The South Carolina senators who broke ranks this week to block a new congressional map that President Donald Trump wants insist they’re loyal Republicans, but they cite concerns about the rushed redistricting process and the primary ballots that voters had already cast.
A more quietly looming factor: fears about what could happen to their own seats down the road if they broke up the heavily blue U.S. House district occupied for decades by Rep. James Clyburn.
The state Senate adjourned Tuesday without passing the redistricting bill, effectively guaranteeing there won’t be a new congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The new map was an explicit effort to oust Clyburn, the Democratic stalwart and lone African American among the seven members of the U.S. House representing a state that is about one-fourth Black.
Whether it was idealism, pragmatism, wariness of Clyburn’s clout or even some chafing at taking orders from Washington, the decision by those dozen senators has set South Carolina apart in a primary season dominated by redistricting.
South Carolina’s proposed map was part of the GOP’s broader and mostly successful effort to gerrymander more House seats before the general election in November. In Republican statehouse after Republican statehouse, those efforts have run into little resistance, with the exception of Indiana, where GOP state representatives who bucked Trump’s redistricting directive paid the price in their primaries.
In South Carolina, the state House fell in line. It was the state Senate, where lawmakers aren’t up for re-election this year, where the map ran into problems.
Earlier this month, five Republicans in the state Senate, including the majority leader, rejected an attempt by their colleagues to discuss a new map that had been presented to legislators by Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust.
Republican Gov. Henry McMaster called a special session anyway, and early last week the map began making its way through the legislature.
In the meantime, early voting began, highlighted by a huge turnout Tuesday, the first day of in-person voting. More than 56,000 people voted that day, according to data from the South Carolina Elections Commission. MS NOW saw hundreds of people funneling into early voting locations through Columbia, braving thunderstorms to cast ballots in what African American lawmakers dubbed “Black Tuesday.”
“It didn’t go without notice that there was a record turnout,” said state Sen. Tom Davis, who opposed the redistricting effort from the start and is one of a handful of Republican state legislators, officials and consultants who spoke to MS NOW.
“I think people felt differently once early voting began,” Davis added of his Republican colleagues.
For weeks, South Carolina Republicans have been uneasy about redrawing congressional lines so close to the June 9 primary.
Multiple Republican state senators pointed to a May 12 appearance by Kincaid in front of a state House subcommittee, in which Kincaid spoke for less than eight minutes and left without taking questions, citing a timing conflict.
“He never made himself available to the Senate. I have no idea how to reach him,” Davis said.
Kincaid told MS NOW he had made it clear that he was willing to speak to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which heard hours of public testimony about the map last week. “Committee staff informed me I was not needed,” he said on Wednesday.
Even some Republicans who voted in favor of the map resented the influence federal officials and Washington insiders had on the process.
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey has said Trump called him about supporting the bill, while Davis told MS NOW he was contacted early on by Matt Brasseaux, a White House aide.
“I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that the White House may be telling South Carolina what we’re going to do with our congressional seats. That bothered me greatly,” said Republican state Sen. JD Chaplin, who nevertheless voted repeatedly to advance the bill because he thought the new lines would help his district, northeast of Columbia.
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Chaplin said he blamed McMaster for not acting earlier this year to try to redraw district lines.
State Rep. Luke Rankin, who co-sponsored the new congressional map in the House, was livid with his colleagues in the Senate.
“What we saw in the state Senate today was weak-kneed Republicans that caved under the pressure from Democrats,” Rankin told MS NOW late Tuesday.
Rankin hopes the Republicans who killed the map for the 2026 cycle will face retribution at the polls, similar to what Indiana Republicans who defied Trump faced in primaries earlier this month.
State senators will be up for re-election in 2028.
“I think the president and Republicans are disgruntled over what the Senate just did,” Rankin said. “You’ll see a lot of backlash, and I think it will cost some of these senators their seats.”
The flip side of breaking up the concentration of Democratic voters in Clyburn’s district, of course, is that they wind up in congressional districts that are currently heavily red, making it slightly trickier for Republican members of Congress seeking re-election. That could play a part in when and whether Republicans revisit the map.
Clyburn himself noted that his district, which stretches from Charleston and other stretches of the coast inland to the Columbia area, is about 45% Black, yet he routinely gets re-elected with north of 60% of the vote.
“It must mean that I’m getting some votes from people who are not African American, and that’s a fact. I’m supported by Blacks and whites, Democrats and Republicans and independents,” he told MS NOW before the special session ended.
“And I don’t know how you decide that a state with 27% African Americans deserves zero African Americans in their representation.”
While state Senate Republicans retreated to their home districts, some Democrats hung around the statehouse to celebrate their victory Tuesday afternoon.
“We had a bipartisan group of senators who understood that, even if redistricting needs to be looked at, the timing was inappropriate,” state Sen. Tameika Isaac Devine said.
Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.
Will McDuffie is a reporter for MS NOW.