visited the state to lobby legislators.

Two other Republican-controlled states, Ohio and Utah, also are in throes of redistricting battles that began before Trump took office.

In Utah, a judge found that an existing map hadn’t followed guidelines imposed by a citizen ballot measure. Earlier this month, the GOP-dominated legislature passed a new congressional map that could give Democrats a slim chance of breaking the GOP’s monopoly on the state’s congressional delegation.

That map needs to go back before the judge for her approval, with a final decision expected in early November. At the same time, Republicans in the state have launched a signature-gathering petition in the hopes of blocking the new map.

In Ohio, the redrawing of its congressional districts is an outgrowth of a state law that requires maps approved without bipartisan support be redrawn after four years. Crafting new maps will ultimately fall to the Republican-controlled General Assembly, likely next month.

Democrats are vowing to fight back.

The top Democrat in the US House, New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, is weighing an effort to counter Republicans in Ohio. If the map is passed along partisan lines, state law allows a voter referendum that could invalidate the map, and Jeffries is prepared to go all-in to support that effort — including raising money, according to a person familiar with his planning who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose internal deliberations.

John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said Democrats will mount lawsuits, protests and citizen-led ballot initiatives to push back on the actions in GOP-dominated states.

“Republicans are openly stating that they need to take away the voting power of the American people through gerrymandering in order to win the 2026 midterms,” Bisognano said in a statement. “That alone is a sign of incredible weakness. The fact that they are taking the gerrymandering crisis to even more states beyond Texas and Missouri underscores just how scared they are of the opposition they are facing from the American people – even in deep red states.”

Democratic fury in North Carolina

Trump has praised the new lines, writing last week on Truth Social that it “would give the fantastic people of North Carolina the opportunity to elect an additional MAGA Republican in the 2026 Midterm Elections, which would be A HUGE VICTORY for our America First Agenda, not just in North Carolina, but across our Nation.”

Davis’ district representing a swath of eastern North Carolina is the only competitive US House seat remaining in North Carolina after previous rounds of redistricting.

Trump won the district last November even as Davis won a second term by less than two percentage points. The new map makes the district more favorable to Republicans by swapping out several counties with more conservative communities on the coast.

Some North Carolina Republicans argued that actions in California – and other deep-blue states – required them to respond. “This is a political arms race that Republicans did not start,” Hise said, pointing for former President Barack Obama’s support of the California redistricting initiative.

But Democratic state lawmakers along with multiple members of the public who spoke during the elections committee meeting denounced the map as a brazen power grab.

“California hasn’t redistricted a thing,” Mark Swallow of Democracy Out Loud, a liberal activist group, said during the public comment period in a Senate committee meeting. “What they’ve done is respond to Texas, which started this fiasco for our country, and put an initiative on the ballot to ask Californians if they should be redistricted.”

“You should do the same,” he told legislators, “but I doubt that you will because you know that North Carolinians will never approve this scheme. So, you are liars and cheats. That’s what this boils down to. You’re liars and cheats.”

Democratic state Sen. Val Applewhite said Republican lawmakers were going along with Trump’s “coordinated national effort to reshape this country’s political map in his image to guarantee one thing: that Donald Trump and only Donald Trump remains in power.”

This headline and story have been updated with additional details.

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