Editor’s Note: Seasoned national political author Louis Jacobson offers a fresh look at influential political and economic history in this updated profile in the soon-to-be-published 2026 edition of the Almanac of American Politics. See the information at the bottom of the article to learn about a special limited offer to purchase this seminal work. Republished exclusively here with permission.
Tragedy and coexistence have been intertwined in South Carolina’s history from the beginning. The sugar-exporting island of Barbados, where the majority was enslaved, produced many of South Carolina’s original, non-Indigenous settlers. Until 1855, South Carolina was the only colony or state with a Black majority.
On the one hand, early South Carolina plantation owners tolerated some groups, opening their colony to French Huguenots and Sephardic Jews. At the same time, they owned giant plantations where slavery enabled the production of rice and indigo. South Carolinian Charles Pinckney led the effort to enshrine the principle of no religious tests for political office in the Constitution, yet he was also a slaveholder.
Lowcountry planters maintained effective control of the Legislature, and therefore the state’s two Senate seats and presidential electors, up through 1860. In that year and the next, South Carolina did more than any other state to precipitate the Civil War. In December, after Abraham Lincoln’s election, the South Carolina Legislature voted to secede from the Union and the state was soon followed by other states. In April 1861, a cannon near Charleston fired on Union troops at Fort Sumter.
After the Civil War
Defeat in the Civil War transformed South Carolina. About 30 percent of military-age white males were killed, and one of the wealthiest states became one of the poorest. Reconstruction briefly gave Black Republicans political control, but the backlash was fierce once federal troops left; strict racial segregation and voting restrictions, including the poll tax, kept Black South Carolinians disenfranchised for decades.
As late as 1944, in a state of 2 million people, 103,000 voted for president, with 88 percent of them voting Democratic. The Lowcountry languished in poverty, with malnutrition on coastal islands. A silver lining was architectural—the Charleston’s old mansions were not replaced by commercial buildings, and instead were saved by the nation’s first local historic preservation movement (and rebuilt after Hurricane Hugo in 1989), cementing the city’s culture and civic pride. Mostly white upstate South Carolina, with a growing textile industry, took the political lead, led by Pitchfork Ben Tillman (governor 1890-94, senator 1895-1918) and a close friend’s son, Strom Thurmond (governor 1947-51, senator 1954-2003).
Economic transition
Federal moves helped South Carolina take steps forward. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended legal segregation of public accommodations and workplaces and brought Blacks into the electorate. Then, Thurmond, first a Democratic, and later a Republican senator, staged a record-setting filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, began appointing Black staff members and backing a Black federal judge. By the 21st century, the state elected Nikki Haley, a daughter of immigrants from India, as governor, and then Tim Scott, who is Black, to the House and later to the Senate, respectively; in this strongly conservative state, their ideology was what mattered.
South Carolina’s biggest change was economic. Half a century ago, much of the state’s economy depended on military bases and big textile mills in the Interstate 85 corridor around Greenville and Spartanburg. Since then, South Carolina has become the most aggressive state in the South in seeking new industry. It advertised its business climate, with one of the nation’s lowest rates of unionization and taxation and a willingness to splurge on tax incentives; in 2023, only 2.3 percent of South Carolina workers were union members.
Democratic Gov. (later Sen.) Ernest “Fritz” Hollings led the creation of the state’s technical colleges, which today educate and train hundreds of thousands of residents a year. Michelin opened the first of several South Carolina plants in 1975, and the first BMW vehicles rolled off the Spartanburg assembly line in 1992.
Volvo chose a South Carolina site 30 miles northwest of Charleston for the company’s first North American assembly plant, and Mercedes builds vans in North Charleston. Companies such as Bosch and Adidas have built factories throughout central and upstate South Carolina. In recent years, the state has led the nation in exports of tires and completed passenger vehicles.
In 2022, BMW said it would invest $1.7 billion in its Spartanburg plants to build electric vehicles and batteries. In 2023, Envision AESC, a battery supplier to BMW, announced an $810 million production facility in northeastern South Carolina, and Scout Motors, backed by Volkswagen, announced a $2 billion electric vehicle plant near Columbia. South Carolina has even secured a piece of the tech sector: Red Ventures, a $2 billion digital conglomerate that owns such brands as CNET, Lonely Planet and Healthline, operates from a modern, 180-acre campus in Indian Land, in South Carolina just south of Charlotte North Carolina.
U.S. Navy bases were the mainstay of Charleston’s economy in the 1970s, but they were closed in the early 1990s and the area became a center of aircraft production. In 2009, Boeing put a 787 Dreamliner assembly plant in North Charleston, though conflicts arose over unionization and product quality. Charleston is a major port, which is a boon for the state’s international exporters; in 2022, the state completed a five-year, $500 million dredging project that enabled container ships to traverse the Charleston harbor in any tide. In 2024, the port said it would expand into the site of a former paper mill.
Charleston’s downtown has not only survived but thrived, thanks to the creative energy of longtime Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., who was first elected in 1975 and served for 40 years. With a keen aesthetic eye, he made the city’s historic center a magnet for tourists; statewide, tourism has grown consistently, passing the military for statewide economic impact. In 2023, Charleston opened the International African American Museum at Gadsden’s Wharf, the entry point for an estimated 40 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the U.S.
South Carolina’s median income ranks 11th lowest in the U.S., and its poverty rate is 11th highest. South Carolina ranks well below the median for the percentage of residents with a college degree.
Race still defines
Race has continued to be a defining issue. In 2015, Dylann Roof, a man with a history of white supremacist beliefs, entered a historic Black church in Charleston, sat down for Bible study, then systematically gunned down nine Black worshippers—including the pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney—as he squeezed the trigger more than 75 times. The attack took place in the successor to the same church that was the epicenter of the 1822 slave rebellion led by Denmark Vesey, which ended with the execution of Vesey and numerous lieutenants, and the church’s destruction. (Before he died, Pinckney had pushed to build a memorial to Vesey.)
Amid the mourning over Roof’s shooting, critics said the state should finally do what it had previously refused to do: Remove the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol grounds in Columbia, where it had flown since 1962. Haley, who before the killings had shown little interest in pulling down the flag, offered her backing, and on July 10, 2015, the flag was permanently lowered. Roof was sentenced to death in 2017, the nation’s first federal hate crime defendant to face the death penalty; in 2024, he was one of three federal death row inmates not to have his sentence commuted by President Joe Biden.
Black residents, along with environmentalists and others, resisted a $3 billion plan to widen an Interstate 526 freeway interchange in a heavily Black neighborhood in North Charleston; it is proceeding with $146 million in state and federal assistance for the affected residents. The successful 2023 murder prosecution of Alex Murdaugh, scion of a powerhouse legal family in Colleton County who was convicted of killing his wife and son after trying to cover up embezzlement and an opioid addiction, spotlighted the historical power imbalances in this corner of the Old South.
South Carolina is also at risk from climate change. It has been hit regularly by hurricanes, including Ian in 2022 and Helene in 2024; rising seas could overwhelm Charleston and the populated barrier islands of Hilton Head and Kiawah. An independent report found that from 2020 to 2023 alone, the state suffered $2.5 billion in weather-related damage.
State benefits from in-migration
Through the 1960s, few people except military personnel moved to South Carolina. But migration from other states has expanded the population by an estimated 18.5 percent since 2010; from 2023 to 2024, South Carolina was the nation’s fourth-fastest-growing state.
Affluent retirees have flocked to a state where they can spend days with pleasant weather on the golf course and a modest cost of living; the share of older residents has increased from 12 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in 2010 to more than 19 percent today.
By 2030, the state is expected to have more residents 65 and older than children in school. On and near the coast, population in Horry County (Myrtle Beach) has expanded by 48 percent, Berkeley County (northern suburbs of Charleston) by 44 percent, Dorchester County (the northwestern suburbs of Charleston) by 24 percent, Beaufort County (Hilton Head) by 23 percent, and Charleston County (Charleston) by 21 percent. Further inland, two suburbs of booming Charlotte, North Carolina—York and Lancaster counties—have grown in population by 32 percent and 41 percent, respectively.
Beyond these growth corridors, population has declined in rural areas. Overall, the state is 69 percent white and 26 percent Black, with relatively small populations of Hispanics (7.5 percent) and Asians (2 percent).
Influx helps Republicans
The influx of white retirees has moved South Carolina politically toward Republicans. Politics cleave the electorate along racial lines, and the hard math of the population breakdown makes it difficult for Democrats to win statewide. In 2022 and 2024, no Democrat took more than 43 percent of the statewide vote, and setting aside U.S. Rep. James Clyburn’s safe seat, no congressional Democratic candidate came within 14 points in either election.
South Carolina vaulted Donald Trump to the Republican nomination in 2016 and helped undercut Haley’s primary challenge to him in 2024; many South Carolina Republican primary voters had arrived after she left the governorship in 2017. South Carolina ranks 48th for the share of women in the state Legislature, outpacing only Mississippi and West Virginia. In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the state to continue using a Republican-drawn congressional map that a lower court had ruled unconstitutional.
LIMITED OFFER: For more than five decades, the Almanac of American Politics has set the standard for political reference books. In September, the Almanac will be publishing its 2026 edition, with more than 2,000 pages offering fully updated chapters on all 435 House members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and much more.
Louis Jacobson, chief author of the Almanac and a contributor to eight volumes, writes the 100 state and gubernatorial chapters. Readers can receive a 15% discount if they purchase the new Almanac at its website and use the code Statehouse2026 at checkout.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
