RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — In 2022, Democrat Wiley Nickel ran as a moderate and narrowly won North Carolina's 13th Congressional District by about 9,000 votes. Two years later, the current congressman, Republican Brad Knott, ran as a conservative and coasted into the U.S. House by more than 70,000 votes.
Voters didn't change their minds. Politicians changed their voters.
The Republican-controlled legislature redrew the state's congressional map to transform
what was one of the last remaining swing districts in the South to a safe GOP seat. Lawmakers split the rectangular 13th District into an hourglass shape that carved out Democratic voters in Raleigh and replaced them with a swath of rural counties reaching up to the Virginia border.
Swing seats, meaning a district that a presidential candidate won by 5 percentage points or fewer in the previous election, are disappearing from the national map. For decades after World War II, the number of competitive seats in the House slowly eroded as the United States grew more polarized, voters were less likely to split their ticket between parties and people moved closer to like-minded neighbors, creating Democratic strongholds in urban areas and Republicans ones across rural America.
That decline accelerated over the past year after Republican President Donald Trump sparked a partisan redistricting battle. The number of swing districts fell from 45 to 37. There were 96 House seats that fit the modern definition of a swing seat in 1964, according to one count from the 1970s, when the shrinking number of such districts was first noted.
That means the overwhelming majority of House seats are effectively won in primaries, with the support of only a fraction of voters who usually are at the extreme ideological end of their party.
Nickel saw the impact firsthand during his lone term in Washington.
“The biggest divide I found in Congress wasn’t Democrat versus Republican, it was safe seats versus competitive seats,” Nickel said. “When your focus is on running a campaign where you talk to every single voter, you look at things differently and your focus is on solving problems.”
Unite America, an organization pushing alternatives to party primaries, calculated that 87% of the representatives elected to the House in 2024 were chosen by 7% of the country’s voters.
“Voters don’t have any way of holding Congress responsible, except for a narrow window of swing districts,” Nick Troiano, the group's executive director, said in an interview, adding that he expects things to get worse in November. “The least competitive election of our lifetimes will lead to the least accountable and least representative Congress of our lifetimes.”
Republicans are hoping the smaller number of competitive seats puts a low ceiling on what Democrats can win on Nov. 3.
“Both sides are fighting over a narrow House battlefield,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign. “It's a knife fight in a dark alley.”
The alley may be widening this year, but it still is an alley.
Democrats have expanded their political targets, given the unpopular war with Iran and voters angry about high prices. Both parties are spending on campaigns in Republican area that normally would not be competitive.
Even in what is shaping up as a difficult political environment, however, Republicans are protected by the limited number of seats in play.
“Even if there's the kind of swing we got in 2006, there's not going to be 40 seats changing hands. There's going to be 20 seats changing hands,” said Ian Shapiro, a Yale political scientist.
There is a long-standing debate among academics as to how much of the decline can be blamed on partisan-motivated redistricting, known as gerrymandering, and how much on Americans' increasing proclivity to live among like-minded people who vote the same way. Multiple studieshave found that without partisan gerrymandering, the House would have about double the number of competitive seats it has now.
One thing most agree on is that the diminishment of competitive seats leads to greater polarization because legislators are only beholden to primary voters.
“It produces more alienation because Congress doesn’t do anything besides investigations and positioning,” Shapiro said.
Nickel decided not to run for reelection after studying election returns going back to 2016 and finding that no Democratic incumbent had held on in a seat where Trump took 55% or more of the vote. Trump received 58% of the vote in the new district.
Nickel, who had introduced a bill to require all states to use a nonpartisan redistricting system, said at first he would run for U.S. Senate because statewide seats cannot be gerrymandered. But when former Gov. Roy Cooper announced he was running for the Democratic nomination, Nickel switched to run for district attorney of Wake County, the deeply Democratic county that was largely cut out of the 13th District.
Nickel won the Democratic primary and will take office in January. No Republican ran.
That highlights how North Carolina, and the country, have effectively become segregated by political party.
“If you just draw big blocks around a state, you're going to get noncompetitive districts because we are so polarized,” said Joshua Huder, a political scientist at Georgetown University.
Only 15% of North Carolina's voting precincts could be classified as politically competitive, according to Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in North Carolina.
“For the average North Carolinian, depending on where they live, if they drive an hour in any direction they will be in a very different North Carolina than they live in,” he said.
That certainly is the case traversing from the old 13th District to the new one. From the office towers, cafes and gourmet restaurants of central Raleigh that were part of the competitive 13th District, it is about a 90-minute drive north through the subdivisions and soybean and tobacco farms that are the heart of the new, conservative one.
Here, few are talking about the congressional race. While plenty express dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, they see no reason to vote for anyone other than a Republican.
“It's just what I've always been,” said Linda Long, 62, a Republican in the town of Roxboro who works at the local Walmart.
George Scott, a retired architectural engineer in Franklinton, viscerally dislikes Trump but also is a lifelong Republican and expects to keep voting that way.
“It's just one person,” Scott 75, said of the president.
This is what Paul Barringer is up against.
The Democratic nominee against Knott hopes for an upset in a year when even Republican members in safe seats like the 13th District are running scared. Neither Knott's office nor his campaign responded to a request for an interview.
On a recent evening, Barringer drove his 2011 Toyota Land Cruiser, with his two dogs in back, to the home of Mary Blank, who heads the chapter of the liberal group Indivisible in Johnston County, a fast-growing, conservative-leaning area just outside Raleigh.
Barringer, a former healthcare lawyer who returned from Maryland to the tree farm in the district where he grew up to care for his ailing mother, said he was previously a Republican but switched parties to run, hoping he could attract voters of all stripes.
“I think people are disgruntled about things that are happening,” Barringer said. “They want people who will find ways to work together.”
On the house's back porch, he was greeted rapturously by a self-admitted political minority of liberals in the conservative area. At one point, Barringer reminisced about the grueling task of curing tobacco and asked everyone who had undergone that rural North Carolina rite of passage to raise a hand. No one did.
“We're all transplants!” one woman called out.
There was palpable excitement, especially after Barringer noted that national Democrats had put the seat on a list of ones to watch for a possible upset. Blank, a retired 73-year-old social studies teacher from New Jersey, said that gave her hope, but she was realistic about the local dynamic.
“I've been saying all along I don't think Paul can win,” Blank said.
Linwood Parker agrees. “They're blowing smoke,” Parker, the 78-year-old mayor of Four Oaks, a town 26 miles south of Blank's house, said of Democrats' hopes they could win the district.
Parker is a lifelong Republican who knows well that gerrymandering is a decades-old tradition in North Carolina. Democrats used to do it ruthlessly to maintain their control of the legislature and the congressional delegation until they lost power in the 2010 wave. Now Republicans are the ones who bend the maps to benefit their party.
Parker approves even though he said he is no fan of gerrymandering, or the polarization that has eaten away at bipartisan trust in society.
“Redistricting is just one of the levers that when Republicans, when they are in control, have to touch,” Parker said. “Otherwise it's like saying, when we play this baseball game, we're going to have three outs, we'll give you two.”
