South Carolina ‘Republicans’ Rebuff Trump on Redistricting

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by WILL FOLKS

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Apparently, there are limits to U.S. president Donald Trump‘s influence over the South Carolina ‘Republican’ establishment – which has heretofore reflexively obeyed him and acknowledged his near-hypnotic sway over the vast majority of GOP primary voters in the Palmetto State.

Recent polling has shown Trump’s spell over the Republican primary electorate very much intact, but SCGOP leaders – who rarely find themselves misaligned with his wishes – seem to be becoming increasingly bold in defying him. That includes governor Henry McMaster, who over the past decade has been Trump’s most servilely obedient, obsequiously attentive bootlicker.

For months, Trump’s administration has been pushing South Carolina officials to redraw the state’s political boundaries in the hopes of creating a map capable of producing seven GOP congressional districts (the Palmetto State currently has six GOP districts surrounding one heavily gerrymandered “majority minority” Democrat district).

Trump’s objective? Expanding upon the GOP’s wafer-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives – a goal numerous other Republican states have been willing to help him achieve.

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U.S. congressman Ralph Norman – who is campaigning for the governor’s office in 2026 – has been pushing South Carolina to join these states. In fact, Norman has made redrawing these political lines a central plank of his gubernatorial campaign, has been joined in his efforts by the conservative S.C. Freedom Caucus.

Last month, Freedom Caucus chairman Jordan Pace penned a letter to S.C. House speaker Murrell Smith and Senate president Thomas Alexander challenging them to enact “new district lines that will make the 6th congressional district more competitive, thereby better reflecting the voices of voters across the spectrum.”

In other words, the opposite of what it’s been since its inception…

The sixth district was created to ensure representation by a black Democrat. In fact, the black Democrat who has occupied this seat since it was first drawn in 1992 – Jim Clyburn – has worked cooperatively for decades with GOP leaders to ensure its percentage of the black, voting age population never fell below a certain level.

In other words, Clyburn and uniparty leaders in the S.C. General Assembly have been conspiring since the 1990s to draw partisan, non-representative, non-competitive political boundaries in the Palmetto State.

In the fall of 2021, FITSNews penned a lengthy story discussing the extent to which Clyburn was manipulating this process to his advantage – working in secret with GOP leaders to protect his fiefdom. More recently, Clyburn’s self-serving role in this process was exposed for all to see by ProPublica.

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Curiously, Clyburn continued his boundary-rigging antics even as he publicly decried the districts he and his GOP allies were drawing as “racist.”

“You have to be a mystic and a psychic to know where to vote in the horribly rigged sixth,” Norman said. “The General Assembly should lead on this issue, redistrict the rigged sixth, give President Trump the back up he needs, and the people of Clyburn’s district a real voice in Congress!”

In early November, we reported on mounting pressure from Trump to stop to this decades-long collusion – and to remove any “majority minority” districts from the map. South Carolina uniparty leaders remained curiously quiet, though.

Late this week, though – on a Friday afternoon before the Christmas holiday – we learned McMaster and other ranking Republicans traveled to Washington, D.C. last month to discuss the redistricting issue with “senior White House officials.” According to a report from Carolina Yaffa of Nexstar Media, the McMaster delegation reportedly traveled to the nation’s capital on November 24, 2025 and told the White House they “did not plan to take up the issue” in a special legislative session.

Nor, for that matter, do they intend to address redistricting in the coming session of the S.C. General Assembly – which commences on January 13, 2026 and runs through early May.

“(The White House) is aware of where the governor stands on redistricting,” a McMaster spokesperson told Yaffa.

Oh? And where is that?

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RELATED | HENRY McMASTER’S ‘LOST DECADE’

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“We have done our job,” McMaster said last week, referring to the SCGOP establishment’s apparent satisfaction with the current map.

Previously, outgoing S.C. House majority leader Davey Hiott and S.C. Senate judiciary committee chairman Luke Rankin – two decidedly left-of-center “Republicans” – poured cold water on the notion.

“Is (there) anything less than zero?” Hiott told The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper’s Joe Bustos when asked to rate lawmakers’ interest in addressing redistricting.

“It’s not redistricting season,” Rankin, a former Democrat, told Bustos.

Nonetheless, Norman and Pace have continued to press the issue – with Norman calling out his fellow ‘Republicans’ for their failure to act and Pace introducing legislation just this week (H. 4717) to scrap the current congressional map and replace it with seven new districts.

But with McMaster and the rest of the South Carolina “Republican” establishment opposed to redistricting, will Pace’s proposed map even receive a hearing in 2026? And even if some iteration of it were to be adopted – could it conceivably make the GOP more vulnerable in other districts?

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Let’s go SC! https://t.co/81zaJpiTHh pic.twitter.com/ul5AwlHfow

— Jordan Pace (@Jscottpace) December 1, 2025

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Party leaders are very concerned about the first congressional district, for example – which spans from north of Charleston to the coast of Beaufort County. After 38 years of uninterrupted “Republican” rule, this district was briefly held by Democrat Joe Cunningham from 2019-2021. In the 2020 election, Cunningham was narrowly defeated by Nancy Mace – who won reelection decisively in 2022.

Mace’s victory margins expanded further as a result of the 2020 redistricting process.

“Republicans” desperately want to keep the first district in their column. According to the latest Partisan Voting Index (PVI) from the Cook Political Report, the district is currently listed as R+6, slightly more centrist than it was two years ago (R+7). Meanwhile, the second congressional district – which includes broad swaths of the Midlands region of the state – is currently listed as R+7, which is also slightly more centrist than it was in 2023 (R+8).

According to Pace, his map “leaves the first district entirely intact.”

“No change,” he told us.

Certain GOP leaders – including S.C. Senate majority leader Shane Massey – are concerned tinkering with the map too much will put those districts in play for Democrats.

Will Trump press the issue? Or will he continue to let “red state” rulers in the Palmetto State publicly defy him?

Count on FITSNews to keep close tabs on this issue as it continues to develop in Washington, D.C. and Columbia, S.C.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.

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