Sister Toldjah at RedState is exactly right.
It's not about "fair maps."
It's never been about "fair maps."
It's about Democrats getting into a better position to win back power in the 2020 election, so they can draw themselves more state legislative and Congressional seats. This has been the purpose from the beginning of the campaign of lawsuits filed by leftist groups.
It's why virtually every map proposed by Democrats created a gerrymandered 11th Congressional District - running from Murphy to Watauga. The purpose is obvious - to get App State University's Democrat-voting college kids into the same district with Asheville - in order to make it easier for Democrats to win here.
Rep. Butterfield's comments to the Washington Post confirm the motives. It's not about "fair maps." It's about getting more Democrats elected.
State Sen. Paul Newton, one of the legislature’s redistricting authors, said Thursday that “fair is in the eye of the beholder” and he chided Democrats, including Butterfield, for seeking a partisan measure of districts. Newton said Republicans used no racial or partisan data to draw the maps and closely followed criteria including compactness and equal distribution of population.
“They have revealed motives that make is seem inevitable that we will not reach consensus with the minority party,” Newton said.
State Senate Minority Leader Dan Blue confirmed it further:
Dan Blue, Democratic leader of the North Carolina Senate, said Butterfield and other Democrats are not asking to use partisan data in the drawing of districts but simply for an after-the-fact assessment to see how fairly the districts divide up power based on the makeup of the population. Blue said he agrees with Butterfield’s assessment that six Democratic districts, or five Democratic districts and one swing seat, would make for a fair map.
What so disgusting about this assertion is that the left has spent years suing the state over maps - demanding that partisan data NOT be used to draw the maps. So, Sen. Blue is saying don't use the data to draw the maps, but we should edit the maps afterwards based on that data. It's one of the most incredibly dishonest argument I've seen made by a North Carolina lawmaker in twenty years.
Democrats say last year's midterm saw more total votes for Democratic candidates across the state, so they should get more Congressional seats. This is a proportional representation model, by the way. It's a model not enacted in America.
Andy Jackson at NC Civitas finds an 8-5 Republican-Democrat split is "likely the best fit for our political geography."
A team of mathematicians led by Mattingly found that about 55% of their random maps produced an 8-5 likely split in favor of Republicans based on the most recent presidential election (see chart on page 2). The next most likely outcome was a 9-4 split in favor of Republicans.
Again, this is not about "fair maps."
It never has been.