South Carolina‘s state Senate blocked a Republican redistricting push in the state on Tuesday, with five Republicans joining Democrats to vote down the measure.
Just one day after South Carolina’s state House advanced the measure that would have likely enabled Republicans to flip the only Democratic seat, held by Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), in the state red, the state Senate killed the measure by a vote of 29-17. The vote was just two votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass the measure.
The vote flies in the face of President Donald Trump‘s hopes after he encouraged the redistricting move and told the state senators in a Monday Truth Social post that he was “watching closely.”
South Carolina Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, a Republican, voted against the redistricting measure. Massey said in a speech on the upper chamber floor that the numbers in the proposal were not reliable enough and that the margin numbers “keep changing.” He called the push for a 7-0 margin “extremely risky.”
“I don’t want Hakeem Jeffries as the speaker of the House. I think the best chance that South Carolina has to prevent that from happening is with our current maps because we know what we’re going to get. We don’t know what we’re going to get on the other side,” Massey said.
“If we start tinkering with this, my concern is that we can make this a whole lot worse,” Massey continued.
Trump had encouraged the state senators to “BE BOLD AND COURAGEOUS” and usher the proposal through.
SOUTH CAROLINA LEGISLATURE ADVANCES REDISTRICTING PROPOSAL AFTER TRUMP ENCOURAGEMENT
“South Carolina Republicans: BE BOLD AND COURAGEOUS, just like the Republicans of the Great State of Tennessee were last week! Move the U.S. House Primaries to August, leave the rest on the same schedule. Everything will be fine. GET IT DONE!” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social.
A similar move in defiance of Trump’s redistricting efforts in Indiana had sweeping political consequences for the state senators who voted against the move, with Trump’s endorsed primary challengers defeating the majority of the state senators who defected.