North Carolina’s judicial system consists of three distinct divisions – the Appellate Division, the Superior Court Division, and the District Court Division. Judges in all three branches are elected directly by the people, and while the latter two consist of trial courts with judges elected from individual districts, the Appellate Division – which settles only questions of law – sees its judges elected on a statewide basis. The Appellate Division consists of two distinct courts, the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals.

The North Carolina Supreme Court has existed in some form since the state’s Constitution of 1776, with its justices first elected through popular vote as a result of the Constitution of 1868. Since 1937, the court has consisted of seven justices, each of whom are elected to staggered eight-year terms with at least one seat up for election every even-numbered year. If a justice resigns, reaches mandatory retirement age, or otherwise leaves office prematurely, the governor appoints a replacement and a new election is held in the November of the next even-numbered year. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court occupies a distinct seat, with new Chief Justices generally elected or appointed from the existing pool of Associate Justices.

The following timeline, created by Politics NC, displays the name and party of each justice to have served on the North Carolina Supreme Court since 1967:

The last fifty years have seen a number of milestones on the court – its first female justice, Susie Sharp, was elected Chief Justice in 1974, and its first black justice, Henry Frye, was appointed to the same position by Governor Hunt in 1999.

The Supreme Court has also undergone a massive political realignment, representing North Carolina’s shift from a one-party state to a battleground. In 1985, Governor Martin appointed Rhoda Billings to serve as the court’s first Republican justice in contemporary history, and although she lost her reelection bid shortly after being appointed Chief Justice in 1986, her party’s presence on the court had only just begun. In 1994, two Republicans – Robert Orr and I. Beverly Lake, Jr. – each defeated Democratic incumbents to join the court, and by 2003, the GOP’s newfound strength in North Carolina had earned it all but one of the court’s seven seats.

Concerned that voters were beginning to favor Republicans over Democrats in partisan judicial elections, the state’s then-Democratic General Assembly made judicial elections nonpartisan ahead of the 2004 cycle. Democratic candidates made some gains in the succeeding nonpartisan elections, although the GOP took control of the General Assembly in 2010. With Justice Bob Edmunds (R) facing a competitive reelection bid in 2016, GOP legislators attempted to help their incumbent by switching the Supreme Court to a retention election system in which voters would simply decide whether or not to retain Edmunds for another term. The Supreme Court blocked the proposed change, and after Edmunds’ loss in 2016 gave Democrats their first majority on the court since 1998, Republican legislators opted instead to make Supreme Court elections partisan again ahead of the 2018 cycle.

The following maps, compiled by Politics NC, depict the results of the most recent eight-year Supreme Court election cycle, including the seven Supreme Court elections in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016: