Sixth District Congressional Rep. Kathy Manning, on Thursday, Dec. 7, announced that she would not be running for re-election.

Manning has served as the Sixth District Congresswoman since 2020.

The press release states that Manning will not run “under the egregiously gerrymandered congressional districts, which the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly passed into law …”

What goes around comes around. In 202,0 it was Republican Sixth District Rep. Mark Walker who announced he would not be running for re-election because the Sixth District had been redrawn from one that favored Republicans to one that a Republican couldn’t win.

In 2020, Manning ran in the newly drawn Sixth District and easily won election to Congress. Manning won in 2022 in a redrawn Sixth District that still gave the Democratic candidate a huge advantage.

Now the congressional districts have been redrawn again and the Republicans in the state legislature switched the Sixth from a Democratic district to a Republican district.

However, there is a legal challenge to the congressional districts drawn by the Republicans for the 2024 election and, should that challenge be successful, Manning has left the door open for her to get back in the race.

To come full circle, former Sixth District Rep. Mark Walker has filed to run in the newly drawn Sixth District and at this point is considered by political pundits to be the front runner in the Republican primary.  As Manning correctly noted in her press release, a Democratic candidate doesn’t have much chance in the Sixth District general election. What that means is the real election, the vote that will determine who will represent the Sixth District in Congress will be in the Republican primary. Just as in 2020 and 2022, the vote that mattered in the Sixth District election was in the Democratic primary.

In the press release Manning states, “Republicans have blatantly rigged the map against Democrats by splitting the City of Greensboro into three pieces and combining each piece with far-flung counties, with the majority of Greensboro being drawn into a district that goes all the way to the border with Tennessee. The maps separate the heart of Greensboro from High Point and Winston-Salem, destroying a Triad District, a community of interest that deserves representation. Remarkably, and not coincidentally, the newly drawn Sixth District gives a sixteen-point advantage to a Republican candidate over a Democratic candidate.”

In 2020, when Manning first won the Sixth District Congressional seat, the Democratic candidate had a 10 point advantage over a Republican candidate.