The North Carolina Republican Party is preparing to redraw the House map, with the goal of securing another seat for Trump

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Republican legislative leaders in North Carolina are poised Wednesday to complete a redrawing of maps for the state’s U.S. House districts, intent on picking up another seat to help President Donald Trump’s efforts to retain GOP control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.

The state House of Representatives has begun discussion and plans to vote on proposed boundaries that, if passed, could thwart the re-election of Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis, who currently represents more than 20 Northeast counties. The state Senate already approved the plan on a party-line vote on Tuesday.

Read more: As North Carolina’s GOP redistricting plan seeks to pick up another seat for Trump, Democrats are trying to think long term.

Republicans hold majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, and Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, under state law, cannot veto redistricting maps. So the GOP proposal will go ahead after a positive vote in the House, unless a potential lawsuit by Democrats or voting rights advocates stops it. Applications for 2026 candidates are scheduled to begin on December 1.

Republican lawmakers have made the intent of the proposed changes clear — it’s an attempt to meet Trump’s call for GOP-led states to secure more seats for the party nationwide, so Congress can continue pushing his agenda. Democrats responded with competing moves in blue states. Historically, the president’s party loses seats in midterm elections, and Democrats currently need just three seats to flip control of the House.

“The purpose of this map is to get a seat for Republicans,” Senator Ralph Hice, who helped draw the revised map, said this week. “We’ve said that over and over again.”

The national redistricting battle began over the summer when Trump urged Republican-led Texas to redistrict its U.S. House districts. After Texas lawmakers moved, California Democrats responded by presenting their own plan for voters to approve, in the now-current election.

North Carolina’s replacement map would swap several counties in Davis’ current 1st District with another coastal district. Statewide election data suggests this would tip Republicans to win 11 of the state’s 14 congressional district seats, up from the 10 they hold now.

Davis is one of North Carolina’s three black state representatives, and his 1st District includes several majority black counties. Critics of the map have suggested that this latest GOP map could be challenged as an illegal racial gerrymander in a district that has elected African Americans to the U.S. House of Representatives continuously since 1992.

Davis is already vulnerable — he won his second term by less than 2 percentage points, and the 1st District was one of 13 congressional districts nationwide where both Trump and a Democratic House member were elected last year, according to the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Davis on Tuesday called the proposed map “out of the ordinary.”

Hundreds of Democratic and liberal activists invaded the legislative complex this week, criticizing GOP lawmakers for doing Trump’s bidding and criticizing what they described as a power grab through a quick and unfair redistricting process.

“If you pass this, your legacy will be to shred the Constitution and destroy democracy,” Karen Ziegler, of the grassroots group Democracy Out Loud, told senators this week. Instead, she added, “we will let Donald Trump decide who represents the people of North Carolina.”

Democrats claim the proposed map creates racial gerrymandering that would undo decades of progress in voting rights for people living in North Carolina’s “Black Belt.” Republicans counter that no racial data was used in forming the districts, and that the redrawing was based on political parties, not race.

Based on arguments presented last week before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Louisiana redistricting case, Democrats may lose this line of attack. A majority of the justices appear poised to neutralize a key tool of the Voting Rights Act that for decades has protected political boundaries created to help black and Latino residents elect preferred candidates, who tend to be Democrats.

LISTEN: SCOTUS hears the issue of redistricting that could reduce the representation of Black voters

State GOP leaders say Trump won North Carolina’s electoral votes all three times he ran for president — albeit by narrow margins — and therefore deserves more potential support in Congress to implement his agenda.

“It’s an appropriate thing for us to do under the law and in conjunction with essentially listening to the will of the people,” Senate Leader Phil Berger told reporters.