Population surge gives Horry County new SC House seat in redistricting
Horry County, which has grown 30% over the past decade, is one of three counties gaining a seat in the new House redistricting plan approved Thursday.
The plan, which has been criticized for favoring Republicans and incumbent politicians at the expense of voters, passed 96-14. It requires a final vote Monday and must then be adopted by the Senate, but those steps are considered perfunctory.
The House map, released early last month and amended in committee, is projected to give Republicans a supermajority in the House and could significantly reduce the number of competitive districts in the state. The current political makeup of the chamber is 81 Republicans to 43 Democrats.
Due to South Carolina’s explosive growth over the past decade — the state added about 500,000 people, according to the 2020 census — large-scale changes were necessary to ensure all districts had roughly the same number of people.
Horry, along with fast-growing Charleston and York counties, will add seats from areas where population has increased more modestly or not at all since 2010. Richland County, on the other hand, is due to lose a seat after the merger of two lower Richland districts.
District 61, a Florence County seat held by Democratic Rep. Roger Kirby that was short about 8,000 people, has been moved to Horry County to accommodate the population shift.
“We’ve created a new seat in Horry County, which is great for Horry County because it gives us more power, for lack of a better word, up there in Columbia,” freshman state Rep. Case Brittain, R-Horry, said.
With Horry County’s House delegation expanding to 11 members under the new map, its lawmakers will have an easier time getting what the area needs, he explained.
The new Horry County district, which resembles the profile of a pointy-nosed witch, was slotted in between six existing House seats and picks up parts of Conway, Red Hill, Forestbrook and Socastee.
It includes Conway Medical Center, currently in Rep. Heather Ammons Crawford’s District 68, and Coastal Carolina University, currently in Rep. Kevin Hardee’s District 105.
Despite being composed of parts of at least four current districts, no incumbent lawmaker lives in the redrawn District 61, so the race for the seat will be wide open.
Brittain’s District 107, which contains most of Myrtle Beach, had to shed about 6,600 people to rightsize.
It ended up giving up a bit of the city’s southern end to neighboring District 106, including part of the Market Common district that contains Horry-Georgetown Technical College’s Grand Strand Campus, as well as the gated Prestwick community.
Brittain said it was difficult to lose those areas, where he used to live and still has many friends, but believes he’ll now be able to turn more of his attention to Myrtle Beach proper.
“I can really focus on the Myrtle Beach aspect of the district and those businesses and people,” he said. “It makes the job even that much more interesting and fulfilling to be able to represent a diverse area.”
While the once-a-decade redistricting process is nearly always fraught with conflict and accusations of partisan bias, critics say the House map is particularly egregious — a sign the map may be challenged in court.
The state’s underlying demographics make creating a truly unbiased map impossible, but the new House map is significantly more gerrymandered than even the existing imperfect map, an impartial analysis indicates.
Only nine of 124 districts are competitive, or about half as many as the current House map, according to Dave’s Redistricting app, a popular map drawing and analysis tool.
“The extremely low number of competitive districts — even at a generous ±5% standard — points toward making voters nearly obsolete in general elections for the SC House of Representatives,” the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of South Carolina wrote in its assessment of the proposal.
State Rep. Jay Jordan, R-Florence, who chaired the House redistricting committee, defended the integrity of the panel’s process, saying it had gone to great lengths to ensure everything was done transparently.
“Incumbent locations were considered,” he said. “But lines were not contorted in order to protect incumbent legislators. I can say that very, very clearly.”
The House map splits roughly the same number of counties as the current one, but nearly three times as many precincts, which can create voter confusion. It has 32 majority-minority districts — two more than the current map — but actually scores lower on minority representation, according to Dave’s Redistricting.
Ten incumbents — four Republicans and six Democrats — are drawn into districts with one another, setting up potential primaries next year, and at least two districts are left without an incumbent after their representative was shifted into a neighboring district.
House lawmakers who have been drawn into the same district are Reps. Vic Dabney, R-Kershaw, and Brandon Newton, R-Lancaster, in District 45; Reps. Jerry Govan, D-Orangeburg, and Russell Ott, D-Calhoun, in District 93; Reps. Cezar McKnight, D-Williamsburg, and Roger Kirby, D-Florence, in District 101; Reps. Sandy McGarry, R-Lancaster, and Richie Yow, R-Chesterfield, in District 53; and Reps. Wendy Brawley, D-Richland, and Jermaine Johnson, D-Richland, in District 70.
Of the incumbents who are “double bunked” in the new map, all but Newton, McKnight and Yow voted against the proposal or did not vote.