Republicans' nationwide redistricting push has been widely viewed as a bid to boost the GOP in November, but one Democratic strategist says it has a more specific target: Black lawmakers, particularly one from South Carolina.
“They’re not going for revamping representation. They’re going for Black political extermination,” said Antjuan Seawright, an adviser for Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), speaking with The Wall Street Journal for its report Saturday.
The Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in late April that effectively gutted a provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to prohibit racially discriminatory voting policies. In the weeks since, Republican-led states launched a coordinated effort to redraw their congressional district maps, with the effort recently reaching South Carolina as its Republican governor faces pressure to call a special session and redraw the state’s maps.
That the GOP’s gerrymandering blitz was also designed to target Black lawmakers has been alleged before, perhaps most recently by Democratic strategist Ashley Allison, who scolded GOP strategist Scott Jennings earlier this week for dismissing Republicans’ “surgical attack” on Black voters.
Clyburn, the only Democrat and Black lawmaker of South Carolina’s seven-member U.S. House delegation, recently warned President Donald Trump that the redistricting push – launched by the president last year with his call for Texas lawmakers to redraw their own congressional district maps – would ultimately backfire.
“The president says he wants them to redraw the lines – all I'm going to say to that is, be very careful what you pray for, because what I believe is that when they finish with the redistricting, there will be the possibility of at least three Democrats getting elected here in South Carolina to the United States Congress,” Clyburn told CNN earlier this week.
Another Black Democratic lawmaker – Rep. Shomari Figures (D-AL) – told the Journal that the GOP gerrymandering blitz could take the United States back decades, with the redistricting push having already reached his own state.
“We’re certainly at risk of seeing this country return to where it was, literally in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, in terms of Black political representation,” Figures told the Journal.