SC Senate panel advances congressional map that solidifies GOP advantage in US House
South Carolina is one step closer to having a new congressional map without a single competitive district after a Senate panel Wednesday passed out a 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.
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 because it preserves Charleston County in a single district, 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.
