SC Blacks, Dems were urged to turn out to vote to foil Trump redistricting efforts

Over the weekend, South Carolina Democrats and African Americans were urged in churches and on social media to participate in early voting in party primaries, which opened cross the state Tuesday morning. The primary is June 9.

Activists had predicted a large voter turnout would foil efforts by President Donald Trump to pressure Republican lawmakers to move Congressional elections to August and redraw seven new Congressional districts across the state in his effort to oust South Carolina’s only Black Democrat, longtime U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn. If successful, Trump’s effort would leave the state represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by only Republicans.

“If you want to stop Trump’s redistricting scheme, the single best thing you can do is vote tomorrow,” longtime political consultant Lachlan McIntosh wrote on Facebook to his 2,700 followers on Monday.

“The more people who cast ballots before the legislature acts, the harder it becomes to disrupt the election process,” McIntosh wrote, predicting that lawsuits would be filed against the newly drawn districts, and a key point in contesting the new maps in court would be that tens of thousands of people had already voted using the old maps.

The strategy worked.

By early afternoon Tuesday, more than 30,000 people had voted across the state. And around 1:30 pm, the Senate voted to recess until June 10 — one day after the primary.

Trump’s redistricting effort had failed.

“Having 30,000 people — however many — show up to vote was probably the nail in the coffin,” McIntosh said in a Tuesday afternoon interview. “People understand this wasn’t the right place or time.”

It was a rare coalition of Blacks, Democrats, Independents and traditional Republicans who stood up against the MAGA regime,” McIntosh said in the interview.

Voters produced a record number of first day primary votes, according to S.C. Election Commission officials.

Two years ago, a record one-day total was 20,000 votes in a presidential preference primary, said Conway Boulangia, election commission executive director.

“We’ve sort of blown all the numbers out of the water in today’s turnout,” Boulangia said.

By 3 p.m. Tuesday, some 36,000 people across the state had voted, said Boulangia said.

By the time polls closed, 55,500 people had voted, far more than ever before for a one-day total in a party primary.

The fact that voting had begun was key to changing the mind of one staunch conservative senator, Richard Cash, R-Anderson, who in a speech to the Senate Tuesday afternoon said he had voted in the last week at least five times for the bill creating new Congressional districts. But he can’t go on, he said.

“Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” Cash told senators shortly before 1 p.m. Tuesday. He clearly had his eye on the sizable turnout. “As of noon today, over 26,000 votes had been cast.”

“I can no longer support this bill for one simple reason — South Carolina voters are going to the polls today,” said Cash. “It is time to conclude the matter.”

To advance the redistricting bill, Cash told the senators, would be like rescheduling a football game after fans were in their seats and “the game has already started.”

The S.C. Senate’s giving up on its efforts to pass new Congressional redistricting maps means the current districts, one of which Clyburn has a solid chance of winning — the 6th District — will stay in place this year.

Efforts to stop redistricting

On Sunday, the S.C. Conference of the NAACP had issued a call for “voters across the state to participate in early voting.”

In a news release, NAACP state conference president Brenda Murphy urged people to “take advantage of early voting opportunities in their communities.”

In his church Sunday, state Sen. Darrell Jackson, D-Richland, senior pastor at Bible Way Baptist Church of Atlas Road, urged more than 3,000 parishioners in two services to get to the polls as soon as early voting begins Tuesday.

“Tuesday is the beginning of early voting,” Jackson said in a video of his sermon posted on Facebook. “I need you vote early. They are trying to take away your rights.”

Jackson continued, “If they think they can prevail, this will go to the courts and there is no doubt in our minds that the courts will not stop an election that has already begun.”

Specifically, Jackson told his parishioners, “We are fighting for Congressman Clyburn” and fighting against Trump, who posted on social media that he wants to get rid of Clyburn.

“One man (Trump) cannot have so much power that he sends out one tweet, one social media post, and everybody jumps,” Jackson said.

Jackson said he was just one of numerous pastors in black churches across the state who spoke out about the importance of early voting.

On May 11 on social media, Trump had urged S.C. Republicans in the state Senate to draw new seven Congressional districts. The new districts would be tilted toward electing only Republican members of Congress, he said.

“I’m watching closely, along with all Republicans across the Country who are counting on their Elected Leaders to use every Legal and Constitutional authority they have to stop the Radical Left Democrats from destroying our Country, including leveling the playing field against their decades of egregious Gerrymandering and Census Rigging. South Carolina Republicans: BE BOLD AND COURAGEOUS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

A new Republican-oriented map would likely mean that Clyburn, a high-profile Democrat who often criticizes Trump on talk shows and elsewhere, would be out. Clyburn, 85, has represented the state in Congress since he was elected in 1992, and has brought hundreds of millions in federal dollars into the state. He is one of the highest-ranking African Americans in Congress.

Prominent Republicans opposed redistricting

It was not just Blacks and Democrats who opposed quick redistricting.

Former Republican S.C. Gov. David Beasley, who headed an international food program that won a Nobel Peace Prize after he left his governor’s post, wrote in an op-ed on WIS-TV that the effort to draw new districts “is not reapportionment done in good faith. It is designed to game the system. To engineer an outcome that serves those in power rather than the citizens who put them there. That distinction matters enormously. The question is simple: are these lines being drawn to serve the people, or to entrench the powerful? The answer, in this case, is not hard to see.”

Beasley wrote that Clyburn “is one of the most consequential figures this state has produced, respected on both sides of the aisle. Jim Clyburn doesn’t own that House seat but deserves a fair chance to make his case to the people for re-election without a predetermined, gerrymandered electorate.”

In the last week, more than half a dozen Senate Republicans continued to refuse to join the party majority and by so doing, helped stall and eventually kill — Tuesday afternoon — the Trump inspired efforts in the Senate to approve a redistricting bill that had passed in the House earlier in May.

The Republican senators included Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, who posted on Facebook that he had no objection to voting for districts that legally maximize Republican chances, but the current Trump-inspired redistricting was being done too fast and likely would not survive court challenges.

“I am convinced that a map rushed through in two weeks will be challenged and struck down. Because the Supreme Court upheld our current maps just two years ago, the most likely outcome is simply reverting to what we have now – after spending millions of dollars, splitting our primaries, and disenfranchising those risking their lives to protect our right to vote. We will have turned South Carolina’s elections upside down and ended up right back where we started,” Davis wrote.

Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, who opposed the rushed redistricting, told reporters Saturday during a rare weekend session that numerous “bad things” will happen if the Senate passed new Congressional maps that pushed U.S. House elections into August.

“I don’t see any good result coming from this,” Massey said. “The negatives significantly outweigh the positives.”

As an example, Massey, the new Congressional maps might result in the election of two Democrats in the seven-member delegation instead of the ouster of Clyburn. Or, “You could up with 6-1, where we are, and we are spending a heck of a lot of blood to stay right where we are,” Massey said.

Another Republican, state Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Charleston, spoke of the importance of the founding fathers’ emphasis on having the states do redistricting rather than being pressured by the federal government.

The elections and how we conduct elections is largely up to us,” Campsen told senators in a speech, reminding them that the executive branch of the federal government is asking the senate to rush through a redistricting bill that has not been adequately vetted. It ordinarily can take months to properly prepare new redistricting maps, he said.

“That’s really not possible to do something like this accurately in a matter of days,” Campsen said. “It’s almost impossible for us to even pull this off, not without a tremendous amount of error being added in. ”

Moreover, the proposed map drawn up by people in Washington pull together counties that don’t have anything to do with each other, such as one that combines York County — a bedroom community of Charlotte — with the rural community of Williamsburg County, Campsen said. “They could care less.”

“It is a map that has not had any input from the citizens of South Carolina ... It’s just handed down from above ... It was drawn by people who have no concept of communities of interest of this state,” Campsen said. “Oconee County, up there in the mountains, runs all the way down into Richland County.”

Jackson, interviewed later Tuesday afternoon, said, “What got us to this point was overwhelming public input in the way they showed up to vote in unprecedented waves on the first day of voting. Members of the public — Republicans, Democrats and Independents — have expressed their concerns with senators. It made a difference.”

Many preachers across the state spoke in pulpits Sunday against the redistricting plan, Jackson said.

Jackson added that Democrats and Blacks could not take all the credit. “This could not have been done without Republicans.”

State GOP officials were not pleased at the Senate’s action to reject the Trump redistricting.

State party chair Drew McKissick said, “We’re very disappointed with the South Carolina Senate’s failure to act on President Trump’s call for redistricting. It’s an incredible missed opportunity. Now, our focus must shift to what lies ahead: winning the next election to protect our majority and keep President Trump’s agenda moving forward.”

Gov. Henry McMaster in a prepared statement issued late Tuesday afternoon said he was “disappointed” the Senate did not pass a redistricting bill. It is clear that South Carolina will not have a new congressional map for the 2026 election. It is time for South Carolinians to go vote ”confidently in a safe and secure election for the June 9 primary.”

The ACLU, a group that likely would have gone to court to protest any new Congressional redistricting map, applauded the Senate’s action to effectively kill new Congressional districts this year.

“South Carolinians from all walks of life showed up to give testimony, to call and write to our lawmakers, to lift our voices in protest, and finally to cast ballots in record-breaking numbers on the first day of primary voting,” said Jace Woodrum, executive director of the ACLU of South Carolina.

“After we made our voices heard, lawmakers from both political parties finally saw that the rush to redistrict hurts voters — and they did the right thing,” Woodrum said.

This story was originally published May 27, 2026 at 5:30 AM with the headline "SC Blacks, Dems were urged to turn out to vote to foil Trump redistricting efforts."