They Thought We Weren’t Counting: Did Republicans Gerrymander Themselves Into Future Democratic Districts?
- CUBNSC
- May 18
- 8 min read
South Carolina's Republican Supermajority Drew Seven New Congressional Districts Using Flawed Data, Inflated Numbers, and a Suppressed Electorate — And Called It a Map
By Javar Juarez | CUBNSC | Statehouse
"Too many people in power just want to do whatever it takes to stay in power. They'll do whatever it takes to keep it. But I ask — to what end? What do you do with it when you've attained it?" — Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey (R-Edgefield)
They called it redistricting. It is something else entirely.
On May 18, 2026, the South Carolina House of Representatives — convened in a special session ordered by Governor Henry McMaster through executive order after the Senate voted 29-17 to reject the effort through normal channels — began floor debate on H. 5683, a bill that would dismantle and redraw every congressional district in South Carolina.
The lines were not produced through any independent commission process and were not the product of broad public consensus.
By the Republicans' own admission throughout subcommittee proceedings, the maps originated through the work of Adam Kincaid — Executive Director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust and Executive Director of Fair Lines America, a dark money nonprofit whose stated mission includes blocking independent redistricting commissions from forming across the country.
Mr. Kincaid testified remotely before lawmakers that racial data was not used in drawing the maps. Yet the resulting district configurations carve through Black communities across South Carolina with surgical precision — and if fully implemented, the impact on Black political representation could be devastating.
The Columbia Urban Broadcast Network has completed its assessment. What the data reveals is this: the Republican architect of these maps constructed their projections around a suppressed electorate — not a fully activated one.
That distinction is the story.
PART ONE: WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DID
Richland County — home to Columbia and one of the largest concentrations of Black voters in South Carolina — is divided into three separate congressional districts under H. 5683. Districts 2, 6, and 7 each absorb separate portions of the county.
That was not accidental.
A county does not become fractured into three congressional districts without deliberate political intent. Communities that historically shared representation, political interests, schools, churches, economic corridors, and civic infrastructure are now divided across multiple districts with entirely different electoral bases.
Charleston County is similarly split. The heavily Democratic and heavily Black precincts of Charleston's urban core, North Charleston, and portions of the peninsula are separated from surrounding communities and folded into a newly configured coastal district stretching more than 100 miles toward Horry County. The result is a district that appears designed less around communities of interest and more around partisan vote dilution.
Allendale, Bamberg, and Hampton Counties — deeply Black rural counties that historically anchored Jim Clyburn's congressional coalition — are pulled from District 6 and placed alongside heavily Republican Lexington County. There is no coherent economic or geographic logic connecting these communities. There is, however, a very clear electoral logic. McMaster carried Lexington County by 30 points in 2022.
Allendale, Bamberg, and Hampton will have no political weight inside that district from day one.
District 6 itself — Jim Clyburn's historic seat — is not eliminated. It is made unrecognizable. Florence, Darlington, Dillon, Marion, Marlboro, Williamsburg, Clarendon, Georgetown, Sumter, and Lee are stitched together with a partial slice of Richland that does not include the Black west Columbia precincts.
The Black Belt corridor from the Low-country through the Midlands — the geographic foundation of Black political power in South Carolina for three decades — is severed.
Senate Majority Leader Massey, a Republican, called the partisan projections attached to these maps "deliberately disingenuous." The Post and Courier reported independently that Republicans would hold roughly a 3-point advantage in the redrawn seat.
But as we will show, even that 3-point advantage is built on assumptions that collapse the moment the electorate is fully mobilized.
PART TWO: THE ELECTORATE THEY MODELED
The central assumption embedded inside H. 5683 is not simply partisan advantage. It is suppressed participation.
The raw population totals used to construct these congressional districts — the roughly 730,000-person targets appearing throughout the bill text — include large numbers of residents who historically participate at substantially lower rates in electoral politics than their census presence would suggest. Prison populations. Military populations. College and university populations.
These residents are counted for apportionment because they physically reside inside the district boundaries. But census presence and electoral participation are not the same thing.
Partisan projection models are not built around population. They are built around expected turnout behavior. Which means the partisan ratings attached to these districts are being projected against an active electorate that is significantly smaller than the raw population totals used to justify the maps themselves.
A smaller electorate is easier to predict. Easier to control. And easier to hold through suppression, disengagement, and organizational neglect.
This is not a theoretical argument. It is arithmetic.
The proposed District 2 absorbs Orangeburg County — home to South Carolina State University and Claflin University — alongside Lexington County and several rural Black Belt counties stripped from Congressman Clyburn's historic coalition.
Just to the southwest, Bamberg County, also now inside District 2, contains Denmark Technical College and Voorhees University. Together these four institutions form one of the most concentrated clusters of HBCU enrollment in South Carolina — thousands of voting-age residents counted in the population totals used to construct the district, but historically under-integrated into statewide voter mobilization infrastructure at the scale their enrollment numbers would suggest.
The students are counted when population is needed to build the map. Their electoral potential appears discounted in the turnout assumptions used to project it Republican.
That gap may ultimately determine whether these districts remain safely Republican over the next decade — or become competitive far sooner than their architects expect.
PART THREE: THE 2018 WARNING THEY IGNORED
In November 2018, Joe Cunningham flipped South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District in one of the biggest Democratic upsets in the country that cycle.
A district Donald Trump had carried by nearly 13 points two years earlier flipped Democratic under midterm turnout conditions. Cunningham defeated Katie Arrington 145,455 to 141,473, a margin of 3,982 votes. He carried Charleston County by roughly 17,034 votes, more than four times his overall districtwide margin.
Now look carefully at the new District 7 under H. 5683.
The same Charleston-area Democratic turnout infrastructure that powered Cunningham's victory now sits inside a newly engineered district Republicans believe favors them. They pulled the Black precincts off the Charleston peninsula and from North Charleston, combined them with part of Richland County and part of Horry County, and called it a safe Republican coastal district.
But if 2026 resembles 2018 politically — with Donald Trump once again in the White House during a midterm election cycle and the national political environment moving against the president's party — Republicans may have unintentionally created a second competitive Democratic congressional district in South Carolina.
The same miscalculation. The same Charleston County. A brand new district.
PART FOUR: THE SLEEPING GIANT IN THE UPSTATE
South Carolina's fastest-growing region is no longer politically static.
South Carolina gained more than 360,000 residents between 2020 and 2024. Every one of those gains came from migration — the state recorded more deaths than births during that period. The top three states sending people to South Carolina: New York, North Carolina, and New Jersey.
The top destination inside South Carolina for those migrants: the Upstate — Greenville, Spartanburg, York, Lancaster, Pickens, and Cherokee Counties. Those are the counties that make up the proposed District 4 and District 5 under H. 5683.
Political consultants operating in this environment estimate that approximately 250,000 registered voters throughout the Upstate region remain politically disengaged despite already being on the voter rolls. These are not theoretical voters. They already exist. Many relocated from politically engaged environments elsewhere and simply have not been integrated into South Carolina's civic infrastructure.
Republicans drew those maps assuming the Upstate stays exactly as it is.
The Upstate is not staying exactly as it is.
District 4 is not winnable in 2026 under any realistic scenario. But it is what political analysts call an opportunity district — a seat that becomes competitive within one redistricting cycle if the demographic trajectory continues and the Democratic Party builds the infrastructure to activate voters who are already registered.
District 5, which includes York County — already trending Democratic due to Charlotte suburban spillover — carries the same long-term potential.
The 2032 maps will be drawn based on the 2030 Census. That deadline is not distant. And the people moving into the Upstate right now will still be here when it arrives.
PART FIVE: THE CALL
The Republican architects of H. 5683 are betting on four things.
That Black turnout remains depressed. That HBCU students remain under-mobilized. That newly registered Upstate voters remain politically inactive. And that fragmented communities lose the organizational capacity to resist.
That is the gamble embedded inside these maps.
This is not a moment for choosing between the ballot and the dollar. It is a moment for deploying both with intention.
The economic boycott underway among Black leadership and the growing voter mobilization effort are not contradictory strategies. They are complementary forms of political and economic leverage operating toward the same goal.
They are the same strategy operating on two fronts simultaneously.
You withdraw your dollars from the districts and institutions that do not serve you — and you reinvest that economic power into the infrastructure that will. Churches. HBCUs. Black-owned businesses along the corridors Republicans just redrew. Community organizations doing the ground work that political parties have failed to do.
That is not abandoning the process. That is funding the parallel economy that makes the process respond to you.
The road to 2032 requires both.
Economic isolation of hostile political geography and aggressive civic investment in the communities inside it. You do not vote and spend as though nothing has changed. You vote as a bloc and you spend as a bloc — and you make the cost of ignoring you visible in both arenas.
Boycott the economy that excludes you. Build the economy that includes you. Register every voter you can find. Show up in November. Do all of it at the same time.
That is the call.
This is a moment for something harder and more demanding than protest.
A sustained, county-by-county, campus-by-campus, neighborhood-by-neighborhood voter mobilization movement — one that does not end after November 2026, one that does not pause between election cycles, one that is still operating at full capacity when the 2030 Census arrives and the 2032 maps are drawn.
In Richland County alone, an estimated 75,000 eligible Black voters remain unregistered. If even a fraction of those voters are registered and mobilized before 2032, the three-way split of Richland County that Republicans designed to dilute Black political power in the capital becomes the mechanism by which Black voters influence not one congressional district but three simultaneously.
They thought they were splitting us up. They may have spread us into three battlegrounds.
In District 6 — restore 2018 participation levels in Williamsburg, Darlington, Florence, Sumter, and Kershaw Counties and add a serious HBCU mobilization effort in Orangeburg.
The district becomes competitive.
Not theoretical.
Competitive.
In District 7 — the Charleston County Democratic infrastructure that delivered 17,000 votes in 2018 now sits inside a brand new district under a midterm political environment. With the right candidate and the right campaign, District 7 becomes the second Democratic congressional seat in South Carolina.
In Districts 4 and 5 — where consultants estimate a large universe of Democratic-leaning, registered-but-infrequent voters in the Upstate — the opportunity is not immediate victory, but long-term electorate building. South Carolina does not register voters by party, but modeled voter data, migration trends, and turnout history point to a decade-long opportunity that begins with contact and ends with maps that look different in 2032.
The Republicans made a map. We are going to make an electorate.
Maps do not vote. People do.
They thought we weren't counting.
We were counting the whole time.
The Columbia Urban Broadcast Network is an independent investigative news outlet based in Columbia, South Carolina, covering politics, civic affairs, and community accountability. CUBN is affiliated with the South Carolina Press Association. All population data in this report is sourced directly from H. 5683, May 15, 2026 amended version, the South Carolina State Election Commission, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce. All 2018 election results are sourced from certified South Carolina Election Commission returns and contemporaneous published news reporting. CUBNSC.COM
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