Tipsheet

The South Carolina Redistricting Foul-Up Is Riddled With Irony and Disappointment

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  May 27, 2026 6:55 AM

South Carolina delivered a major blow to the GOP’s redistricting efforts yesterday: they shut it down. On another key cloture vote on the new map, which the State House passed and the SC Senate Judiciary Committee approved, a dozen Republicans in the state Senate joined Democrats to block it, 24-20. This matter will now be taken up next session—it’s over. 

The irony of how this turned into a circus is that the Republicans' main reason for trying to kill the push was early voting, which had started this week. The irony runs deep, since that also partly explains why Virginia Democrats’ gerrymandered map was struck down by the courts. Legal challenges were coming, and the timing was tight, but the GOP made it that way: slow-walk the process, secure a major cloture vote over the weekend on the second reading of the map, adjourn, and then present this weak excuse. This could have been done. 

SC State Senate Republicans are hoping we’ll forget, since the next election cycle for them isn’t until 2028. We won’t—the powder will be kept dry.

We had a governor, Henry McMaster, who took too long to call a special session, and State Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey was also dead-set against this new map. Also, the way you knew this was going south was that no one in the Palmetto State gave the Trump White House a heads-up that the tide was turning (via NBC News):

Advisers close to the White House — which has pressed Republicans across the country to pass new maps over the past year to shore up the party’s narrow House majority — said they were caught off guard by the failed vote in the South Carolina Senate, with one calling it a “betrayal.”

“We knew it was bumpy all along, never a guarantee,” one adviser told NBC News. “But the votes were there on the last vote, and nothing changed.”

The adviser also said that the White House was not given a heads-up about the vote from South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, which they would have expected if votes were changing. The person said they were alerted by Attorney General Alan Wilson and “a couple” of state senators.

Here’s a thread on the legalese of the early voting problem:

There are a lot of procedural panics that still need culling.