“Be careful what you pray for …” —Rep. James Clyburn

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.)

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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.

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.

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.

A state primary season conducted under duress is on its way to a first-order public relations disaster. Absentee ballots are on their way back to election officials. Early voting starts after Memorial Day. The June 9 primary could move to mid-August, costing state and county taxpayers millions—this in a fiscal environment where states deprived of federal dollars are already pressed to make ends meet.

Active military members, including troops deployed to the Middle East, would face disenfranchisement: Either their ballots would be discarded, or they’d be unable to cast a ballot if the date shifts and they’ve been deployed elsewhere. Then there are the candidates themselves, who are already fundraising and door-knocking and who may have to refile their paperwork.

All this Clyburn-focused turmoil comes when Democrats aren’t competitive statewide in South Carolina. The year 1999 was the last time a Democrat moved into the governor’s mansion. Statewide offices are held by Republicans. Though South Carolina has major industry sectors—aerospace, automotive, food manufacturing, life sciences in the Upstate region—it’s primarily rural and doesn’t have the swing-state dynamics of neighboring Georgia or North Carolina. The state lacks large major metro areas like Atlanta or Durham or Charlotte that trend Democratic.

But for how long? South Carolina is the fastest-growing state in the country, a favorite of Northeastern and Midwestern retirees along with younger people seeking a warmer climate. Some Southerners are even looking for slightly cooler temperatures and a lower cost of living. In the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey, North Carolina ranked number one in South Carolina in-migration relocation followed by Florida, Georgia, California, Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Washington state.

It’s not clear yet how these demographic shifts will affect the state politics, much less the maps that Republicans are knocking themselves out to pass. But they could energize the Democratic Party and add some heft to Clyburn’s warnings to Republican state lawmakers that new maps might not produce the results they’ve prayed on.

Gerrymandering could also backfire on Republicans and the unassailable 6-1 advantage they have in the House right now. Forge ahead with the 7-0 plan, and South Carolina’s House delegation could shift to 5-2 simply by spreading Democratic voters among other Republican areas during a Democratic wave election. Add in Democratic-voting transplants, and the GOP creators of the most gerrymandered state in the country aren’t counting very well.

On that Clyburn and state Sen. A. Shane Massey (R-Edgefield), the Senate majority leader, agree. “I’ve told the press a number of times, I think if you get cute with this you could end up in a 5-2 scenario,” Massey said during remarks last week from the Senate floor. To avoid elevating Hakeem Jeffries to Speaker of the U.S. House, he warned that South Carolina needs to go with a sure thing, a 6-1 map.

He noted that Alabama, which also has seven seats, had created two court-ordered Black congressional districts and has now returned to a 6-1 map. Massey telegraphed obliquely that having one Democrat in the delegation means somebody in the White House will pick up the phone when the Republicans are out of power.

Massey is a self-described “rabid partisan,” along with his Senate colleagues. “Most people in South Carolina think we’re freakin’ crazy,” he said at one point. But even Massey voted against the redistricting push. He’s less concerned about Democrats than he is about getting this message across to voters “in the middle” who are conservative but don’t always vote Republican.

And he made plain one of the GOP’s biggest fears. “I also think one side effect of this, very candidly, is that you’re going to motivate Black turnout.” Motivated Black voters means the repercussions would be felt down-ballot in county council races and state House races. These races, “narrowly decided” in the past, he says, could produce GOP losses.

There are other factors, including candidate selection and possible legislative interference, to think about when it comes to Black voter turnout. What’s certain is that African Americans, Democrats, and most of all, African American Democrats seeking congressional seats would be put at a distinct disadvantage, an outcome that has presumably been the subject of much prayer.

“If you go back to the 1980s, Democrats did better in the South. It was a coalition of moderate whites and African Americans that propelled a lot of Democrats,” says Gibbs Knotts, a Coastal Carolina University political science professor. “Once there was a move to create more majority-minority districts, obviously you concentrated or packed a lot of African Americans in one or two districts, depending on the state, and it made those remaining seats easier for Republicans to win.”

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The map is the product of the National Republican Redistricting Trust (NRRT), which has been “aggressively” moving to redesign congressional districts across the county after the 2020 census. The numbers they’re using to make this decision appear to be somewhat of a mystery to community leaders like Cate Mayer, the executive director of Be the Ones, a grassroots organization working on increasing civic participation in South Carolina. (South Carolina voters have a miserable rate of voter participation. In the 2022 midterm primary election, only about 6 percent of Democrats voted; Republicans were only marginally better at a little more than 11 percent.)

Mapmakers are not taking into consideration a fast-growing state or the smaller rural communities where these changes are taking place. “They are building maps on data from six years ago, from our census,” Mayer says. “We haven’t had any time to even look at it and analyze what does this map actually represent?”

Five state senators originally joined their Democratic colleagues to stave off a redistricting vote during the regular legislative session. In the special session, that bar’s been lowered to a simple majority. Or state legislators could keep the maps as is and watch the president spend millions to primary any South Carolina state House member experiencing pangs of conscience. Those decisions cost—just ask the five of the seven Indiana state lawmakers who voted against redistricting and lost their primaries, as well as outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).

South Carolina’s redistricting exercise revives Jim Crow for the 21st century. It’s a Deep South cataclysm matching similar moves in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. “Beyond Black voters,” says the ACLU’s Woodrum, “we are talking about the erasure of the voting power of anyone who isn’t Republican: When you combine Democrats and independents in this state, you have a majority of voters. With a map that is rigged to ensure 7-0 Republican representation, we are effectively disenfranchising more than half of our voters.”

“Gerrymandering districts to secure a partisan advantage and a political outcome is an abuse of power and harmful to representative democracy,” he adds, “and every poll I have ever seen tells me that voters do not like it, because they know it is cheating.”

A December 2025 Winthrop University poll found that a large majority—67 percent—of South Carolinians believed that redistricting moves designed to produce benefits for one party are “a major problem.” Another 66 percent of residents reported that designing districts along party lines to benefit candidates “should be illegal.” Another 73 percent weighed in that it should also be illegal to draw districts that prevent racial groups from electing candidates they support. In all likelihood, fair maps won’t appear anytime soon.

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Gabrielle Gurley is a senior editor at The American Prospect. She covers states and cities, focusing on economic development and infrastructure, elections, and climate. She wins awards, too, most recently picking up a 2024 NABJ award for coverage of Baltimore and a 2021 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication urban journalism award for her feature story on the pandemic public transit crisis.