South Carolina Senate rejects Trump-backed redistricting push before midterms

Early voting had already started when South Carolina lawmakers lost the chance to rewrite the state’s congressional map in time for the 2026 midterms, a sharp example of how election mechanics can neutralize late political pressure. The Republican-led Senate rejected a Trump-backed push to redraw districts that would have targeted Rep. Jim Clyburn and put all seven of the state’s U.S. House seats in Republican hands.

The effort centered on South Carolina’s lone Democratic district, Clyburn’s seat in the 6th District. Six of the state’s seven congressional districts are already held by Republicans, and the proposed map from the National Republican Redistricting Trust would have turned the full delegation red. Republicans were also trying to cancel the existing congressional primary elections and replace them with a new vote under revised lines, but that plan collided with the fact that voters were already casting ballots.

The timing mattered as much as the politics. Gov. Henry McMaster had called lawmakers back to Columbia for a special session after the normal legislative year ended May 14, but the calendar kept tightening. Reuters reported that an earlier Senate vote on May 12 fell two votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to extend the session, and on May 26 a procedural vote to end debate failed 24-20, effectively killing the effort before the midterms. The Senate then adjourned until June 10, closing the door on redistricting for 2026.

Richard Cash, the GOP state senator, said voters were already going to the polls and that his conscience and common sense would not let him stop an election already underway. Clyburn cast one of the first early ballots in Orangeburg and said he would run for reelection regardless of how the district was drawn, adding that he was fine with a district that was “Trump plus 20.”

The failed push fit into a larger Republican effort to redraw maps ahead of the next federal election cycle. South Carolina’s drive was renewed after the U.S. Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, and it came after the state’s existing map had already survived Supreme Court review in 2024 as a political gerrymander. Republicans have also moved aggressively elsewhere, with Tennessee passing a new map and Louisiana and Alabama delaying primaries to give lawmakers time to redraw lines. On the same day South Carolina’s effort collapsed, a federal panel in Alabama blocked a GOP-drawn map, saying it intentionally discriminated based on race.