South Carolina 2nd District

In 1786, soon after the Revolutionary War, the South Carolina Legislature decided to move the state capital away from the Charleston aristocracy and into the Upstate interior, away from a city named after a king to a new city named after a discoverer of America. So began Columbia. The State House was built on high ground above the Congaree River in a town of one-and-a-half story houses with first floor porticos, dormers and raised brick basements—“Columbia cottages.” In 1865, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army burned almost everything here but the State House. Columbia recovered, but grew slowly, with state government and the university, the Army’s Fort Jackson and local insurance companies providing steady employment. Manufacturing boomed in the 1970s and again in recent years, making Columbia a confident city and the state’s largest. For a time, Columbia’s politics was personified by Jimmy Byrnes, the Democrat who returned from top posts in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Washington to serve as governor and lament the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Since then, upwardly mobile South Carolinians, transplanted from underdeveloped rural areas to comfortable two-car-garage subdivisions, turned Republican, first in national elections and then at the state and local levels. The metro Columbia area has been mostly Republican. But African-American population, now 46% of the total in Columbia’s Richland County, has helped Democrats carry it. Across the river, faster-growing Lexington County, which is 14% black, has remained heavily Republican.

The 2nd Congressional District of South Carolina includes most of metro Columbia, except for the African-American neighborhoods in northern and western Columbia and the southern and eastern parts of Richland County that are in the black-majority 6th District. It contains the city's affluent white neighborhoods and the spread-out towns of Richland and Lexington counties, with their shopping centers, churches and the Army’s huge training center, Fort Jackson, where $1 billion in construction projects resulted from the 2005 base realignment. The district extends south, taking in Barnwell County, which includes half of the Savannah River Site, one of the nation’s nuclear weapons manufacturing complexes and the location of a landfill for low-level nuclear waste. A massive clean-up of the landfill has been going on since the reactors were shut down in 1992, but plans are now underway for a $5 billion plant to convert weapons-grade plutonium for commercial use.

The district takes in horse farm country around Aiken and several lightly populated, low-income rural counties. The 2nd also includes fast-growing Beaufort County on the coast, with the old county seat of Beaufort, the carefully manicured developments of Hilton Head Island and the Marine Corps’ Parris Island training base and air station. This part of the district distinctively blends old and new. Beaufort’s wonderful mansions and evocative Spanish moss provided the backdrop for the prose of novelist Pat Conroy and the 1983 movie The Big Chill, while the posh condominium developments and golfing resorts around Hilton Head and the Sun City Hilton Head development helped drive up Beaufort County’s population by 24% since 2000. On nearby St. Helena Island, slave-owners, hating the heat and mosquitoes, ran largely absentee operations, thus allowing Gullah culture—a fusion of English and African elements—to thrive. Republican President George W. Bush won 60% of the vote here in 2004, and GOP presidential nominee John McCain got 54% in 2008.