The Supreme Court’s decision in April to strike down a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana as a racial gerrymander set off a redistricting frenzy across the South. Republican lawmakers in Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee moved with alacrity, changing filing deadlines and voting dates to eliminate formerly protected Democratic districts ahead of this fall’s midterms.
South Carolina appeared poised to follow suit. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster called a special session for lawmakers to approve a new map boxing out the state’s lone Democratic congressman, veteran Rep. James Clyburn.
But this week, the Palmetto State’s redistricting attempt ran aground – with some Republicans in the state Senate joining Democrats in declining to move forward with the House-passed map. The outcome underscored the complexities and conflicting motivations involved when determining the makeup of districts and what ultimately benefits a state.
Why We Wrote This
Some Southern states moved to eliminate majority-minority districts in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling last month. But others are holding off for now – underscoring the complexities and political risks.
Some Republican lawmakers balked at the cost to taxpayers of rescheduling South Carolina’s June 9 primary. There were also thorny legal questions, given that early voting began on Tuesday.
Above all, some worried that the new, hastily drawn map could backfire. Mr. Clyburn, who is running for an 18th term, until recently was the No. 3 Democrat in the House. For decades, he has funneled federal funds to his state and played a kingmaker role in Democratic primaries, including in 2020 when he backed Joe Biden. On Friday, Mr. Clyburn was hosting his annual “fish fry,” a fixture of the presidential primary calendar for Democrats exploring or seeking a White House run. If Democrats take control of the House this fall – or the White House in 2028 – it’s easy to see how South Carolina could benefit from still having him in Washington.
And spreading out all of Mr. Clyburn’s voters into Republican districts could potentially have tipped one or even two of those seats to Democrats, especially in a wave election. While South Carolina’s proposed new districts all looked solidly Republican on paper, that might have changed if outrage over the process spurred Black voters to turn out en masse, says Claire Wofford, a political scientist at the College of Charleston.
“When you mess with James Clyburn in South Carolina,” she says, “you make a lot of minority voters really angry.”
To be sure, the redistricting fight is far from over in South Carolina and other states that have declined to act ahead of this year’s elections. The Supreme Court decision weakened a key section of the Voting Rights Act that had put guardrails around minority communities that historically elect Democrats. As a result, the Congressional Black Caucus says 19 of its 58 members could lose their seats over the next few years. All are Democrats; the four Black Republicans in the House are all retiring or running for other offices.
Jaime Harrison, who ran for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina in 2020 and is a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, says GOP lawmakers “believe they have been given a green light” to break up communities. This should concern all Americans, he says, but it is “deeply personal” for Black voters in the South. “We know the history of literacy tests, poll taxes, racial gerrymanders, and systems designed to reduce our political voice,” he said in a text. “That is why this moment carries so much weight.”
Conservatives argue that drawing district lines based on race is actually discriminatory. Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Louisiana v. Callais decision that states had been forced by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”
Majority-minority districts were originally designed to ensure voters from racial minority groups had political representation, not necessarily to change the racial makeup of Congress, says David Lublin, the chair of the department of government at American University who studies majority-minority districts. The result, though, was a steady increase in the number of Black lawmakers. Of the 40 non-white federal lawmakers currently from the South, 35 represent majority-minority districts and nearly all are Democrats.
In recent years, more Black candidates have won federal elections from majority-white or racially mixed districts with solid Democratic majorities, notes Professor Lublin. But in much of the South, “the linkage between party and race is pretty tight.” That makes it easier for Republicans to draw district lines that maximize partisan advantage and dilute minority representation, as Tennessee recently did in Memphis, drawing out a majority-minority district represented by the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.
Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor
Still, some majority-minority districts might have cost the Democratic Party pick-up opportunities by concentrating its voters too heavily in one place, he says. “It wasn’t necessarily helpful to them.”
Indeed, not all South Carolina Democrats want to leave Mr. Clyburn’s 6th Congressional District as is.
The last time the state redrew its maps, in 2022, Lincolnville, a small town outside Charleston, was moved out of the 1st Congressional District and into the 6th. Before that, the 1st had been a swing district – represented over the past decade by Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham and then Republican Rep. Nancy Mace.
A lawsuit filed by civil rights groups challenged the 2022 map as racially discriminatory because it moved 30,000 Black voters out of the 1st District to make it safe for Republicans. A federal court ruled unanimously in favor of the litigants in 2023. But the Supreme Court overturned the ruling on appeal, leaving the map in place.
As a result, Lincolnville, a community founded in 1867 by former slaves on land bought from a railroad company, was drawn into the district that’s been represented since 1992 by Mr. Clyburn.
Democrats in the state offer conflicting views on whether that redraw was helpful or harmful.
Enoch Dickerson III, the mayor of Lincolnville, was delighted with the new map. He had never met Ms. Mace, but found Mr. Clyburn was receptive to what his town needed. Last year, it was awarded a $4.1 million grant to renovate a historic school building that is now the town hall. “It’s been neglected for many, many years,” the mayor says. The renovation “is all because of Congressman James Clyburn.”
Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor
The prospect of being moved back into a Republican-held district, if not this cycle then possibly in the next one, makes Mr. Dickerson wince. “I just feel this is unfair,” he said.
But the backroom dealings that put Lincolnville in Mr. Clyburn’s district clearly benefited Ms. Mace, who coasted to reelection in 2022 by 14 percentage points, after winning by just one percentage point in 2020. It also made Mr. Clyburn’s seat safer by increasing the Black voting-age population in his district.
Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a veteran Black Democratic state legislator, says the 2022 map closed off opportunities for her party to gain seats.
She says she thinks the map Republicans were contemplating adopting for this fall, while it ostensibly would create seven Republican districts, could actually have resulted in five GOP and two Democratic seats, in a state that cast 40% of its votes for Kamala Harris in 2024. “Were there not such a commitment to pack voters of color into one district, this could easily have come about back in 2020,” she says.
“I’m not focused on maintaining power for an individual,” Ms. Cobb-Hunter adds. “What I am focused on is the state as a whole and making sure that voters around the state are adequately represented, whether those are voters of color or not.”