OP-ED: Are We Really in the Same Boat? South Carolina Redistricting and the Limits of Coalition Politics

By Greer Marshall
BlackPressUSA Columnists

Rainbow coalitions have a history of leaking on Black folks. There are tons of stories behind that claim; that’s probably not relevant right now, but I digress.

In Southern politics, the Black electorate has been the engine of the Democratic Party for more than half a century. They’ve provided the votes, the grassroots infrastructure, and the moral authority that’s kept the party alive. That said, at this point, they know when they’re being asked to provide the labor for a coalition that doesn’t prioritize them.

So when Mayra Rivera-Vázquez, a Latina candidate, is running for Congress in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District as the state legislature carves up the only Black district in the state, the question isn’t only if she’s qualified. The first question is whether she’s a legitimate option or, to be more direct, are we really in the same boat?

Eight days after the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, South Carolina Republicans are moving to trash the June 9 primary and push it to August so they can redraw the congressional map. Democracy is just too risky unless they can guarantee the outcome. Today, the South Carolina Senate is expected to vote on whether to authorize a special session for redistricting. President Trump says he will be “watching closely.” The target is Jim Clyburn’s 6th District. He holds the state’s only Democratic seat and is the only Black representative from South Carolina since Reconstruction.

This isn’t the first time. In 2023, Republican lawmakers moved roughly 30,000 Black voters out of District 1 and packed them into District 6 to hit a specific racial target. 17% of the Black vote, to be exact. A federal three-judge panel called it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling in 2024, calling the motive partisan rather than racial, as if the two aren’t the same thing in South Carolina. Now, the Callais ruling has given them permission to finish the job.

The numbers are the only thing that matters in this story. Before redistricting, Black voters made up 21.4% of District 1. Today, 17.8%. Hispanic voters went from 7.9% to 8.2%. One group diminished with precision. The other was statistically consolidated.

John Morgan, a Republican map consultant, testified before the House panel that the proposed map was drawn to deliver a 7-0 Republican sweep of the state’s congressional delegation. If you don’t believe me, he said that on the record. The cost of this latest maneuver, according to state Election Commission Director Conway Belangia, is at least $2.2 million in taxpayer money. And that doesn’t include county costs. It also renders the military ballots already in the mail dead on arrival.

And that’s where the public conversation starts telling on itself.

The poetic hypocrisy is hard to miss in South Carolina politics. Nancy Mace, the Republican who held the seat Mayra Rivera-Vázquez is running for, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that women in her own party are stuck in “the token slots,” claiming they are boxed in while the real power operates behind closed doors. But Mace backs the same anti-DEI crusade that South Carolina Republicans have used to dismiss Black achievement and the credentials of women of color as unearned. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, white women were the largest beneficiaries of DEI initiatives. Mayra says to be taken seriously by state lawmakers, she practically has to carry her three advanced degrees like a permission slip at all times, “just because of the fact that I am Latina and a woman.”

District 1 in 2026 is a different beast from the one Mace first won. Mount Pleasant is 90% White with a median household income of $124,000. Kiawah Island’s median income exceeds $213,000. The new math isn’t designed to care for the deeply specific, land-related issues facing the Geechee-Gullah people in places like St. Helena, Wadmalaw, and Johns Island. This is the ghost map Mayra Rivera-Vázquez is running against—an algorithm engineered for the wealthy and for suburban developments, drawn to erase Black districts.

But here’s where the coalition question gets uncomfortable. According to the US census, a significant portion of the Latino population in the Lowcountry identifies as white. A middle-class Latino family in Mount Pleasant has a fundamentally different relationship with this district than a Black family that was redistricted out of it. When a chunk of your coalition shares more economic interests with the people who drew the map than with the people who were erased by it, that ain’t a coalition.

Mayra says she’s not a politician. She’s a lawyer, an economist, and the former chair of the Beaufort County Democratic Party, the first Latina to hold that position in South Carolina. She’s spent 14 years in the Lowcountry.

She stopped a rezoning effort for a golf course on Gullah Geechee land in Beaufort. She organized coalitions against a data center project near the ACE Basin. She’s been in hearing rooms fighting for Black land before ever filing to run for anything.

Mayra says she’s drawn “lines in the sand” for working families in the Lowcountry. In fact, she is the only candidate in the District 1 race who can say to the families on St. Helena, “As former chair of the Beaufort County Democratic Party, while Nancy Mace was busy drawing you off the map, I was fighting to keep you in it.”

When I asked Mayra whether Black voters being displaced should trust a Latina candidate to carry their fight, she didn’t dodge the question.
“Being a Latina, I could not run for Congress without the fight the Black community in the ’60s fought. They helped everyone get the right to vote,” she said. “It’s because of them that I am even a possibility.”

Mayra understands whose shoulders she’s standing on and isn’t pretending otherwise.
Are we really in the same boat?
I asked her that directly.
“Only if we are rowing in the same direction.”