South Carolina Senators Just Handed Rep. Jim Clyburn a Stay of Execution, Defying Trump

We’ve got a rare piece of unambiguously good/pro-democracy news to report on the redistricting front today for once: It seems that South Carolina state senators, including Republicans, have at least a sliver of shared backbone among them. They needed that spine in order to defy kingmaker/legislator-eradicator Donald Trump, who has in recent weeks successfully led charges to primary several defiant GOP lawmakers. In the case of SC’s state senate, however, the legislators were presumably thinking about the absolutely terrible optics of being asked to adopt new congressional maps at the 11th hour when voting has already begun, which would have eliminated the state’s only Democratic representative in Congress, and they thus rejected the bid on Tuesday, voting 20-24 to use the previous maps. The move will presumably save the seat held by 17-term Democrat Jim Clyburn, the man who has been the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation since 2011.

“Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” said Republican state Sen. Richard Cash, a previous supporter of the effort who flipped his vote on Tuesday. As Cash notes, voting for primaries in South Carolina is already underway, and in-person voting literally began today, with Clyburn casting his own vote this afternoon before holding a press conference.

So South Carolina senate again just killed the redistricting bill. Given what’s happened so far I wouldn’t say anything is ever final. But another big reverse. I’m sure Trump will be stoked. www.nbcnews.com/politics/202…

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) 2:58 PM · May 26, 2026

The rejection of the presidential demand to redistrict and eliminate the state’s sole Democratic seat in the U.S. House of Representatives comes as a surprise, given that most red states in similar positions have simply folded to pressure from the White House and crammed through redistricting, whether or not it seems to be legal in the eyes of state law. On the other side of the spectrum, blue states like Virginia have struggled to institute their own gerrymandered maps in retaliation even when passed by popular vote, abetted by a Trump-dominated U.S. Supreme Court that consistently has taken the side of the Trump administration, most recently rejecting a bid to restore the new Virginia maps that could have netted up to four new Democratic districts. The maps in South Carolina, meanwhile, had already been approved by the S.C. House of Representatives last week in the hopes to implement them in time for the 2026 midterm elections. The rebellion of the S.C. Senate throws a massive wrench into those plans, and saves the job of one of the longest tenured legislators in Congress, Jim Clyburn, in the process.

Frankly, this feels more like a case of optics than contrition from South Carolina Republicans, although it is a welcome one. Jim Clyburn is one of the single most recognizable Democratic figures in Congress and in the American South, especially as a key member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He had already vowed to run for reelection in November whether or not his district was redrawn, and no doubt would have been a very loud voice against the injustice of rampant gerrymandering in a way that could have hurt the campaigns of other S.C. legislators. Likewise, if the state eliminated his district entirely, it would have faced the likely possibility of being the opening election in Democratic primary season for the 2028 Presidential nomination … in a state with not a single Democratic representative in Congress, which would certainly have been a powerful bit of cognitive dissonance.

The state’s Republican legislators, of course, can’t very well state that they’re fearful about a midterm blue wave or disparage Donald Trump outright, so they instead focused on the incredibly ramshackle, last-minute process that put the new maps before them. Republican State Sen. Tom Davis noted in his statement that the prior redistricting process spent nine months in the Senate, involving dozens of meetings and hearings, but that the same senators were now expected to ram this one through after its districts were chosen with zero explanation or rationale whatsoever. That was apparently too much for even the South Carolina GOP to swallow.

“A process that properly done took our state senate nine months, 10 community hearings, eight subcommittee hearings, our own demographic analysis, our own work, and contrast that with what we’re doing now,” Davis said. “We have completely outsourced our constitutional obligation to prepare a congressional redistricting map to a consultant in Washington, D.C. We have no idea, no idea how that map was created. Now, in fairness, he did show up for a House subcommittee meeting via Zoom and spoke for seven minutes and 40 seconds. Then he had to leave for another appointment. He said he was going to take no questions. Took no questions. Seven minutes and 40 seconds is our legislative record supporting this map. Seven minutes and 40 seconds.”

BOOM 💥

NEW: South Carolina Republicans saw the insane lines and slammed the brakes on another gerrymandering circus targeting Black voters and Jim Clyburn.

S Carolina Dems made it clear: changing maps after voting already started is crazy work!

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— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) 3:17 PM · May 26, 2026

Seems a little short, when the goal is to eliminate the district of Jim Clyburn, who has been a member of Congress since 1992! That much is obvious, but the Tuesday result is still notable, given how thoroughly Republicans dominate state-level Senate seats in South Carolina. Of the 46-person chamber, 34 of them are Republicans, meaning that this would have been an extremely easy piece of legislation to pass if those Senators had been anywhere near the same page as Donald Trump and the national GOP’s edict that every state must engage in unprecedented, mid-decade redistricting. And it wasn’t even the only notable headline on this front within the last 24 hours: A three-judge panel in Alabama also issued a preliminary injunction blocking the state from using a new Republican-drawn congressional map that would have yielded one more Republican seat, saying that the Republican plan was intentionally discriminatory. All told, these events of the last 24 hours could prove pivotal to Democratic hopes to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November … or they could just be a nice cherry on top of an overwhelmingly blue wave, which Donald Trump would absolutely deserve while running truly apocalyptic approval numbers.

The 85-year-old Clyburn, despite being a prominent member of our doddering gerontocracy, seemed absolutely committed to going down with the ship regardless of what the state GOP ultimately decided to do, and it’s entirely possible that his refusal to kowtow here ultimately pushed South Carolina Republicans off the ledge. That said, it would be nice if the next Democrat to make a run at the seat wasn’t alive when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.

“I’m OK if it’s Trump plus 20,” said the defiant Clyburn recently, stressing that he would run no matter what, even if the district had been reshaped specifically to exclude him. “I would be running where I live.”