Black Democrat Rep. James Clyburn, one of South Carolina’s most powerful politicians, secretly worked with Republicans during the 2020 redistricting process to dilute the strength of the black vote, making it harder for his party to gain seats in Congress. He did it to ensure he’d be able to comfortably continue winning his seat for as long as he wanted to.
That’s the explosive charge at the heart of a ProPublica investigation. Despite Clyburn’s denials to ProPublica, I have no reason to doubt that’s precisely what happened. The non-profit investigative journalism outfit documented the behind-the-scenes meetings between Clyburn’s chief of staff and Republicans tasked with redrawing voting maps. The proof showed up in the 2022 midterms. Rep. Nancy Mace easily won re-election in the First District without having to truly gain support just two years after she skated by. Clyburn again won the Sixth District in a landslide even as the state’s percent of black voters fell and after his district lost a significant number of residents.
The deal, of which we are only now being made aware, meant pushing key Democratic constituents into Clyburn’s district and made the First District more Republican-friendly.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued over the gerrymandered voting map. A three-judge federal panel called it a racial gerrymander and said it was “effectively impossible” to have moved more 30,000 black voters into Clyburn’s district without it. But the court pushed back against some of the NAACP’s claims – by showing that Clyburn had requested some of the changes. It’s just one example of the ugly often-hidden layer of what we keep referring to as a democracy, a term that’s often misapplied given the state of things. In a healthy democracy, the people choose their representatives. Increasingly, that’s not what’s happening in ours.
The most charitable reading for Clyburn is that he had to make a deal with the devil to ensure there would be at least one district in South Carolina that had to take seriously the concerns of the state’s black residents. The GOP has effectively had full control of the state for decades and has time and again diluted the black vote through a variety of measures. There’s little doubt they’d want a Republican running the Sixth District – they run every other district – if they could make it happen.
In that sense, Clyburn has established a beachhead in the war over voting. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts – the kind of white moderate Martin Luther King Jr. warned us about, a greater threat to racial progress than racists – gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, making it easier for the GOP to hold fast to power that far exceeds their success at the ballot box. And it is true that despite the enormous power and influence Clyburn wields, the GOP drew the map in a way most favorable for Republicans.
But I’m sympathetic to the less charitable view, that the 82-year-old congressman prioritized holding onto his power even if he had to do it by helping the GOP further dilute the black vote, which represents about 25 percent of South Carolina voters. He isn’t the first elected official to make such a short-term decision, and he won’t be the last, the kind of decision that repeatedly harms the most vulnerable among us most severely over the long haul. Former Democrat Tricia Cotham did something similar in the North Carolina legislature when she switched parties and gave the GOP a veto-proof majority that could mean a curtailing of abortion care access Cotham not too long ago vowed to protect.
It’s enough to make voters cynical, at least those among us who want a healthy democracy even if it means we sometimes won’t get our way. Or we may have to make a deal with the devil also, and join forces with the most partisan actors on our side to try and counteract the extremism on the other side.
Unfortunately, there are few good options – and those are being diluted, too.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion columnist based in Myrtle Beach.
