South Carolina?
I can only conclude he represented the Black district, managing to win primaries despite his whiteness, like Steve Cohen in TN. Probably due to his power and length of term in office.
“The most likely reason is the writers don’t have a clue on how to write from the POV of a Republican as the main character. “
Mmm, makes sense. “The West Wing” tried to do it with Alan Alda as the Republican nominee in the final season, but they just had to make him pro-choice because they can’t respect a pro-life character at all.
Alda's characther didn't make sense for similar geographic reasons. Not only was he a Republican Senator from California, he had been an incumbent for like 20 years and won the GOP nomination as an openly pro-choice "moderate" Republican (though supposedly he was conservative on everything else). Both scenarios are very unlikely in modern-day America (a Republican winning statewide in California for decades and the GOP nominating an openly pro-choice Republican in the post-Reagan era). If I had written the character, I'd change him to an Ohio Republican and make him pro-abortion in private and earlier in his career but claim to be a "change of heart" on the issue to win the nomination nationally.
I’ve never watched House of Cards, but a friend of mine told me that Spacey’s character represented the York County-based SC-05 (which white liberal RAT John Spratt represented until 2010, when it went GOP for the first time since Reconstruction). The SC-05 was like 30% black prior to 2012 redistricting, so, no, it wasn’t a black-majority district. When did House of Cards come out, like 2011? When they first floated the show it probably was perfectly reasonable to depict a white liberal Democrat congressman from SC, but by the time it came out Obama’s policies had made such a character a relic of the past.