Kate Barr has no chance of winning this election, and she knows it. Barr is running as a Democrat for North Carolina’s 37th state senate district. If things go as expected, she’ll get around 30 or 35 percent of the vote.
That’s because Barr is running in a gerrymandered district. To have a chance of winning, Barr would need an astonishing statistical anomaly—a “99th percentile kind of blue wave,” as she told Reason, to get elected. But just because Barr’s campaign is doomed doesn’t mean she isn’t going to have fun on the way to defeat.
“I’ve been training to lose this Senate race for all of my life,” reads the glib ‘about’ section on Barr’s campaign website. “I voted for Al Gore in 2000, cheered for Carolina basketball during the Matt Doherty era, and watch the Carolina Panthers on Sundays (shudder).”
Barr told Reason that she was motivated to run after watching anti-gerrymandering efforts face losses at the Supreme Court and state-level courts. Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court—following a flip from Democratic to Republican control—reversed its own decision that had ruled partisan gerrymandering illegal. In the new map that followed, the heavily democratic Charlotte suburb Barr lives in was redrawn to be included in a district dominated by the much more rural and conservative Iredell County.
“When I learned about gerrymandering at that point,” says Barr, “I was like, ‘this is what’s making our politics feel so extreme.”
These changes haven’t just affected state-level races like Barr’s. In 2023, the Republican-controlled state house approved a Congressional map that will likely flip three Democratic seats—halving the state’s Democratic representation in Congress.
Partisan gerrymandering—drawing an electoral map to make uncompetitive districts—happens across the political spectrum. Even in states where redistricting is done by a bipartisan commission, gerrymandering is still frequently used to keep incumbent politicians in power.
“When you let incumbents make the rules, they make the rules for incumbents,” says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “Generally when it’s done by insiders, the interests of the voters in getting a lot of competitive districts or in getting simply neutral, impartial districts where politics was not part of what made them draw the lines, gets kicked aside and you get different degrees of artificiality, which are depending on a combination of how shameless they are and whether or not there are any legal constraints.”
“I decided to run specifically because it’s a losing race,” Barr says. “I really believe that we can’t fight things that we won’t face. And so, I had wanted someone to run in a gerrymandered district and be honest about what that means. And I then sort of realized that I might have to be the one that did it.” Barr told Reason she decided to go all in on the frank marketing strategy after a friend suggested her slogan. “We were joking around about what it would mean to run a losing campaign and just brainstorming all these different truly hilarious kinds of taglines and slogans that you can use when you just come out of the gate as a loser. And she said, ‘clear eyes, full hearts can’t win.’ And I was like, ‘my God, we have to do it.’ And so I filed two days later.”
Barr says she wants to raise awareness about gerrymandering while also keeping a positive outlook. “Gerrymandering and its impacts are very serious, but that doesn’t mean that we have to be,” she says. “In North Carolina, we have kind of a long road to getting fair maps back and we can walk that road joyfully and have a good time and still make a difference. And I personally am exhausted from all of the crisis aversion, fear-based political messaging that is happening really all the time, but especially right now…being serious all the time will cause people to wear out.”
Barr says that she’s had a positive reception even from many Republicans living in her district. “The incumbents’ ability to keep their job is dependent on them making the mapmakers happy. And so even Republicans in my district feel ignored in this system,” she told Reason.
When asked what she would do if she ended up winning her race in November, Barr laughed. “Something truly bizarre would have to happen for me to win,” she said. “But I’ll go to Raleigh and represent this district with the best that I’ve got.”
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