The South Carolina Senate abruptly adjourned on Tuesday without taking up a new congressional map that aimed to eliminate the state’s lone majority Black district and cement an entirely Republican delegation.
By refusing to act, lawmakers defied pressure from President Trump and national conservatives to wade into the country’s redistricting wars before the November elections.
The State Senate failed to pass a motion to stop debate on the map, signaling that with early voting already underway on Tuesday, there was no longer enough support among Republicans to push through new district lines before the state’s June 9 primary. Instead, the Senate agreed to adjourn, effectively punting votes on a new map until after the primary.
The vote ensures that for now, South Carolina will remain among the outliers in the South. Other Republican-led states have raced to respond to the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act by diluting districts where a majority of Black voters have repeatedly elected Democrats.
But in South Carolina, the prospect of throwing out thousands of ballots was enough to prevent enough Republican support for new district lines. Nearly 45,000 votes had already been cast by 3 p.m. Tuesday during the first day of early voting.
It is likely that South Carolina will return to the debate for future elections. Leaders in Georgia and Mississippi, where primaries have already been held, have signaled that they want to redraw their own district lines in time for the 2028 elections.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling last month, pressure escalated for lawmakers to slice up South Carolina’s only majority Black district, which has repeatedly stood behind Representative James E. Clyburn, a Black Democrat. Mr. Clyburn, 85, is seeking an 18th term in Congress, and remains a powerful political force.
But even as Mr. Trump and his allies pressured the South Carolina Legislature to join other lawmakers across the country and shore up Republican advantages ahead of the midterms, fears persisted about weakening the political chances of incumbents in a year where conservatives already face headwinds. And there were worries about rushing a process that might not withstand a legal challenge.
On Tuesday, with lawmakers and constituents alike casting their votes early, it became clear that those concerns were enough to preserve district lines.
“Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” said State Senator Richard Cash, a Republican from northwestern South Carolina, speaking on Tuesday. He added: “Many of us are also frustrated and disappointed in what is a very unsatisfying outcome, but we need to face it.”
State Senator Brad Hutto, the Democratic minority leader, said in an interview that Democrats had worked all weekend to make sure thousands of voters flooded the polls on Tuesday to send a message, both visually and politically.
“The people in South Carolina was sending us a message that their vote mattered,” Mr. Hutto said. “It was important, and they didn’t want us to cancel their vote.”
The State House, which passed the new map on May 20, had always been much more receptive to the idea of redistricting. Its members are up for re-election this year, and it did not go unnoticed that many of the Republican state senators in Indiana who voted down the president’s plan on redistricting lost their primaries this month to challengers he had endorsed.
The Republicans who backed the map framed their support as a way to help cement G.O.P. control of the state’s federal delegation at a moment when Congress is narrowly divided.
“I like the map — I would like to see it become law,” said State Senator Larry Grooms, a Republican. Speaking on Tuesday, he added that he believed “this is our last and best chance to pass this map” and that without a successful procedural vote, “it’s not going to happen.”
But some of Mr. Grooms’s colleagues in the Senate were far more skeptical of the scramble to enact new district lines this summer. Senate members are not up for re-election until 2028.
Those concerns first crystallized earlier this month after a rare, defiant speech from Shane Massey, the Republican majority leader of the Senate, which helped derail a first attempt to reconsider the state’s district lines.
Gov. Henry McMaster eventually called a special session himself, making the senators’ earlier refusal moot. In a statement on Tuesday, he said he was “disappointed” by the outcome, but that he was confident that South Carolina’s congressional delegation would one day be completely Republican.
Mr. Grooms, in his own statement on Tuesday after the Senate had adjourned, seemed to place at least some blame on Mr. McMaster and accused him of being too slow to act.
“Republicans and the White House worked quickly to pass a redistricting plan before the start of in-person voting,” Mr. Grooms said. “But the call from the governor came too late.”
Other Republicans in the state pledged to pick up the battle over maps in the future.
“I’m disappointed the Senate failed to get this bill across the finish line,” said Alan Wilson, the state attorney general and a Republican candidate for governor. He added: “I have said all along that our state has both the authority and the responsibility to fix it. This fight is not over.”
During debate over the weekend, some lawmakers, including Mr. Massey, said the map also referenced voting precincts that no longer existed. It was evidence, they said, that the process had been rushed and would not hold up in court.
“Two years of due diligence would have caught these mistakes,” State Senator Tom Davis, a Republican from coastal Beaufort County, wrote in an email to his constituents Monday evening. “Two weeks did not, because two weeks is not due diligence. It is a rubber stamp.”
But Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said those lawmakers were “mistaken,” noting that the bill text instead referred to 2020 census geography, not precincts.
Some Republicans also bristled at a perceived national interference, taking issue with a map that was generated by a consultant in Washington.
Several of the Republican state senators who voted against the map had raised questions about whether it would even lead to the defeat of Mr. Clyburn, a popular Black Democrat who is considered a power broker, and who has funneled vast resources to South Carolina over his decades in office.
The lawmakers feared the new map could have created more competitive districts for Democrats by placing Mr. Clyburn’s liberal voters in other conservative-leaning districts. And there were worries among conservatives that such a shift would boost Black turnout and hurt other Republican candidates down ballot.
Mr. Clyburn, in an interview, said he had spoken to multiple Republican state senators last week about the new map, pointing out that his district had withstood legal challenges in the past few years.
“A critical number of Republicans in the South Carolina Senate just didn’t believe in putting a man over the law,” Mr. Clyburn said, referring to the senators rejecting pressure from Mr. Trump. “So I don’t think they joined with Democrats as much as they were maintaining their principles.”
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
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