‘They had absolute power’: the US congressman driven out by Republican gerrymandering

A little over nine months after he was sworn in to his first term in Congress, Jeff Jackson, a freshman US representative for North Carolina, announced he would leave the body at the end of his term.

To an outsider, that might seem like a surprising decision. In just his first few months in Congress, Jackson had become well-known for smart, short videos explaining what was going on at the Capitol. By April, he had more followers on TikTok than any other member of Congress, the Washington Post reported (as of mid-December he had 2.5 million). By all accounts, he was a rising star.

Related: North Carolina voting rights ‘still in five-alarm fire’ despite supreme court ruling

But the reason for his planned departure was simple – it was impossible for him to win re-election. In October, Republicans enacted a new congressional map that reconfigured the boundaries of his district. They cracked the district near Charlotte, which Jackson won by more than 15 points in 2022, and divided voters into two districts that heavily favor GOP voters. It was an effort made possible by the new Republican majority on the North Carolina supreme court, which reversed a key ruling limiting extreme partisan gerrymandering it issued just months ago. Jackson announced he would run for attorney general in the state instead.

The Guardian spoke to Jackson about gerrymandering, what he’s learned in Congress, and his decision to leave. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You get that phone call – and you have no chance of winning re-election. What’s that like?

To be honest, we knew it was very likely to end up that way. I was not shocked. They had absolute power to draw almost any map they wanted. And we all know what absolute power does to politicians. Frankly, it would have been a shock if we hadn’t seen this level of corruption from them.

So you sort of knew that this was coming.

I didn’t know it to a certainty. And I didn’t have any advance information. I just knew the legal freedom that our court was going to grant them and I knew what their incentives were. So if you have that information you can predict the outcome.

Can I ask you what happened with the supreme court in North Carolina. Obviously, they switched their rulings on the districts within a matter of months after control of the court flipped. And some people might look at that and say that’s not surprising, the partisan makeup changes, the rulings change. Is there something there that you think people should pay more attention to?

On its face it’s deeply concerning. I don’t think you have to know much about the court or politics to see exactly what happened here. This is one of those instances where one of the most obvious explanations is simply the right one. The court was elected with a different partisan composition and they acted in a partisan way to accommodate their party. I think the simple read here is the right one.

And do you think people pay close enough attention to what’s happening in supreme court races? I mean, there was one in North Carolina that was decided by 400 votes.

I am absolutely positive that they do not. Just with my conversations with voters over the years, the judicial races are the ones furthest from people’s radar.

Why do you think that is and how do you get people to pay more attention to them?

We haven’t had partisan judicial races for a really long time in North Carolina. That’s a recent development. We’re the first state in a long time, many decades, to go from non-partisan judicial races to partisan judicial races.

So I think most people in North Carolina just grew up with an understanding that these judicial races were not partisan and were probably between judges and lawyers who wanted to be a judge. But now that’s not the case. Now these offices come with prepackaged partisan agendas as we saw with redistricting in North Carolina.

Is there any hope of fixing this problem in North Carolina?

The gerrymandering fix in North Carolina is a long-term fix. There are no immediate prospects for this because of the hurdles that you cited. The only way to mitigate it is by doubling down on our effort to get people to the polls. The only way you overcome the seawall of gerrymandering is through an energetic approach to turning out the vote, and that’s what we’re gonna do.

Going back to your district, what do you think the consequences are going to be for voters?

That’s a good question, particularly when it’s a brutal gerrymander. The state legislature basically used redistricting to take as much power away from voters as they possibly could. They found the true ceiling of how much electoral power they should shift from the voters to themselves. I don’t care which party you’re in, you really shouldn’t appreciate elections being decided for you for the rest of the decade by the state legislature drawing the map, which is exactly what happened.

Walk me through your decision to not run for this new district and to run for attorney general?

I’ve appreciated the opportunity to serve in Congress. I’ve found it highly educational and [there have been] moments where I felt really productive but I also appreciate the opportunity to serve as attorney general. The job is to protect people. It’s our state’s top prosecutor. I started my career at the district attorney’s office and it’s about guarding against consumer fraud and keeping kids safe online and combatting the fentanyl epidemic and protecting clean air and water.

One thing about the job that’s really great is that it’s really not about the type of jobs you see in Congress. It’s not so much about left versus right. It’s just about doing what’s right. Having been in a highly charged partisan environment like Congress, serving as attorney general would be completely different in a really refreshing way.

You were in Congress for a relatively short time – what are your takeaways from what you learned there? Your videos about what it’s like to be a congressman I think really struck a chord with a lot of people.

There are a lot of serious people here who want to do good work and they tend to be the people whose names you might not know. And getting to know a lot of those people and find ways to work with them has been a rewarding part of the experience.

Another rewarding part, to your point, has been learning that there’s enormous appetite by the American public for being spoken to in a calm, reasonable, sensible way about politics. That wasn’t necessarily what I expected. They’re so used to being screamed at that I sort of thought what I was offering wasn’t going to gain much traction beyond my district, beyond people who personally knew me. But as it turns out there’s huge demand for being spoken to in a normal tone of voice about what’s happening in Congress. I think that’s really encouraging.

Can I also ask you one more question about this new law that messes with the composition of local boards of elections? There’s concerns that could be used to interfere with certifying election results in other matters. Is that something that you’re concerned about and that you would be focused on as attorney general?

Any time the same group of people who just gerrymandered the heck out of the whole state say that they have some ideas about tinkering with the state board of elections, it should make the hair on the back of everyone’s neck stand up. These people are flatly not to be trusted when it comes to taking power away from the voters.