Bid for South Carolina to join GOP’s nationwide redistricting push falls short

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