COLUMBIA, S.C. — A proposed voting map that would relocate Sen. Dick Harpootlian’s seat to the coast and create three wholly contained Senate districts in Richland County advanced Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
A seven-member Senate panel that includes Harpootlian unanimously advanced the plan with minor amendments.
The proposal now goes to the Judiciary Committee, where senators may amend it further before sending it to the full Senate ahead of next week’s special session. The Judiciary Committee is likely to meet late this week, or possibly Monday morning.
The Senate redistricting plan, which would move District 20 to Charleston County and bring Districts 18 and 26 into Richland County, does a better job preserving communities of interest than the existing map and does not appear likely to immediately shift the current 30-16 Republican advantage in the Senate.
Harpootlian, who is drawn into former Senate Minority Leader Nikki Setzler’s district, said he takes no issue with the proposal because it aligns with demographic shifts in the state.
Richland County has grown at only half the rate as Charleston County over the past decade, according to the 2020 census.
While Harpootlian would give up his seat under the Senate proposal, it would guarantee three resident senators in Richland County. The county currently has four resident senators — Harpootlian, Darrell Jackson, Mia McLeod and John Scott — but only two whose districts are entirely within county lines.
“It’s the right thing to do, whether or not I get reelected,” Harpootlian said of giving up his district.
Prior to the amendments adopted Monday, the Senate’s draft proposal split 27 counties and five voting districts compared to 35 county splits and 156 voting precinct splits in the existing map. The number of splits present in the amended map was not immediately known.
“Basically, we believe it is a very good map,” Lynn Teague, vice president for issues and action with the League of Women Voters of South Carolina, said earlier this month of the Senate’s original proposal.
Teague said after Monday’s hearing that the amendments to the plan appeared to be minor, but that she had yet to examine them in detail.
The approved changes involved the swapping of more than a dozen individual voting precincts between neighboring Senate districts in the Lowcountry, Midlands and Upstate.
Congressional map comes under fire
A draft congressional map the Senate panel released last week was not as well received Monday.
The proposal, which Senate cartographer Will Roberts described as a “minimal-change plan,” is strikingly similar to South Carolina’s existing congressional map. The largest adjustments were made to balance population differences between the growing 1st and shrinking 6th districts so that all districts have equal populations.
“Our goal was to bring the congressional districts back into deviation compliance while maintaining the core constituencies of the districts,” Roberts said.
Senate staffers accomplished that by swapping portions of the 1st District, represented by US Rep. Nancy Mace, R-Daniel Island, with the adjacent majority-Black 6th District, represented by US Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-Columbia.
While limited, the changes could have major political implications for the state’s lone competitive district.
The proposed map would transform the 1st Congressional District, which has flipped twice since 2018, into a solidly Republican district, critics say.
Under the plan, Mace’s district would add portions of eastern Berkeley County, southern Jasper County, the city of Hanahan and the Daniel Island portion of Berkeley County, while Clyburn’s amorphous district, which stretches from Columbia to Charleston, would pick up parts of West Ashley, about half of Johns Island and a segment of downtown Charleston that includes the College of Charleston.
An analysis by Dave’s Redistricting, a popular map drawing tool, found the draft plan would favor Republicans by more than 14%, or about 3 percentage points more than the current map does.
Mace bested former Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham by a little more than 1 point last November.
Cunningham, who is running for governor, had harsh words for the Senate’s congressional proposal.
“The maps are awful,” he testified Monday before the redistricting panel. “They make no sense, unless, of course, the sole purpose of these maps is to make it harder for a Republican to lose.”
Cunningham blasted the redraw, which he said appeared to be racially gerrymandered to include white parts of Charleston in the 1st Congressional District while pushing heavily African American areas into the 6th Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn.
“If gerrymandering was an art, this proposed plan would be a Picasso,” he said. “Y’all have taken it to the nth degree.”
Harpootlian and Sen. Margie Bright Matthews, D-Colleton, who both sit on the Senate redistricting panel, also criticized the map and said they hadn’t been asked for input on it prior to its release last week.
The Richland County senator pressed a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer about the plan’s creation during Monday’s hearing and was told that, outside of testimony provided at public hearings and emailed suggestions, only a Clyburn staffer, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson and an independent national Republican organization had offered advance input on the plan.
“They had more of a say of the design than I did, and I’m on this committee,” an incensed Harpootlian said of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. “And that’s what upsets me.”
The redistricting panel did not take any action on the proposed congressional map Monday, but could pick it up again later this week or early next week. Harpootlian said he’d like to see any proposed changes to the congressional map in advance of the next hearing.
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