South Carolina Republicans blocked a move to redraw the state’s voting maps in their favor just as some voters were already heading to the polls, a last-minute decision that left Jim Clyburn’s seat intact and denied the GOP another House seat. The timing mattered because the midterms are less than six months away, and lawmakers were trying to change the map while the election was already underway.
Richard Cash said he could not, in his view, stop an election that had already begun. “Neither my conscience nor my common sense would allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” he said, after Republicans cited timing concerns in opposing the measure. Governor Henry McMaster urged South Carolinians to “vote confidently in a safe and secure election,” trying to steady a process that had just been thrown into doubt.
The South Carolina fight is part of a broader redistricting scramble across the South as Republicans move to dismantle court-ordered majority-minority districts after the Supreme Court changed the legal ground under the Voting Rights Act. Last month, the court said the law did not require states to draw congressional districts that give minority voters the chance to elect candidates in rough proportion to their population, and the conservative majority said only overt racism could justify throwing out a state map. That ruling has become the backdrop for a wave of legal and political maneuvers aimed at House control before November.
Alabama is now the clearest test case. On Tuesday, a federal district court temporarily blocked a congressional map adopted by the GOP-led legislature in 2023 for the November midterm elections, saying it violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The judges ordered the state to keep using its race-blind map, the one with two majority-black districts that was in place after the 2020 census in 2024. Republicans in Alabama have already appealed to the Supreme Court, keeping the map fight alive even as the election calendar moves forward.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries accused Republicans and Donald Trump of mounting a desperate power grab, and said, “There will be a free and fair election in November.” The NAACP praised the Alabama ruling and said it preserved black representation, adding that redrawing maps to silence entire communities cannot be tolerated and runs against the values of democracy. For Democrats, the immediate question is whether courts will keep blocking new maps long enough to protect their seats; for Republicans, the question is whether the Supreme Court’s new standard will let them redraw away even more of the political map before voters can weigh in.
