South Carolina's state Senate rejected congressional redistricting on the floor despite the House passing a calendar extension and Governor Henry McMaster applying pressure. Senate Majority Leader Davey Hiott told members the state would not proceed1. Mississippi narrowed its post-Callais session to state Supreme Court districts only, declining to redraw the congressional map. Both states answered the post-Callais call along with Alabama and Tennessee in late April.
A governor pressing his own Senate majority on a partisan redistricting question and losing is rare on any calendar. The Hiott bloc's argument, reported by NPR, was that an in-cycle redraw would invite federal court intervention before November and produce no net seat gain over the existing 6R-1D map. The countervailing pressure from McMaster, per the same reporting, was that the Callais window will not stay open into 2027. Hiott's bloc judged the November risk larger than the foregone seat opportunity. Mississippi's narrowing was procedurally cleaner, scoping the special session to state court redistricting at the outset rather than calling and failing.
The two refusals shave the Callais harvest estimate from a notional 15 congressional seats toward the lower end of the 12-15 range cited by Cook Political Report. Of the seven candidate Republican states reckoned with mid-decade redistricting after Callais, two have now declined. The Republican track remains fast and asymmetric on the four states that have proceeded: governors' calendars in days against Democratic counter-mechanisms measured in months or years. But asymmetric does not mean uniform.
Brookings Institution redistricting scholar Joshua Douglas noted that intra-party rejections like Hiott's tend to track the specific math in each state rather than any national counter-current. South Carolina's existing 6R-1D map already absorbs most of the available partisan gain; the marginal seat from a redraw was not worth the federal court exposure. Indiana, Ohio and Missouri, where the partisan math leaves more upside, remain the next test of whether the pattern scales.
