The North Carolina General Assembly approved a new congressional district map on October 22. The change involves moving Beaufort, Carteret, Craven, Dare, Hyde, and Pamlico counties, along with part of one precinct in Onslow County, from the Third District to the First. In turn, it shifts Greene, Lenoir, Wayne, and Wilson counties from the First District to the Third.
The new map shifts Democratic Rep. Don Davis’ First District from highly competitive to one that favors Republicans. That change came at the expense of Republican Greg Murphy, whose Third District has become more competitive. Both representatives plan to run for reelection, but have not announced which district they will run in.
But redistricting is not the only factor contributing to a shift in expected congressional district election results.
Rating the 2026 North Carolina congressional districts
I used a methodology similar to that used at Locke to analyze congressional districts passed by the General Assembly in 2023. For the districts passed this year, I used data from nine 2024 Council of State races (the governor’s race was excluded for being an outlier). The Republican and Democratic votes of those races were added together in each district and divided by the total two-party votes for those sixteen races to get a partisan percentage in each district.
The results are expressed as an R or D followed by the distance from a 50/50 split in the district. The results are below.
While Republicans will usually win in the “lean” districts, the president’s party tends to lose support in midterm elections. If that trend continues in 2026 and Democrats nominate strong candidates, they have an outside chance of winning one or more of those races.
With the change in the First District, the 11th District is now rated as North Carolina’s most competitive at R+4. Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards currently represents the 11th.
How the districts have changed from 2024
Compared to the map used in the 2024 election, the new map has the same number of safe Democratic districts (three). The sole toss-up district (the First) is gone. The number of lean Republican districts (with ratings from R+2 to R+5) increased from one to four, while the number of likely Republican districts (from R+6 to R+9) decreased from eight to seven. One of those likely districts had previously been rated as R+10, safe Republican.
The table below shows how each district has changed from 2023 to today due to redistricting or data from the 2024 election. They are expressed as a letter (R for Republican, D for Democratic) followed by the percent shift in that direction. So “D1” means that the district has shifted by one percentage point towards the Democrats in the expected result from the 2024 election to the 2026 election.
While none of the districts are true “dummymanders,” North Carolina could see a few interesting congressional races in 2026.
