COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Senate on Thursday adopted a congressional map expected to protect the 6-1 Republican advantage in the U.S. House for years to come.
The upper chamber passed the plan 26-15, along party lines, after nearly five hours of debate.
Unless the House concurs with the Senate's map, which is a possibility, the chambers will now need to hash out the differences between their adopted proposals before moving forward with a single redrawn map.
Regardless of where they land, the final map is likely to draw a legal challenge. The constitutionality of South Carolina's maps have been challenged in each of the last six decennial redistricting cycles, including a pending suit over the new state House map.
The Senate congressional map adopted Thursday is a least-change plan that closely resembles the current congressional map and recently passed House proposal.
Senate Republicans have touted those similarities as a strength because the vast majority of South Carolinians would remain in their current districts. By retaining constituent consistency and preserving the cores of congressional districts, the map adheres to traditional redistricting principles, GOP state Sen. Chip Campsen said.
Campsen, a Senate redistricting committee member who presented the plan to the upper chamber Thursday, said its resemblance to the current map was also beneficial because that map was precleared by the U.S. Department of Justice and withstood a legal challenge.
Democrats and public interest groups, such as the League of Women Voters of South Carolina and American Civil Liberties Union, take a different view. They criticize the map as a racial gerrymander that carves up the area around Charleston along racial lines and leaves the state without a single competitive congressional seat.
The 1st Congressional District, currently held by U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., has been highly competitive during the past two election cycles, but stands to become a more solidly Republican seat under the new map, according to an analysis of past election data.
Campsen preemptively addressed those concerns on the floor Thursday. He denied charges the Senate map was gerrymandered and presented data he said debunked those allegations.
The 1st District, he said, would become only slightly more Republican under the adopted Senate plan. The coastal district went for Donald Trump by about 6 points in 2020, and as redrawn, would have favored the former Republican president by about 8.5 points. Dave's Redistricting, a popular map drawing and analysis tool that uses multiple past elections to calculate a seat's partisan lean gives Republicans a 13-point advantage in the redrawn 1st District compared to an 11-point edge currently.
Campsen also denied the Senate map's split of Charleston County between the 1st and 6th congressional districts was racially motivated.
Critics have held up the split, which is historical, as an example of racial gerrymandering because North Charleston is excised from its geographic neighbors on the coast and placed in the 6th District, a majority-minority district represented by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn that stretches to Columbia.
Campsen said race was not considered when that portion of the map was drawn and presented data showing the percentage of Black voters in the 1st District remained virtually identical between the current map and the adopted Senate map. The percentage of Black voters in the 6th District actually decreased in the Senate plan, belying claims that Republicans packed the district with Black voters to dilute their voting strength elsewhere in the state, he asserted.
"Certainly the allegations of packing are not panned out when you look at the statistics," Campsen said.
Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a Democrat, criticized Republicans' strict adherence to the current congressional map, calling it a racially divisive "Frankenstein monster," and presented an alternative proposal that would have kept Charleston County whole in the 1st District.
Unlike other plans that used the existing congressional map as a starting point and varied only slightly from that baseline, Harpootlian's map represented a fundamental revision that would have substantially altered all seven of South Carolina's congressional districts and created two competitive U.S. House districts — one in the Lowcountry and another in the Pee Dee.
Senators voted along party lines to table the map and several others put forward by Democrats.
