SC redistricting plan leaves Sen. Harpootlian without Senate seat. He says that’s OK
The South Carolina Senate redistricting committee will decide soon whether to advance a map proposal that eliminates the district of an influential Richland County senator.
The draft map, released Nov. 4, would move District 20, represented by Sen. Dick Harpootlian, to Charleston County, while bringing Districts 18 and 26 into Richland County.
The proposal would force the outspoken Harpootlian into a primary with former Senate Minority Leader Nikki Setzler, D-Lexington, while giving Richland County an additional fully contained Senate seat and bringing Setzler and Sen. Ronnie Cromer, R-Newberry, into the county’s legislative delegation.
“I don’t have an issue with what they’ve done with my district because there’s been huge population growth on the coast and not in the Midlands,” Harpootlian said.
Richland County’s population increased about 8% over the past decade, but the 2020 census showed Charleston County’s population grew by roughly twice that amount.
The Senate redistricting panel received public comments on its working plan Nov. 12 and will take up the plan again in the near future, although its next hearing date has not been set.
The proposal must advance out of the Senate redistricting panel and Senate Judiciary Committee before Dec. 6, when the full Senate returns to wrap up the map drawing process.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Luke Rankin, R-Horry, said earlier this month that any proposed amendments to the draft plan would be made at the full committee meeting.
The South Carolina House, whose redistricting process is running concurrent to the Senate’s, also has set aside three days in early December to return to Columbia to finalize its map.
Both chambers are also in the process of crafting congressional maps. The Senate redistricting committee released its draft congressional map Tuesday afternoon and will meet Monday to take public testimony on it.
Lawmakers hope to have all three maps completed by year’s end, roughly three months ahead of the March 30 candidate filing deadline.
Senate plan is ‘not a gerrymandered map’
The Senate’s working plan, which garnered positive reviews from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of South Carolina, does a better job of keeping counties and voting precincts whole than the current map, resulting in the separation of fewer communities of interest.
“The plan that we’ve come up with really focused on those issues,” Senate cartographer Will Roberts said. “Making sure that we tried to keep the counties (as) whole as we could, as well as eliminating and trying to avoid splitting voting precincts as much as possible.”
The counties of Abbeville, Allendale, Darlington, Dillon, Greenwood, Hampton, Marlboro and McCormick, which currently are split between multiple districts, are wholly contained in a single district in the Senate’s draft map.
Overall, the draft proposal splits 27 counties and divides five voting precincts compared to 35 county splits and 156 voting district splits in the existing map, Roberts said.
Princeton University’s Gerrymandering Project, which analyzed proposed House and Senate maps in all 50 states, does not expect the Senate’s working map to impact the chamber’s seat distribution, which currently breaks down 30-16 in favor of Republicans.
It does, however, estimate that only one Senate seat in the entire state — District 41 in the Lowcountry, currently represented by Sen. Sandy Senn, R-Charleston — would be competitive under the Senate staff proposal.
Alternatively, the League of Women Voters of South Carolina, which defines competitiveness somewhat more liberally (partisan lean margin of +/- 5% rather than +/- 3.5%) and considers the results of more past elections when calculating it, projects 10 competitive districts in the Senate’s working plan.
That may not sound like many — only about 22% of Senate districts — but it’s not bad given the state’s uneven demography, said Lynn Teague, the League’s vice president for issues and action.
“It is equal to the League map — which was drawn in a totally nonpartisan fashion — in variables like the number of competitive districts,” she said. “We know that South Carolina has an underlying demographic pattern that means we don’t have truly proportional representation when you draw districts, but we believe this has been basically a very fair attempt at that.”
Earlier this month, Teague told the Senate redistricting committee their staff had drawn a map that significantly improved on the current map.
“We can say with absolute certainty, the Senate map is not a gerrymandered map,” she said.
Another of the Senate working map’s changes is to create three wholly contained districts in Richland County, guaranteeing three resident senators.
Richland currently has four resident senators — Harpootlian, Darrell Jackson, Mia McLeod and John Scott — but because only two represent the county exclusively, their seats could conceivably be taken by non-Richland County lawmakers in the future.
The only way to guarantee Richland County a third resident senator, according to Roberts, was to move a district out of the county.
“Because of the population growth along the coast, we have collapsed (Harpootlian’s) District 20 and moved it to the Charleston area,” he said. “In doing so, we have three resident senators that are totally within Richland. We’ve got Districts 19 (Scott), 22 (McLeod) and 21 (Jackson) that are wholly contained.”
Mapmakers pulled Setzler’s goalpost-shaped District 26 — which one expert has called the most gerrymandered district in the Senate — out of Aiken County and into downtown Columbia to cover portions of Harpootlian’s current district.
Cromer, Scott and Jackson also would absorb portions of what is now District 20 into their districts, under the working plan.
Despite being the only known senator whose district would be eliminated in the Senate proposal, Harpootlian said he took no issue with the draft map and does not plan to propose an amendment to restore his district.
“I think it makes sense to create the district that Nikki (Setzler) and I will have, which is basically a city of Columbia, city of West Columbia,” he said. “It’s basically an urban district, except the part that goes down into Swansea and Calhoun County.”
When asked if he could beat Setzler in a redrawn District 26, Harpootlian deferred.
“I think that’s a question three years too early,” he said.
Concerns with the Senate plan
While the League of Women Voters offered a generally positive assessment of the proposed Senate map, the organization, along with numerous interest groups and residents who testified last week, did take issue with certain aspects of the plan.
The redrawn District 39, in particular, which contains portions of Berkeley, Dorchester and Orangeburg counties, concerned the League and the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund.
Currently a competitive, albeit Democratic-leaning district, Senate District 39 could turn solidly red by 2030 if recent demographic trends hold, according to John Ruoff, a researcher and veteran mapmaker who worked with the League on its redistricting proposals.
Ruoff said he feared explosive non-minority growth in Berkeley County in the years ahead could transform the district, currently represented by freshman Sen. Vernon Stephens, D-Orangeburg, from a rural Midlands district into more of a suburban Charleston district.
“I think in trying to build a map that is fair to all citizens in the state, you need to not just focus on what did the census numbers say last year,” he told the Senate redistricting committee. “You need to look at these as districts being built for a decade, and as much as possible you should avoid having landmines in districts for minority voters.”
Another Democrat-held seat at risk of turning red in the future is Fairfield County Sen. Mike Fanning’s District 17, which would stretch into Lancaster County under the Senate plan, the League and NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund warned.
“Based on recent trends of population growth, CD-17, as proposed by this body … puts at risk in the upcoming years the ability of Black voters to continue to influence elections,” said Leah Aden, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Other concerns about minority representation raised with the draft map included its splitting of minority communities in Greenville, Spartanburg, Batesburg-Leesville, North Augusta, St. Matthews and outside the city of Aiken.
Matt Greene, a redistricting expert and the South Carolina Democratic Party’s technology director, said he saw significant room for improvement in the Senate’s draft map.
Greene, who cited past work on Idaho’s independent redistricting commission, took issue with the number of city and county splits in the proposal.
“When you do need to split counties, you split them in ones that have either not enough for a district or too many,” he said. “But instead small rural counties were used as chopping blocks, which should have been avoided.”
Greene said the Senate’s proposal denied Richland and Horry counties fair representation by allotting them fewer resident senators than their populations warranted and also criticized what he said was excessive splitting that affected the cities of Anderson, Spartanburg, Greenville, Mount Pleasant, Charleston, Rock Hill and Walterboro.
The map’s impact on the tiny Lexington County community of Pelion, population 631, may have attracted more attention than any other issue at this month’s Senate redistricting hearing.
Pelion residents, including its mayor, a councilman and a former police chief, asked the committee to keep the town in a Lexington County district rather than shifting it into District 40, represented by Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg.
Mayor Frank Shumpert told the committee he feared losing the ear of the district’s senator — currently Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington — if Pelion were to move into Hutto’s district.
“Whether you sell pork and beans or you’re in politics, it’s about relationships,” he told the committee. “We get things done because of the people we know and the relationships we have.”
This story was originally published November 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM.