This essay is part of Beyond the Battlegrounds, a special opinion series from MS NOW that digs into a number of lesser-known elections to watch, which will each nonetheless impact the national balance of power in important ways.
The most important election in North Carolina isn’t the highly publicized Senate race between Roy Cooper and Michael Whatley.
In truth, the stakes are highest in the state Supreme Court race, which has gotten a fraction of the attention. It pits incumbent Anita Earls, a longtime civil rights attorney, against Sarah Stevens, who until recently was an influential Republican lawmaker in the state legislature.
Republicans want to unseat Earls and tighten their hold on the state’s high court. Democrats, if Earls wins, have a chance to flip the court in 2028, when three more seats will be up for re-election.
For a decade or more, Republicans’ gerrymandered voting districts have been able to withstand even Democrats’ strongest elections in a politically “purple” state.
The North Carolina Supreme Court’s power of judicial review matters more than ever in the state. It was arguably the most gerrymandered in America even before President Donald Trump ordered state lawmakers in 2025 to draw the state’s only predominantly Black congressional district out of existence.
Gerrymandering is more than two centuries old but modern computer programs have made the practice ruthlessly efficient. And North Carolina is the model for how to do it most effectively.
For a decade or more, Republicans’ gerrymandered voting districts have been able to withstand even Democrats’ strongest elections in a politically “purple” state. In statewide races, North Carolinians have elected Democrats like former Gov. Roy Cooper, current Gov. Josh Stein, Attorney General Jeff Jackson and Earls herself. But in those same elections, because of the tilted maps, Republicans claimed powerful majorities in the state legislature and in North Carolina’s congressional delegation.
The majority of North Carolina voters might be fed up with having some of the most poorly funded public schools in America, with the legislature’s anti-trans zealotry and its cringing obedience to Trump.
But Republican gerrymanders have effectively shushed those voters, time after time.
Until recently, the North Carolina Supreme Court was a rare institution that could check the state GOP’s gerrymandering. In February 2022, the court struck down a map that would have added at least two seats to the Republican column, and in its place upheld a court-drawn map. Under those district boundaries, the two parties split the state’s 14 congressional districts. But in the same election, Republicans captured a majority of seats on the court. The GOP majority quickly overturned the previous court’s ruling, setting the stage for new gerrymandered maps redrawn by the legislature. In 2024, Republicans won 10 of the 14 districts.
The Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act has inaugurated a new era of racially minded gerrymandering.
Stevens likely will go along with her GOP colleagues in future gerrymandering cases. After all, Stevens was a top lieutenant in the North Carolina House when the legislature drew its latest gerrymanders in 2022 and 2025.
But Earls, who has spent most of her career as a voting rights and civil rights attorney, strikes a very different tone. “One of the biggest challenges to having a fair democracy in this state has been the problem of partisan gerrymandering,” Earls said in September.
“We have this battle between one party that thinks the districts should be fair,” she added, “and the other party that staunchly defends having districts that favor their party.”
Even before Trump normalized political corruption, before the president urged Southern Republicans to wage an all-out gerrymandering war in 2025, North Carolina’s Republicans were bragging about their manipulation of the voting maps.
“We drew Congressional maps for partisan advantage,” two of the state’s most powerful GOP lawmakers wrote in The Atlantic in 2019. “That was the point.”
They spoke as if gerrymandering — one of America’s oldest partisan vices — is as inevitable as gravity. But there are Republican and Democratic states alike — such as Virginia, Florida, Colorado and California — that have passed constitutional bans on partisan gerrymandering or taken steps to limit it with independent redistricting commissions.
The Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act has inaugurated a new era of racially minded gerrymandering. If Earls wins this year, Democrats might be able to do something about it in North Carolina at least, provided they retake the majority in 2028.
Republicans understand the stakes, too.
When Democrat Allison Riggs won a seat on the court in 2024, it took six months for her GOP opponent to concede, after an unprecedented attempt to throw out more than 65,000 ballots. Despite a national outcry, the state Supreme Court appeared poised to let Republicans overturn Riggs’ election — a “bloodless coup,” as Earls put it — before a federal judge intervened.
Earls’ re-election race, then, is about making certain that elections matter, that the will of the voters is respected. It is a dangerous kind of despair for a political majority like the one that exists in North Carolina to feel handcuffed by a voting minority, to feel as if elections are meaningless. Earls’ re-election campaign has those folks feeling something they haven’t felt in a while: hope.
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