A ruling on whether to block North Carolina’s new congressional district map from being used in the 2026 elections could come any day now, following a hearing on the case Wednesday in federal court.

A panel of three judges met in Winston-Salem to hear arguments from attorneys for various challengers against the map — who include individual voters as well as groups such as the state NAACP and anti-gerrymandering advocates Common Cause — as well as the attorneys for the Republican state lawmakers who drew the map.

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The new map targets the only Black man who represents North Carolina in Congress, U.S. Rep. Don Davis, a moderate Democrat who won the state’s only competitive district in 2024. It turns his seat into one that’s very likely to elect a Republican in 2026, a mission it accomplishes by carving up a part of eastern North Carolina with a larger-than-average Black population.

The challengers say it’s a clear instance of racial gerrymandering, but GOP state lawmakers say they didn’t look at racial data and instead targeted Davis purely for political reasons, which they believe should be legally allowable.

The new map passed into law last month on a party-line vote in the Republican-led state legislature. It’s part of a broader national push, by both major political parties, to further gerrymander their states’ congressional maps ahead of the 2026 elections — which will decide whether Republicans continue to control Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s time in office. Texas Republicans were the first to move, which has since caused a chain reaction involving Utah, North Carolina, California, Virginia and others.

North Carolina will go from having 10 safe Republican seats, three safe Democratic seats and one competitive seat, to having an 11-4 GOP advantage with no competitive seats, unless the map is struck down.

Whenever the judges issue a ruling, it can — and likely will — be appealed by the losing side. Any appeals would head straight to the United States Supreme Court for a final say, due to the nature of the litigation.

The role of race?

State Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, who has said he personally drew the map with limited outside help, testified in court Wednesday.

He said he used no racial data and furthermore has nothing against Davis either personally or racially. Hise said he would “be more than happy” for Davis to switch parties and stay in Congress as a Republican. His only goal in targeting Davis’ seat was political, Hise said: “Making sure we had a greater margin of control in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Deborah Dicks Maxwell, president of the state NAACP, was highly skeptical of Hise’s claims that race had nothing to do with the redraw. The new map turned Davis’ competitive seat into a Republican seat by taking away several Eastern North Carolina counties with above-average Black populations from Davis and shifting them into a neighboring Republican district, and replacing those areas with heavily white, conservative communities on the coast.

The entire strategy, Maxwell said, revolves around making it harder for Black people to flex their political muscle. The northeastern part of the state has been represented in Congress by a Black Democrat for decades — something that’s likely to change after 2026 if the new map is allowed to stand.

“Black voters are not optional,” she told reporters after the court adjourned. “They cannot be forgotten. And we remain resolute in our pursuit that the maps are not fair. Anyone can see that.”

Under cross-examination on Wednesday, Hise admitted that even without looking at spreadsheets of racial data, he has a general knowledge of the racial makeup of North Carolina counties. Hise, a statistician by trade, has helped lead the state legislature’s redistricting efforts for years — including past years when Republicans did use racial data to decide where to draw the lines.

Phil Strach, a lawyer for GOP lawmakers, said just because Hise knows generally which counties are more or less diverse doesn’t mean he can’t work on drawing maps. “Senator Hise is not required to undergo a lobotomy,” Strach told the judges Wednesday.

A new legal theory

The challengers have also come up with a brand-new legal theory to target redistricting, based on the First Amendment.

They say the new map punishes voters for voicing political views the state legislature doesn’t agree with, by taking away their representation in Congress and ensuring that the state has no more competitive congressional seats. It also sets up a future in which the legislature could redraw the lines every year, or even every few months, to retaliate against members of Congress who don’t vote the way state lawmakers want them to.

“It goes to the core of why we have free speech,” said Hilary Klein, one of the attorneys for the challengers. “It protects dissenting voices. But they are saying they will engage in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to punish voters for dissenting speech.”

Strach said if the legislature wants to redistrict constantly, it can legally do that and courts shouldn’t step in to stop it. The state constitution bans that sort of never-ending redistricting for state legislative districts, he said, but contains no rules for congressional redistricting.

During a four-hour hearing on Wednesday, the judges peppered Klein and other attorneys for the challengers with question after question about what exactly their First Amendment challenge was trying to accomplish, and where to draw the boundaries in law.

The challengers are seeking what’s essentially an emergency ruling on their behalf, called a preliminary injunction, which would mean a ruling from the judges to temporarily block the maps while the two sides can gather evidence for a trial to fully delve into the issues and evidence.

But the judges noted that to issue such an order, they’d have to find the challengers would be likely to win at trial. They questioned how they could make such a ruling on brand-new legal arguments that have no past precedent to go on.

“It’s a pretty high bar,” said Judge Thomas Schroeder, one of three judges — all Republican political appointees — who heard the case.