WHEN THE time-honored tradition of gerrymandering met up with modern-day computers and their ability to slice and dice not just neighborhoods but individual blocks according to voting patterns, it was only a question of when incumbents would be able to manipulate their districts so precisely that the partisan makeup of legislative bodies would become nearly impervious to the public will.

Here in South Carolina, we came about as close as you can to “when” this month, as the partisan composition changed by a single seat each in the House and in the Senate. The parties fought to a similar near-standstill in the House two years ago, but senators weren’t on the ballot then. This year’s elections marked the smallest change in party control of the two bodies in the two decades since the Republicans began their ascent from irrelevance to hegemony. And while the current balance may reflect the public will at the moment, the manipulative drawing of the districts will allow both parties to maintain roughly this same balance even if the public will changes — either way.

“It’s becoming more firm and fast that if you draw districts on the basis of creating majority-minority influence seats as your number one criterion, and your number two criterion is allowing incumbents to maintain a semblance of their district, then what you end up with are seats that are going to be decided in primaries and that’s it,” House Republican Leader Jim Merrill told me.

Democrats picked up one Senate seat on Nov. 2, to trim the GOP advantage to 26-20, when popular Democratic Rep. Joel Lourie knocked off Columbia attorney Ken Wingate to win the seat of retiring GOP Sen. Warren Giese, whose popular son, GOP Solicitor Barney Giese, endorsed Mr. Lourie.

In the House, there is dispute over which party picked up the one seat. Democrats say they did, by knocking off Republican Rep. Bubber Snow and cutting the GOP lead to 74-50. It feels bizarre to refer to Mr. Snow as a Republican, and that’s the gist of the Republican argument: Mr. Snow, who had served as a Democratic representative for 22 years, switched parties in the spring, after it became apparent that he couldn’t survive a Democratic primary. Since they started the year with 73 members and ended it with 74 (thanks to another party-switcher who was re-elected), Republicans say, they were the one-seat winners.

Whichever argument you buy, the inescapable and crucial fact is that Republicans remain in solid control in both bodies, with little reason to believe that will change any time soon. That suggests that if the General Assembly is to take a different course, it will be because a different kind of Republican is elected to replace Republicans already there.

It’s too early to get a feel for whether there was a substantive difference between the seven Republicans who retired this year and the seven who won open seats. But it’s not too early to think it significant that while Rep. Snow was the only legislator to lose a general election contest, six were defeated in primaries — five of them Republicans.

It’s always dangerous to read too much into such small numbers, particularly since primaries are often marked by local considerations or matters of personality, but the primaries and their aftermath suggest a change within the GOP that could be in the offing.

The primaries themselves — which saw the defeat of three House Republicans with a combined 58 years service and two Republican senators who had been thorns in the side of the governor — were viewed by many as a repudiation of the Legislature’s status-quo approach and an embrace of Gov. Mark Sanford’s aggressive challenge to the way business has always been done.

The reaction to those primary results within the House Republican Caucus seemed to indicate that this was precisely the message received. The caucus replaced Republican Leader Rick Quinn, one of the three primary losers, with Mr. Merrill, who has been among the House Republicans more able to get along with the governor and more willing to challenge the House GOP leadership of Speaker David Wilkins.

Mr. Merrill and Mr. Wilkins are quick to point out that the House passed 14 of the 16 items the governor identified as priorities last session. But the relationship between House Republicans and Mr. Sanford has been rocky at best; and, as one Republican told me, “You don’t have longtime stalwarts like Teddy Trotter and Larry Koon and Rick Quinn be defeated and not acknowledge some belief that there’s some push for a breath of fresh air.”

In the Senate, Republicans and some Democrats had already agreed to make changing that body’s obstructionist rules their top priority in January. That effort could only have been boosted when the three senators who lost in primaries — Republicans John Kuhn and Bill Branton and Democrat Maggie Glover — were well-known abusers of the rules.

If the elections do result in a new direction for the General Assembly, it won’t be because of the two-party competition that has driven change for the past two decades. It will be because sophisticated gerrymandering has hastened our return to a one-party state where the party in charge is too big to avoid internal divisions that are the driving force behind whatever changes we get.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.