This US House district was once a political battleground. Now it shows why Congress is dysfunctional

(AP) — In 2022, Democrat Wiley Nickel ran as a moderate and narrowly won North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District by about 9,000 votes. Two years later, the current congressman, Republican Brad Knott, ran as a conservative and coasted into the U.S. North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature redrew its congressional map to transform what was one of the last remaining swing districts in the South to a safe GOP seat.

Lawmakers split the rectangular district into an hourglass shape that carved out Democratic voters in Raleigh and replaced them with a swath of rural counties reaching to the Virginia border. Swing seats, meaning a district a presidential candidate won by 5 percentage points or fewer in the previous election, are disappearing from the national map. For decades after World War II, the number of competitive seats in the House slowly eroded as the nation grew more polarized, voters were less likely to split their ticket and people moved closer to like-minded neighbors, creating Democratic strongholds in urban areas and Republicans ones across rural America.

That decline accelerated the past year since President Donald Trump sparked a partisan redistricting battle. The number of swing districts fell from 45 to 37. There were 96 House seats that fit the modern definition of a swing seat in 1964, according to one count from the 1970s, when the shrinking number of such districts was first noted.

That means the overwhelming majority of House seats are effectively won in primaries, with the support of only a fraction of highly ideological voters. Nickel saw the impact during his term. “The biggest divide I found in Congress wasn’t Democrat versus Republican, it was safe seats versus competitive seats,” Nickel said.

“When your focus is on running a campaign where you talk to every single voter, you look at things differently and your focus is on solving problems.” Unite America, an organization pushing alternatives to party primaries, calculated that 87% of representatives elected to the House in 2024 were chosen by 7% of the country’s voters. “Voters don’t have any way of holding Congress responsible, except for a narrow window of swing districts,” Nick Troiano, the group’s executive director, said in an interview. The Republican-controlled legislature redrew the state’s congressional map to transform what was one of the last remaining swing districts in the South to a safe GOP seat.

Lawmakers split the rectangular 13th District into an hourglass shape that carved out Democratic voters in Raleigh and replaced them with a swath of rural counties reaching up to the Virginia border. Swing seats, meaning a district that a presidential candidate won by 5 percentage points or fewer in the previous election, are disappearing from the national map. That decline accelerated over the past year after Republican President Donald Trump sparked a partisan redistricting battle.