House committee meets on congressional redistricting maps
BY MICHELLE LIU, ASSOCIATED PRESS/REPORT FOR AMERICA
COLUMBIA, S.C. - New maps for U.S. House seats released by a South Carolina House committee differ significantly from boundaries drawn up by the Senate, as the two chambers try to carve out seven congressional districts that reflect the state's rapid growth in the past decade.
The House's redistricting committee heard public testimony on its initial proposal Thursday after releasing the maps earlier in the week. Some speakers who criticized the Senate maps said the House's plan does a better job of keeping the district competitive.
“It is not one we can be enthusiastic about, although I will say that the numbers are not terrible at all,” Lynn Teague, vice president of the League of Women Voters of South Carolina, said of the House proposal.
South Carolina’s new maps must account for the 500,000 new people the state added in the past decade to reach a total population of 5.1 million, according to the 2020 Census. But that growth was uneven, as people flocked to coastal areas while rural areas saw populations drop.
The House's version moves the boundaries of the 2nd District, currently represented by Republican Joe Wilson, out of Richland County. Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn's 6th District would instead share the county with the 5th District, represented by Rep. Ralph Norman.
The 2nd District would extend from the Midlands counties of Aiken and Lexington into coastal Beaufort County, while the 5th District would shrink geographically.
The House map differs in several ways from the proposal drawn by Senate staff and released last month. Notably, it keeps the 1st District — the only one in South Carolina where a Democrat has flipped a seat from Republicans since 1986 — competitive, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
Democrats had pushed back last month against the Senate map that would have put more likely Republican voters into the 1st District.
Joe Cunningham, the Democrat who flipped the 1st District seat in 2018 before losing it to Republican Nancy Mace in 2020, said Thursday that the House proposal was an improvement from the Senate maps, keeping most Charleston-area communities in the same district, although it “wasn't exactly a high bar," he said.
Several other speakers on Thursday urged lawmakers to keep coastal communities and counties together, especially those in the Lowcountry, because of their shared interests and needs.
Teague said she disagreed with the proposal to extend the 5th District into Richland County, noting that district has become dominated by the suburbs south of Charlotte, North Carolina, which is “a very different area.”
Teague also said the House plan increases the total minority population for the 6th District, which has been drawn to have a majority of minority voters since Clyburn was first elected there in 1992. That creates an unnecessary minority population imbalance, she said.
The committee didn’t take a vote on the map Thursday, and lawmakers made few comments on the proposal. Committee Chairman Jay Jordan said the panel will meet again after Christmas to solicit more input, which he emphasized is just a starting point.
“We've noticed those map proposals go through the multiple stages of this process — they seem to have a tendency to get worse,” Teague said. ”We would really love to see this one get better."
Lawmakers from both chambers will eventually collaborate to come up with a final version of the map.
Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/south-carolina/article256659847....
