Is Chaos the Point in South Carolina?

Seems to be, but overzealous Republican state legislators steamrolling new congressional maps onto baffled voters may end up in a world of hurt.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/21/is-chaos-the-point-south-carolina-congress-redistricting-clyburn/


Protesters gather outside the South Carolina State House, May 14, 2026, in Columbia, South Carolina. Credit: Jeffrey Collins/AP Photo

After the Supreme Court gutted voting rights in Louisiana v. Callais, it was all over but the shouting. This week in South Carolina, state lawmakers are proceeding with the Great Erasure of African American voters without the legal hindrances of the Voting Rights Act, that now timeworn relic of the late Great Society. Their goal? To create a congressional dream team of seven GOP House members by zeroing out Rep. James Clyburn, a longtimer with 33 years in Congress—and the only Black Democrat to represent South Carolina in the House in state history. Indeed, Clyburn is the ninth Black person to represent the state in Congress; the first eight were all Republicans elected during Reconstruction in the late 19th century, before Jim Crow ended Black voting in the South, and when the parties had opposite views on civil rights compared to today. (Clyburn himself recently wrote a book about his predecessors.)

The modern GOP would accomplish the same goal as their Dixiecrat forebears by cracking the Sixth Congressional District, where African Americans constitute a plurality of voters, across several rural, largely white districts. Black South Carolinians would be able to vote, but absent the Voting Rights Act, they would not have any chance of winning political representation. After hours of debate, the state House passed the new maps; the Senate will take them up. Last year, the Supreme Court of South Carolina threw out a partisan gerrymandering challenge brought by the League of Women Voters of South Carolina, a ruling that found after Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that partisan gerrymandering is a nonjusticiable political issue.

Now with Callais fresh out off the Supreme Court docket, Republican state legislators have new claims and aims, says Jace Woodrum, executive director of the ACLU of South Carolina. “They swore that their goal was only to execute a partisan gerrymander; what we are seeing now is lawmakers going back on their word and saying this a racial gerrymander—and the Supreme Court has said that that is no longer permissible in Callais—and we need to redraw our maps.” South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Henry McMaster called a special legislative session to take up new maps, the last-ditch option after five Republican state senators joined their Democratic colleagues to set up the supermajority needed to derail an earlier vote on redistricting. The governor had said he’d do no such thing.

But McMaster was one of the first state GOP leaders to get on the Trump train in 2016. When President Trump says jump, Republicans leap into action, in this case by flip-flopping, though McMaster has denied caving to the White House. In the special session, GOP leaders only need a majority vote to create their preferred maps. But they might get more than they bargained for. It is already quite late on the electoral calendar, and South Carolina is about to find out what electoral chaos looks like. Designing a new congressional map to erase one Black Democrat and to disperse the voters who’ve kept him in office across various geographies comes with high costs for Republicans.

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