Redistricting is moving forward. The State reports on the League’s perspective on new congressional districts — and the perspectives of those who get a vote, the state’s legislators.

Columbia- South Carolina has added about 500,000 people over the last decade, but that population growth has been far from uniform.

Urban and coastal areas have packed on population while rural areas, especially those along Interstate 95, have shrunk in size.

As state lawmakers embark on the process of redrawing voter districts in the months ahead, they’ll have to take those population shifts into account to ensure all districts have equivalent populations of about 731,200 people.

Five of South Carolina’s seven congressional districts are within 4% of the “ideal” population and likely won’t require substantial modifications. 

But the 1st Congressional District, represented by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-Daniel Island, and 6th Congressional District, held by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-Columbia, deviate significantly from the standard size and will need extensive adjustments.

Mace’s district, which stretches along the Atlantic coast from Hilton Head to the Santee River and includes portions of Beaufort, Berkeley, Charleston, Colleton and Dorchester counties, has experienced a population boom over the past decade and now has 819,000 people, or about 88,000 more than it should have.

The 6th District, which Clyburn has held since 1993, has gone in the opposite direction. 

Despite covering a lot of land, the amorphous majority-Black district that encompasses seven rural counties and parts of nine other counties in the Midlands, Pee Dee and Lowcountry regions, has only 646,000 residents, or about 85,000 fewer than it needs to have.

Rightsizing both districts will be a primary focus of state lawmakers as they take public testimony on proposed redraws, assess map proposals submitted by outside groups and work among themselves to construct congressional seat boundaries.

Regardless of how it’s accomplished, there likely will be tens of thousands of South Carolina voters, including some in Columbia, who will be represented by a different U.S. congressman or congresswoman in the near future.

HOW WILL SC LAWMAKERS DIVIDE UP DISTRICTS?

The South Carolina House and Senate panels tasked with redistricting have taken hours of public testimony from people all over the state and solicited map submissions from outside groups, but have yet to release any maps of their own.

State Republican leaders, who ultimately control the redistricting process, declined to provide any insight into how they intend to split congressional districts, except to say it would comply with the law and adhere to recently adopted redistricting guidelines.

The guidelines prioritize the creation of contiguous districts with equivalent populations, compliance with the Voting Rights Act and the avoidance of racial gerrymandering.

Additional considerations are given to grouping together “communities of interest;” minimizing the splitting of counties, cities, and voting precincts; creating compact districts; and preserving the cores of existing districts so as to protect incumbents.

“My goal is unanimity in adopting a plan that reflects the interests of everybody we can,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Luke Rankin, R-Horry, who chairs the Senate panel responsible for redistricting. “Not that one group gets something over another, but that represents and is reflective of all the input we’ve gotten.”

House Speaker Jay Lucas, R-Darlington, simply said the process of designing district maps was ongoing.

“An ad-hoc committee of the Judiciary Committee has just finished receiving public testimony on those matters and many others,” he said in an email. “The ad-hoc committee is in the process of evaluating that testimony as well as plans submitted by interested groups and individuals.”

Rankin said he hoped to have a Senate plan “for God and country to see” sometime in November. 

House and Senate lawmakers are aiming to return to Columbia in December to debate redistricting proposals and approve new district lines before the year is out.

A PROPOSAL TO ADJUST SC’S 1ST, 6TH DISTRICTS

Since Clyburn’s and Mace’s House districts are contiguous and need to make population corrections of equal but opposite magnitudes, a fairly clean swap between them is possible, said John Ruoff, a researcher and policy analyst who has been drawing voting districts in South Carolina for 30 years.

But, he acknowledged, “there’s also a lot of other ways to skin that cat.”

Ruoff, who worked with the League of Women Voters of South Carolina on its redistricting proposal, redrew the 6th District to ensure it would have a large enough Black population that African American voters could continue to elect candidates of their choice, but not so large as to dilute their votes, as some argue the current lines have done.

The League’s proposal, which did not include incumbency protections but otherwise used redistricting criteria similar to what lawmakers have adopted, locates Clyburn’s 6th District more centrally in the state rather than having its tentacles stretch deep into the Lowcountry. 

Richland County, instead of being split between the 2nd District — held by Rep. Joe Wilson, R-Springdale — and 6th District, exists entirely within the 6th District in the League’s map.

“We’ve made it more of a Midlands district,” said Lynn Teague, vice president for issues and action with the League of Women Voters of South Carolina. 

The 1st District, the state’s lone competitive congressional district that has flipped from Republican to Democrat back to Republican over the past three cycles, would remain hotly contested in the League’s redraw, Ruoff said.

“It comes down to who plays politics better,” he said.

The coastal district is more compact in the League’s redraw, ceding Beaufort County to the 2nd District, but gaining portions of Charleston County that are currently in the 6th District.

“North Charleston belongs with Charleston, it doesn’t belong with Columbia,” Teague said.

Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, agreed and said the idea of pulling Charleston County out of Clyburn’s district has been floated.

“(The 6th District) reaches fingers into Charleston and Columbia,” he said. “Those two big cities need to have their own congressman. They don’t need to have someone in both of those places.”

Representatives from Clyburn’s and Mace’s offices declined comment when asked their thoughts about redrawing the lines of their districts.

HOW POLITICS AFFECTS REDISTRICTING

While the maps submitted by the League of Women Voters and six other outside groups that presented proposals to the Senate’s redistricting subcommittee last week may all be sensible, there is no such thing as a perfect map.

“If you look at a map proposal and you don’t find districts that appall and offend you, you haven’t looked far enough,” Ruoff told the panel Thursday. “These are suggestions. We’re not telling you that somehow this is the perfect map and that you should adopt it. We’d take it if you adopted it, but clearly any districting plan has places where you do odd things.” 

Beyond the inevitable compromises that come with attempting to balance competing mapping interests, politics also colors the redistricting process.

Lawmakers in the majority want to retain and grow their majority and incumbents on both sides of the aisle have a vested interest in holding onto their seats.

An analysis by Matthew Saltzman, a Clemson University mathematics professor who also sits on the League of Women Voters’ redistricting advisory committee, found voter districts in South Carolina were shaped more by incumbent gerrymandering than by partisan gerrymandering.

“When (redistricting) moves from the hands of demographers like me and moves to the realm of politics, all sorts of things could happen,” Ruoff said. “There are a series of choices ahead, some of which will be about policy, some of which will be about politics and some of which will be about personality.”

The idea of putting an independent commission in charge of redistricting to minimize the role politics plays in the process gets raised from time to time, but there’s been no political will to implement such a plan.

“As a concept, it’s appealing,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, said. “But almost every time you look at these things, this independent commission is shaded toward the individual or entity that wants to have a new way of doing it.”

He said he thinks about South Carolina’s redistricting process the same way Winston Churchill thought of democracy.

“This may not be the best way to do this,” Massey said. “But it’s the best way we’ve come up with.”

Zak Koeske: @ZakKoeske