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North Carolina Republican who lost key swing seat in 2022 will run for newly gerrymandered district [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2023-11-10  

Bo Hines, who was the 2022 GOP nominee for North Carolina’s swingy 13th District in the Raleigh suburbs, has announced he'll run in the new 6th District currently held by Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning—a seat located multiple districts to the west of the one he sought to represent last year as shown on the map above (click here for a larger version).

Hines ran for Congress last year while he was still in law school, and he won the crowded primary with 32% of the vote, just above the 30% needed to avoid a runoff. But while his endorsement from Donald Trump and emulation of far-right Rep. Madison Cawthorn may have helped him win the nomination, he lost the general election to Democrat Wiley Nickel by a 52-48 margin in a district Joe Biden had won just 50-48.

However, Republicans recently enacted a new gerrymander that flipped the Greensboro-based 6th District from a 56-43 win for Biden to a 57-41 margin for Trump. Whoever wins the GOP primary, which already includes former 6th District Rep. Mark Walker and High Point Mayor Jay Wagner, will be heavily favored next fall.

Once again, though, Hines' ties to the district he wants to represent are all but non-existent. The new candidate says he lives in Charlotte, which is not located in either the old 13th or the new 6th, and he's still registered to vote in a suburb of Raleigh.

However, he's no stranger to district-hopping across the Tar Heel State. Early in 2021, Hines launched a challenge to Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx in the old 5th District, which was then based in the western Piedmont region and extended to the Tennessee border. But after GOP Rep. Ted Budd announced a bid for Senate, Hines switched to what was then numbered the 13th District, a conservative seat based in the central Piedmont.

He changed gears yet again when Republicans passed a new map following the release of 2020 census data, jumping into a redrawn 7th District, which was by and large the successor to Budd's old seat. But a state court blocked that new map, calling it an "unlawful partisan gerrymander." That led Republicans to pass yet another proposal that inspired Hines to bounce over to the newest incarnation of the 6th District in the Greensboro area.

The GOP's second map, however, was likewise barred as an illegal gerrymander by the court, which instituted its own remedial plan. Hines made one last journey, trekking to the Raleigh area to run in the revised 13th District, where he finally met his fate against Nickel.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/10/2204913/-North-Carolina-Republican-who-lost-key-swing-seat-in-2022-will-run-for-newly-gerrymandered-district?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_recent_news&pm_medium=web

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