The Republican-led South Carolina Senate voted Tuesday against advancing a new congressional map, ending for now a last-minute effort to redraw the state’s districts before this year’s election. The defeat came as early voting had already begun for the previously scheduled June primary.
The map would have eliminated South Carolina’s single majority-Black district, now represented by longtime Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, and lawmakers also wanted to push the affected races to an August primary. Republican state Sen. Richard Cash said, “Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” as the chamber turned aside the proposal.
That vote closed the latest chapter in a fight that has stretched across the country and into state capitols this year. South Carolina is one of several states that rushed to take up new district lines after a major Supreme Court ruling on racial gerrymandering, and the push has unfolded against the broader effort that began last summer when Donald Trump urged Republican-led states to redraw maps to protect the party’s slim House majority.
The South Carolina House approved the map last week, but resistance in the Senate had been building for days. Republican state Sen. Tom Davis said an earlier redistricting process took nine months of consideration, while the current push moved ahead over the course of a few weeks. He also said, “We have completely outsourced our constitutional obligation to prepare a congressional redistricting map to a consultant in Washington, D.C. We have no idea, no idea how that map was created,” a sharp rebuke of the rushed process.
Another Republican senator, Shane Massey, defended the broader value of competitive politics. He said, “I believe that our state is stronger with vibrant parties. I think we, as a whole, are stronger when we have a clash of ideas. I think that’s true at the national level. I think it’s true at the state level. We are stronger when we have a clash of ideas and we can discuss those policy goals,” and added, “Republicans are stronger when the Democrat Party is vibrant and viable.”
Election officials had already warned that the changes would come at a steep cost and on a tight schedule. Conway Belangia told a state Senate committee that it would take an additional $6 million to implement the district lines for this year’s election. The concern was not abstract: voters were already casting ballots, and changing the map would have required a scramble to reset a contest that was underway.
The South Carolina standoff now leaves the current congressional map in place unless lawmakers return to the issue later. Similar battles are still moving elsewhere, with Florida and Tennessee enacting new maps in recent weeks and Louisiana Republicans advancing their own proposal. On Tuesday, a panel of federal judges blocked Alabama from using a Republican-drawn map, and Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said the state would appeal to the Supreme Court.
For now, the Senate vote means the state’s election calendar stays intact and the effort to redraw South Carolina’s congressional lines has run into the one obstacle that mattered most: lawmakers were unwilling to stop an election that had already begun.
