She’s running with all she’s got for a seat she can’t win. That’s the point.

Kate Barr is waging a sure-to-lose campaign for a seat in the North Carolina legislature as a protest against gerrymandering, which has made elections uncompetitive in states nationwide. In many state legislative and congressional districts across the country, aggressive gerrymandering has helped erase competitive elections, effectively guaranteeing the result and leaving voters without a real choice. That’s true in North Carolina, where statewide races are competitive: Donald Trump has twice won the state even as voters elected and then reelected a Democratic governor. So Barr, a 42-year-old mom of two elementary-age kids, is campaigning with all she’s got for a seat she cannot win. “Why am I losing?” Barr asked, warming up the crowd at a community center in her district ahead of a campaign appearance by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein one recent day. “In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives.” Gerrymandering arrived in Barr’s backyard last year when the state legislature redrew Davidson — the liberal, picturesque college town where she lives — into a state Senate district with conservative Iredell County for the 2024 election. While Barr’s approach of building an entire campaign around defeat is unconventional — she sells a “LOSER” T-shirt on her www.KateBarrCantWin.com website — the strategy of running Democrats in districts in which they are sure to be beaten has spread across the country after decades of ceding state legislative races to Republicans. But about twice as many state legislatures overly favor Republicans compared with Democrats, according to a 2023 study by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Advertisement Sam Wang, a professor of neuroscience who runs the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, said some states, such as Michigan, have made progress in creating more representative legislatures and congressional delegations by putting mapmaking in the hands of nonpartisan commissions or the courts. But in states where the legislature itself draws the lines — in conservative states such as Texas, as well as liberal ones like Illinois — “the temptation for self-dealing often leads to a one-sided gerrymander.” The result is a magnification of the state’s partisan advantage. The effect has been on particularly vivid display in some red states in recent years as legislators who have little to fear from a general election pass laws that are to the right of what their voters might support, experts say. “They have a super highway of extremism, and we have not been challenging it at all,” said David Pepper, a former Ohio Democratic Party chairman who now advocates against hyperpartisan GOP state legislatures and leads efforts in Ohio to get Democrats to run everywhere. “Because we’re not even running against them there’s not even a tiny speed bump to stop them.” Barr’s opponent, incumbent state senator Vickie Sawyer, who ran unopposed in 2022, has supported policies such as North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban — which was enacted after the legislature overrode the governor’s veto — and constraints on discussing sexual orientation in elementary schools. At a recent forum on aging, Sawyer brought up unprompted her support for a bill that would require sheriffs to detain undocumented immigrants who have been charged with a crime, even if they have made bail — “so they can’t kill our children,” she said. Dee Duncan, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, said they are “solely focused on winning the necessary districts in key battleground states to keep those chambers in the hands of the GOP while putting Democrats on defense in the states where they hold slim majorities.” Advertisement Nationally, Democrats have supported the effort to run candidates in hard-to-win races. “Our whole theory of change is filling a gap in the Democratic support structure,” said Michele Hornish, executive director of Every State Blue, which helps fund Democratic candidates in “the reddest, roughest, toughest places” in Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee. Advocates of the strategy say it is also politically pragmatic to have down-ballot Democratic candidates campaigning in conservative areas that the party has long ignored, especially in swing states. The presidential race is expected to be won on the margins in just a handful of states, so turning out even a slightly higher percentage of Democratic voters in red areas could alter the outcome. In Florida, a state where Republicans dominate in a highly gerrymandered legislature, a Democrat is running in every state legislative district this year. Whether it’s winnable is debatable, but you have to show up and play, you can’t concede before the game starts,” said Fergie Reid Jr., a Democratic activist who has helped lead an effort to find Democrats to run in the state. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives the North Carolina state Senate and congressional maps an “F,” calling both maps unfair and uncompetitive. The state’s maps, like many across the country, are drawn by the legislature. “Gerrymandering is a form of voter suppression in every single way, shape and form,” said Anderson Clayton, the 26-year-old chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party. Voters “go into a voting booth every November and they’re like, ‘Damn, I don’t have a Democrat to vote for. You know that means that somebody didn’t care, that my vote wasn’t worth fighting for.’” To change that, Clayton put calls out on TikTok searching for candidates to run in every district. (Displayed on the back of Clayton’s phone is a sparkly Kate Barr sticker that says “Gerrymandered AF.”) Matt Mercer, spokesman for the North Carolina GOP, dismissed the Democrats’ efforts. “If Democrats had the right strategy and the right policies that the majority of North Carolinians wanted, they wouldn’t find themselves in their current position,” he said in an emailed statement. Barr chatted with her close friend, Caitlin Barnes, about the race, and Barr said they laughed imagining “how ridiculous it would be to run a campaign where you basically come out of the gate saying, ‘I can’t win because of this systemic problem,’ and make gerrymandering a ground-level issue, because it’s been for so long, this political science-y sounding term.” “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t win,” Barnes joked then, riffing off a famous line from “Friday Night Lights.” (This eventually went on a hoodie.) And Barr used her campaign coffers — she said she’s raised just under $30,000, mostly from small-dollar, in-state donors — to help fund a party with an ’80s cover band she called “Democracy Rocks.” The bash brought in statewide Democratic candidates who otherwise might not visit the GOP-leaning county. On a recent weeknight, Barr sat cross-legged on Barnes’ couch surrounded by another half-dozen women she’d invited for a party she called “Text in the City.” The idea was to gather friends to text their contacts to remind them to vote. But to make it fun, there was a “Sex and the City” theme; the women could pick a text script based on the character they most identified with while drinking wine and listening to a soundtrack of girl power anthems. “As scary as it is to text the people you know, the idea of Donald Trump as our president or Mark Robinson as our governor is infinitely more terrifying, and I feel like I can overcome anything if I hold my 2016 day-after-the-election feeling in my heart,” Barr told her friends. Carter didn’t know who his state senator was but told Barr, “You’re in the right house. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/30/north-carolina-gerrymandering-kate-barr/