But longtime observers of North Carolina government say Republicans’ actions are without recent precedent. And court rulings seem to affirm their point. The United States Supreme Court said this year the legislature created illegal racial gerrymanders in drawing election maps for Congress and its own members in 2011. The Supreme Court also sustained a lower-court ruling that North Carolina’s 2013 voter ID law was unconstitutional and discriminated against blacks “with almost surgical precision.”

“Anybody who has been around for a while will tell you what’s happened in the last few years is on an entirely different level than anything done before,” said Michael Crowell, a former associate director of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, who is unaffiliated with a party. “The common feature here is that so much of it seems to be designed to manipulate the election process.”

Mr. Cooper has been in hand-to-hand combat with the legislature all year. State courts have blocked some of the laws Republicans passed to take away his powers.

The State Senate’s powerful leader, Phil Berger, a frequent nemesis of the governor’s, said in a statement that the smaller appeals court would be more efficient and stop the governor from filling three vacant Republican seats in what he called a “partisan court-packing scheme.”

“This legislature doesn’t like the courts, doesn’t like the judges on the court,” said Mr. Crowell, who headed a commission on improving the courts in the 1990s. “It wants to change who they are, and they don’t seem to care how they go about it.”

Maps for new districts for the state courts were approved by the State House on a party-line vote this month. During debate, Democrats said 65 percent of African-American judges would be “double-bunked,” or placed in districts facing another incumbent, which would reduce judicial diversity.