COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina is one step closer to having a new congressional map without a single competitive district after a Senate panel Wednesday passed out an amended redistricting plan that closely resembles one the House adopted last week.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 14-8, along party lines, to advance the proposal, a riff on the Senate redistricting committee's heavily criticized original plan.
If ultimately adopted, the map is expected to solidify the 1st Congressional District as a Republican seat and could cement a 6-1 Republican advantage in the U.S. House for years to come, according to an analysis of past election data.
Senate Judiciary members chose the plan over another proposal put forth by Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, that checked many of the boxes Democrats and good government groups, such as the League of Women Voters of South Carolina, had sought in a congressional map, but was never likely to win support from the Republican-led committee.
The favored Senate proposal, like the adopted House plan, is a least-change plan that closely resembles the current congressional map. It rates poorly on measures of competitiveness, proportionality, compactness and splitting, according to Dave's Redistricting, a popular map drawing and analysis tool.
State Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Charleston, who presented the amended plan, said it improved upon what the House passed by restoring key aspects of the original Senate staff proposal and using natural geographic boundaries as district dividers.
The proposal splits 10 counties — same as the House plan and two fewer than the current congressional map — and 13 voting precincts. It reintroduces a split in Orangeburg County, which is made whole in the House plan, but adopts the House's decision to keep Calhoun County intact.
In Richland County, the Senate's plan moves St. Andrews and the Broad River corridor back into the 6th District, represented by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-Columbia, and uses state Senate district boundaries as the dividing line between the 2nd and 6th congressional districts.
The Senate proposal also differs from the House plan in that it keeps the entire Charleston peninsula and West Ashley community in Clyburn's district, instead of splitting them between his district and U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace's 1st District.
It does not, however, keep Charleston whole.
The splitting of Charleston County between the 1st and 6th districts, while historical, has been held up as an example of racial gerrymandering.
In all but Harpootlian's proposal, North Charleston is excised from its geographic neighbors on the coast and winds up in the 6th District, a majority-Black, largely rural district that stretches all the way to Columbia, more than 100 miles away.
Unlike other plans that used the existing congressional map as a starting point and varied only slightly from that baseline, the "whole county map," as Harpootlian's proposal came to be called, represented a fundamental revision that made substantial changes to all seven of South Carolina's congressional districts.
While slightly less compact than other plans, the whole county map split fewer counties, preserved more communities of interest and created two competitive U.S. House districts — one in the Lowcountry and another in the Pee Dee.
Campsen explained his decision to split Charleston County by noting the difficulty of keeping large urban areas whole and pointed to the split present in the current congressional map.
He said by preserving the split he was adhering to constituent consistency, one of the chamber's adopted redistricting principles.
Harpootlian questioned the wisdom of maintaining the status quo, even if it was precleared by the U.S. Justice Department.
"The major reason I ran for the Senate was that we would not replicate this race-based gerrymandering," the Columbia Democrat said. "And that's what this plan does."
