Don Davis was born in Snow Hill, a small town on the coastal plains of North Carolina. Growing up, he spent Sundays worshipping at the local Presbyterian church and summers working in the surrounding tobacco fields. At 29, he was elected Snow Hill’s youngest-ever mayor. He went on to represent the town of about 1,500 in the state legislature and then in Congress. The Democrat is now running for a third term, but in a very different district: If he wins, his constituents will no longer include his wife, his kids, or anyone else in Snow Hill.   

Davis is used to having to figure out exactly who can vote for him. The first time he was elected to Congress, in 2022, he triumphed in a district that slightly favored Democrats. The North Carolina legislature redrew it to favor Republicans, and Davis won reelection in 2024 by less than two percentage points.

Then, in the summer of 2025, President Trump called for the GOP to gerrymander as many seats as it could to protect the party’s House majority, even though redistricting is typically done only once a decade, after a census. Democrats in some states retaliated with their own gerrymanders. North Carolina was one of seven states, both red and blue, to hastily redraw its maps after Trump’s demand; four more redistricted after the Supreme Court’s April Louisiana v. Callais decision gutted the Voting Rights Act. Many of the incumbents being targeted for defeat by Republicans are Black Democrats. Davis, who had his home and base of support in surrounding Greene County cut out of his district, is one of them. But the gambit may not succeed as planned.

Republicans are forecast to gain fewer than half of the seats they expected when they redrew the maps, in large part because voters are mad—over inflation, over corruption, over the Iran war. Here in North Carolina’s First Congressional District, many have an additional cause for anger: their gerrymandered map. The state, which is among the most politically divided in America, already has district lines that give Republicans a significant edge. The congressional delegation includes just four Democrats out of 14 representatives. The GOP-dominated legislature wants to cut that to three, and has drawn lines tailored to end Davis’s congressional career. If the new boundaries of his district had existed in 2024, Trump would have won the area by almost 12 points. (He carried the old district by just three.)

The new map removed four counties with large Black populations and added six Republican-leaning ones near the state’s coast. Under the new map, the proportion of Black voters in the First District dropped from about 40 percent to about 32 percent. After the redistricting, the Cook Political Report labeled Davis “the most vulnerable House Democrat in the country.” He seemed like a goner. But recent polls show a close race, with both parties spending eye-popping amounts of money—more than $52.9 million in total, making it the most expensive House general election on record, according to the data-tracking firm AdImpact.

Democrats have represented North Carolina’s First District since 1899, but Davis has been touting his centrist voting record in Congress. He often reminds voters that he has spent nearly all of his life in eastern North Carolina. “These are tobacco-cropping hands,” he told me, holding up his palms. (Federal law requires congressional candidates to live in the state, not the district, in which they are seeking office.) Davis is running against Republican Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army colonel whom he narrowly beat in 2024. Buckhout is now trying to capitalize on the more deeply red composition of the district. “We are Republican-majority districts,” she told a crowd at a rally with President Trump and a Republican candidate in a nearby district last week. “That’s simple math. There are more of us. All you got to do is get out the vote.” After she left the stage, Trump turned to her: “You’re running against Don Davis? I hear he’s a total disaster.”

It’s unclear if Trump’s support will help her. His popularity has cratered in the state; a recent poll from Elon University shows that only 34 percent of North Carolinians approve of the job he’s doing, despite the fact that he won 51 percent of the vote in 2024. Ben Lindemann was among the North Carolinians who voted for him. But the 49-year-old told me he will likely vote for Davis this year, in part because of the way Trump has governed. “I just don’t like the way he’s ruining our country,” Lindemann said.

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

In the past, Davis could count on votes from Greene County, where he ministers at the church he grew up attending. Now he needs to win over unaffiliated voters who may have never voted for a Democrat before in areas where he is less well-known. Billboards with his face line the highway: Don Davis supports lowering costs. Thank you Representative Davis, for supporting our veterans. There’s no mention of the Democratic Party; Davis, an Air Force veteran, is running as a brand unto himself. He often cites the times he’s crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans, including to end last year’s government shutdown, to fund ICE, and to condemn “socialism in all its forms.” In 2024, the website GovTrack, which assesses politicians’ voting records, ranked Davis the most conservative Democrat in the House.

The district is among the most rural and agricultural in the state; seemingly endless fields of sweet potatoes and cotton line the sides of country roads. Davis was one of only 14 Democrats who voted in favor of this year’s Republican-sponsored Farm Bill, arguing that it would provide necessary support for the district’s economy. Farmers—particularly those who cultivate row crops such as tobacco and cotton—have been squeezed by tariffs and soaring operating costs. Thomas Joyner, a sweet-potato farmer, told me Davis is the only Democrat he’s ever voted for, because he “genuinely wants to help agriculture.” Richard Anderson, a 63-year-old who grows tobacco, told me Trump’s trade war with China destroyed the crop’s profitability by leaving a glut of product. He said he’ll be voting for Davis, even though he voted for Trump in 2024 and identifies as an independent. “I think that his district is proof that people will cross the aisle,” Anderson said.

The gerrymander has given voters another reason to back Davis. People are angry about the redrawn lines, especially Black voters who feel the redistricting targeted them. Early votes cast by Black voters in North Carolina as of Wednesday were up 57 percent compared with the same date in 2022, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida. Voting-rights advocates have said that a backlash against redistricting is driving a surge of African American turnout across the South.

At the “Unapologetically Blue” banquet thrown by the Nash County Democratic Party earlier this month, more than 400 people showed up—the most in the event’s history, according to organizers. As I wandered among the crowd, attendees kept bringing up the unfairness of redistricting. “We fought hard for our rights. All of us did,” said 69-year-old Ernestine H. Stephenson, who is Black. Cynthia Pitchford told me that she grew up in the 1970s cropping tobacco; there were, she said, few other job options available for Black people in eastern North Carolina. Decades later, when Pitchford heard Davis was running for Congress, one of the first things she liked was their shared country background. This year, she decided to volunteer for him because she was so upset about the GOP’s gerrymandering. “I knew it was a ploy to try to pull votes away from him,” she said.

[Read: The arc of the Voting Rights Act ]

I heard the same at the homecoming game of Elizabeth City State University, a historically Black university, where Davis walked the stands of the school’s football stadium in a driving rain, shaking hands with fans. He told me that people bring up redistricting all the time. “I believe the general feeling is that no one’s really asked for this,” Davis said. “I mean, people feel that they’re left out.”   

Buckhout lost to Davis in 2024 by only about 6,000 votes, and has since worked in a senior cyber-policy role in the Pentagon. She did not respond to my request for an interview, but when I talked with her supporters around the district, many said they believed she would fight socialism, which they said represents an existential threat to the country. Others applauded her military background and sense of patriotism. Buckhout spent decades in the Army and commanded an 800-person battalion in Iraq. “She’s strong and truthful,” said Rhonda Flood, a 61-year-old who has been volunteering for Buckhout’s campaign. Flood said the people she’s met while canvassing “know she’ll fight for the country, because she has.”

Buckhout faces the same problem as many other Republicans this cycle—if your message is that the country is on the right track, how do you motivate voters who are unhappy with the state of the nation to show up? Early-voting numbers indicate that, so far, Republican turnout in North Carolina is lagging. Buckhout’s answer has been to campaign hard on fears about socialism and transgender issues. At the rally with Trump, she referenced ongoing unrest in France, warning that similar chaos could come to America if voters stop choosing Republicans. “I have fought against those people, and this is no joke,” she said to cheers. (When I asked the Buckhout campaign whom she meant by “those people,” the answer was “violent extremists.”)

Buckhout has reminded voters that Davis in 2023 sponsored the Equality Act, which, if it had passed, would have banned discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. She also criticizes him for being the only member of the House to vote “present,” rather than yea or nay, on a 2025 bill that would have effectively banned trans student athletes from playing in federally funded girls’ school sports. (Davis said the issue should be left up to states, not the federal government.) Several Republicans I spoke with said they are voting for Buckhout because of her opposition to transgender athletes. (Davis has said he supports North Carolina’s ban on transgender athletes.) In 2025, Davis was one of only three Democrats who supported former Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors. When I asked Davis if he still supported the Equality Act, he said his support had “evolved.”

Davis opposed last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—which Buckhout has touted on the campaign trail for its tax cuts and other help for working families. But as I traveled North Carolina, voters told me that the cost of living is surging at a relentless pace, and they were seeing little relief.

[Read: Going hungry in Trump’s economy]

The district once seemed an easy flip for Republicans. But in a year when the price of gas has spiked, tariffs are squeezing businesses, and some undecided voters are still trying to get to know the candidates, a redistricting plan that appeared to be a sure thing could backfire. If it does, Davis said he will leave Snow Hill and find a house within the district’s new lines.

John Quillin thought America’s Middle Eastern wars were safely in the past. He spent two decades in the Navy, enlisting not long before the September 11 attacks and retiring as a chief petty officer about 18 months after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan. “Now we’re right back in it,” he told me, “and it’s taking a huge toll on everybody.”

I met Quillin as he handed out Democratic sample ballots outside an early-voting location in Chesapeake, Virginia. He is one of more than 80,000 veterans—along with more than 30,000 active-duty and reserve personnel—who live in Virginia’s Second Congressional District, where the debate over the Iran war is about far more than rising gas prices. The district wraps around Naval Station Norfolk, home of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command. Since 2008, the seat has toggled between the major parties four times, and the results have mirrored overall House control. Polls show a tight race with money pouring in from both sides.

Both Jen Kiggans, the Republican incumbent, and Elaine Luria, the Democratic challenger, are veterans who have centered their campaigns on the military, but in very different ways. Luria, a former Navy commander, is telling voters that the conflict in Iran has needlessly weakened the military and is endangering strategic goals in other parts of the world. Iran is a war of choice, she argues, that is taking a toll on service members through extended deployments, even as costs balloon and the timeline for bringing it to a close keeps shifting. People are worried about their friends and family members on active duty, she told me, and are “concerned about the fact that we are running the fleet into the ground.”

Kiggans, a former naval-helicopter pilot, presents herself as a candidate who can work with the opposing party, and she has broken with the administration to champion an offshore wind development. But she is putting no distance between herself and Trump on the war, echoing his insistence that America must prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Kiggans told the Associated Press last week that Luria has “chosen the side of Iran” and that “it’s like the Democrats are now siding with the Iranians and not standing with our military.”

Many Republican voters in the district told me they agree with her support for Trump’s war, and are willing to endure temporary hardships if it means long-term success. Lance Lesher, a Navy veteran and the chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach, told me that Iran has been at war with the United States since the country’s 1979 revolution—and that Trump was right to act when he did.

“I mean, high prices for gasoline—no one likes that,” the 59-year-old Lesher told me. “I think most people, though, at least most older people, have the perspective—is it worth it? Is it worth paying $5 a gallon for gasoline for six months for Iran to not have a nuclear weapon?”

Luria is wagering that undecided voters who are now paying more to fill their gas tanks and grocery carts won’t agree with that premise. At a meet and greet in Suffolk, Elisha Harris, a pioneering local football coach, started a call-and-response that summed up Luria’s pitch: “Gas was three-fifty. Now it’s over four. Diesel hit a record. We can’t take much more. Every fill-up’s a drain—”

“It ain’t been the same, without Elaine!” the crowd responded.

[Read: Trump is considering a plan to strike Iran before the midterms]

Luria was first elected in 2018, turning the district blue amid an anti-Trump wave. She held the seat two years later, but Kiggans then beat her by three points in 2022 after tying the Democrat to the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Luria is now hoping to return the favor, by capitalizing on the unpopularity of Trump’s foreign policy.  

Kiggans sits on the House Armed Services Committee, which has not held a public hearing on the Iran war since May 19. Calls for greater House oversight surged this spring amid reports of deteriorating conditions aboard aircraft carriers, including the Norfolk-based USS Gerald Ford, which took part in the opening days of the conflict. The carrier returned to Virginia in May after an 11-month deployment that was beset by plumbing issues and a fire that left hundreds of sailors without a place to sleep. When asked in March about the ship’s reported maintenance issues, Kiggans told a local news station that she was concerned about them, but that “this is not Carnival Cruise—this is the U.S. Navy.” It’s a line Luria repeats often, claiming that Kiggans has failed to provide oversight as the war degrades military readiness and needlessly endangers lives.

“I know the number of veterans in this room who have served in uniform, like I have. And we have our sailors deploying in harm’s way,” Luria told the crowd in Suffolk. “The lack of sensitivity and compassion, her inability, on the Armed Services Committee, to stand up and ask tough questions of our military leadership—I mean, the silence is deafening.”

The idea that Congress has abdicated oversight of the military repeatedly came up in my conversations with Democratic voters across the district. Many said that they were proud of their service and hold the military in the highest regard, but that patriotism also means criticizing the country and pointing out its mistakes. Mike Carter, who spent years flying F/A-18 Super Hornets, told me he’d come to the Luria event because he worried that the military and country were losing global respect. Marsha Simmons, who cast an early ballot for Luria, told me that her husband served in the Navy, and she worried that today’s Department of Defense was not taking national security seriously enough. Donna Grieco said that she loved her eight years working as a Navy nurse, and that the experience made her especially concerned about the long deployments sailors are enduring. “I don’t agree with the war,” she told me. “And I feel like the demands we are putting on our sailors—it’s not necessary.”

Not every veteran sees it that way. Over Mike Cassidy’s 22-year Navy career, he sailed the Baltic Sea and helped fight ISIS. He was deployed five times to the Persian Gulf. Cassidy’s service convinced him that American adversaries such as Iran need to be confronted. “I know what we’ve been up against in that part of the world,” he told me at a Republican Party barbecue. “I can tell you that we’re doing the right thing.”  

[Read: Trump is preparing for a long war]

At 9 a.m. on a Saturday, the Lockside Bar and Grill in Chesapeake was packed with people decked out in glittery hats and red, white, and blue. Kiggans stood at a podium flanked by two American flags. “My oldest just had his first flight in an F/A-18 this week!” she announced. People whooped. “So many of us have family members that serve, and have kids that we’re leaving this great country to,” she went on. “It is the greatest country in the world. We’ve got to keep it that way.”   

At times, the rally seemed less about Kiggans than about Trump. His core supporters cheered when Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio took the stage and recited a list of MAGA world’s greatest hits: the Steele dossier, Jack Smith, Fani Willis. “Thanks for helping the president,” Jordan said to applause. “Talk about someone doing what he said he would do.”

Kiggans has voted six times against resolutions that would have directed Trump to end the war with Iran. She declined an interview request, but in April, she said on a conservative talk-radio show that she “couldn’t be a stauncher supporter” of military action against Iran. When I asked the campaign whether she still held that position, Kiggans said in a statement that she wants the war to end quickly, but “Iran has been an enemy of the United States for decades and has been the sponsor of terrorism and terrorists around the world who have killed or injured thousands of Americans. Iran can never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.”

The race will likely hinge on a small number of voters who have not yet made up their mind. Kiggans knows this and has avoided uncomfortable questions about how the war is going. At an event in Virginia Beach this month with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kiggans was asked by a reporter if the war has had an impact on her campaign. A staff member quickly cut in: “We’re not going to talk about that.”

*Illustration sources: Peter Casey / The Virginian-Pilot / Tribune News Service / Getty; Nathan Howard / Getty; AFP / Getty; Atta Kenare  / AFP / Getty.