12 South Carolina Republicans Cross the Aisle to Kill Trump-Backed Mid-Decade Plan That Would Have Dismantled Jim Clyburn's District

The South Carolina Senate on Tuesday killed a Trump-backed mid-decade redistricting plan that would have dismantled Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn's majority-Black 6th Congressional District, with 12 Republicans joining all 12 Democrats on a procedural motion that fell short of the 26 votes needed to bring the gerrymander to the floor. The vote, after three weeks of rushed hearings and an extended debate that ran until past 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, preserves the district Clyburn has held continuously since 1993 and represents the most significant Republican rebuke of President Donald Trump's redistricting offensive since he began pressing GOP-controlled legislatures last year to redraw maps in his party's favor.

The defeated plan, drafted by Statehouse Republicans at Trump's personal urging, would have voided the results of the June 9 congressional primaries already underway and held replacement contests in August on the redrawn map. Trump made at least two phone calls in the final week of debate to state Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, and joined a private GOP caucus meeting by speakerphone on May 22, according to two senators who were in the room and spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity. The state House had passed the plan by a 67-46 margin earlier this month over the objections of a small group of moderate Republicans.

The state Senate's veto was nominally driven by procedure but rooted in deeper anxieties about Republican electoral exposure. The break came in a key cloture vote, where 12 Republicans crossed over to deny Massey the supermajority he needed. "Neither my conscience nor my common sense is going to let me stop an election that is already underway," state Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, said in his floor speech, drawing applause from the Democratic side. Sen. Larry Grooms, R-Berkeley, another GOP defector, told The Post and Courier of Charleston that the proposed map would have made two existing Republican seats in the Lowcountry vulnerable in 2028 by adding tens of thousands of Democratic voters from Charleston and Beaufort counties.

Clyburn, 84, who served as House Majority Whip during the Pelosi era and is widely credited with delivering the 2020 South Carolina primary win that resuscitated Joe Biden's candidacy, called the vote "a triumph of conscience over partisanship." Speaking from his Columbia office Wednesday morning, the dean of the state's congressional delegation said: "For three weeks the President of the United States used the full weight of his office to try to draw me out of my district and to silence the voice of the Black voters of the Pee Dee and the Midlands. South Carolina Republicans — many of them my friends — said no. That is the system the framers designed working as it was meant to work." Trump, asked about the outcome at his Cabinet meeting Wednesday afternoon, called the result "a shame" and accused Massey of "weakness," but stopped short of threatening to back primary challengers against the 12 GOP defectors.

The Clyburn vote is the second major setback in three weeks for the White House's mid-decade redistricting push, which Republicans had hoped would offset Democratic gains expected after the Supreme Court's April Callais v. Louisiana decision invalidating key parts of the Voting Rights Act. North Carolina lawmakers shelved a similar plan in late April after pushback from incumbent Reps. Don Davis and Greg Murphy, leaving Texas — where Republicans rammed through a new map in March — as the only state in the Trump column to successfully complete a partisan redraw this cycle. Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand called the South Carolina vote "a green light" for Democratic legal challenges across the South. "South Carolina just proved that even in red-state legislatures, there is a line Republicans will not cross," Gillibrand said. "The next test is going to be in Tallahassee, and we like our odds."