Category Archives: 2026 Governor

The best SC election result in a while

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Screenshot — click to see source.

Last night, I started to text Alan Wilson my congratulations. I was going to say:

Alan, I’m very happy for you tonight, and very relieved for South Carolina.

But when his number came up, I realized it was a landline, probably at the AG’s office. I guess I don’t have his mobile. So I’ll just say it here.

I’m happy for Alan not only because he’s a good guy, but because he was the only remotely decent, qualified, sane candidate seeking the GOP nomination. He was a guy who was running because he thinks S.C. needs a good governor (near as I can tell, that idea was nowhere in the minds of his opponents), and that he could do the job.

And I think he’s right. Let’s hope so, because he’s now the guy who will be elected governor in November. That is, officially elected governor, in the de jure sense. The de facto election was yesterday.

Is that a crack at Jermaine Johnson? Absolutely not. I don’t know him, and know little about him (factors that most voters in South Carolina share), but I know a lot of people who do know him and say only good things about him. He seems to have clearly been a stronger candidate than the other two who ran. But among those people who say good things about him and are thoroughly versed in the realities of South Carolina politics, I don’t think a single one thinks the Democrats are going to win this time.

Just to review: No Democrat has been elected governor in this state in this century. The last was Jim Hodges in 1998, and he had to sell out completely on the state lottery (he was a staunch and articulate opponent of the idea before that) in order to win. Before that, the last had been Dick Riley, who was first elected in the ’70s and was already out of office when I arrived at The State in 1987.

Since then, the Democrats have had two strong candidates — Vincent Sheheen and James Smith, whom I helped make a run at the office in 2018. Vincent made a very good showing in the 2010 race — a tough one because that was the year of the Tea Party and the beginning of the state GOP’s slide into very disturbing territory. But he didn’t do as well.

There was no one as strong as those two seeking the Democratic nomination this year.

So for me as a voter, the issue was as always: How do we get the best — or least bad — result out of this election? Given that the Republican was almost completely certain to win, that meant Alan Wilson had to win. Because the rest of the field was… disturbing, to use that relatively neutral word again.

Never mind the bullets South Carolina dodged on June 9. In yesterday’s runoff, Alan was up against a woman who had offered zero reasons why any voter who cares about good governance would vote for her to become our state’s chief executive. Go look at her website if you doubt me.

And yet, she had received more votes than Alan Wilson had on June 9. That was worrisome, since to beat her, Alan had to get the votes that had gone to the other candidates who didn’t make the runoff cut. Arguments can be made that those people were worse options than Pam Evette. And Wilson would need the support of people who actually voted for those people.

And he got them, I’m happy to say. In fact, he crushed Pam Evette, by a proportion you would have expected back in the days before the American and South Carolina electorates went mad about a decade ago. He got 69 percent of the vote, at last count.

That’s what makes this the best election result in SC since… well, since Russell Ott beat first Dick Harpootlian, and then the Republican to become my new senator in 2024. In this election, people who had just voted for some of the worst candidates possible somehow managed to see by yesterday that Alan was clearly the better choice. Which he was, for all sorts of reasons that used to matter in elections, but seldom do these days — things like experience, understanding of the job, character, temperament, and ability to see beyond the pettiest concerns of your own partisan base.

Cindi pointed out some of those things in her paper’s runoff endorsement of Alan. I was reminded of such point again this morning. I had coffee with James Smith to talk about something totally unrelated to this stuff, but of course the runoff came up. James told me about something I had totally missed.

Did you watch the GOP gubernatorial debates? I tried to watch one for about two minutes, but stopped so I wouldn’t hurl. James tells me that Pam Evette tried to make an issue of him. She blathered on about Alan having supported a “liberal judge” candidate — that candidate being James. That’s the level on which she operates — Trumpian labels, rather than facts or other relevant considerations.

I hadn’t remembered Alan supporting him, but James did not dispute that fact, and if it’s correct, that would make sense.

Let me tell you an anecdote from the 2018 election. One day, Alan was presiding over a ceremony on the south lawn of the State House that was honoring — I think (it’s been awhile) — public officeholders who have served in the National Guard (or in the military generally — as I said, it’s been awhile).

Alan and James are officers in the Guard. Alan is a JAG officer, and James was a JAG officer who, after 9/11, resigned his commission to enlist as an infantry soldier. He eventually regained his commission in that capacity, and led troops in combat in Afghanistan. That gained him a place in the Guard’s Hall of Fame. He’s now a lieutenant colonel. If there are any officers in the Guard who don’t deeply respect his service, I haven’t met them.

I was standing on the edges of that gathering, waiting for James to come down from his office in the Blatt Building (where I think he was making calls to potential donors or something else dreary but necessary). As I waited, Alan came up to me to ask whether James was going to make it. He was very anxious to make sure James would be there to be recognized and honored. He was very clear and insistent on that point, and his tone and facial expression strongly emphasized his words.

Or to put it another way, the Republican attorney general was very worried he wouldn’t get a chance to honor the Democratic nominee for governor, in the middle of the general election. That’s the way Pam Evette would have put it, and she would have expected voters to be totally outraged at such a display of honor and decency.

So I went up and told James “We have to go NOW,” and he came along, and as I recall, Alan was quite relieved.

To the Pam Evettes of this world, that story would damn him. So I’m quite relieved that she won’t be our governor beginning next year.

 

I’m happy to say I NEVER talked like that…

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I hadn’t thought about Doonesbury in awhile, but Mullins McLeod brought him to mind this week with one of his campaign texts.

There are a number of reasons one might not choose him as our governor, some more lurid than others, but this text (and the others like it that punctuate my days with unsolicited beeping) would be enough to keep me off his bandwagon:

Do not be deceived this election. My opponents are not for the people; they represent the political class and donor class.

The biggest threat the people of S.C. face is our own government selling us out to artificial intelligence because once you replace human intelligence with A.I. there will be no more jobs.

My opponents’ websites do not talk about data centers or A.I. stealing our jobs. One of them is invested in A.I. and the other voted for the Energy Security Act which allows power companies to raise our power rates to ensure their profitability as data centers are built. He also voted to allow data centers to conceal from us how much of God’s gift to us, our water, they take from us. I am the only candidate calling to shut down data centers before it’s too late.

I am also the only candidate who: demands a livable wage; demands increased pay for teachers; shuts down crony capitalism and insider deals; reduces our income tax; attacks power companies who raise our bills; helps student loan borrowers; protects our elderly; fixes the state pension and guarantees a veto on bills that limit women’s healthcare rights.

You judge a candidate not by what they promise but by the deeds they have done. The contrast between my record of being the voice of the people when it matters the most speaks for itself…

… and yadda-yadda.

Immediately, when I read that, I remembered this Doonesbury strip from 1973:

It was one of Trudeau’s all-time best. Phred the retired (he thought) Viet Cong has been called back up, and finds himself listening to the kind of bloviating nonsense he hasn’t heard in awhile. He had my sympathy when the strip first appeared, and he has it now.

Back to Mullins… we’ve all seen this kind of appeal to vague resentments and suspicions before — far, far too often. These days, it makes sense to call it the Trump approach. You want to get elected, and you know there are a bunch of people out there who have a lot of rumbling resentment about things they can’t quite put their fingers on, so you tell them you’re the answer to their disaffection. You tell them you’re with them, and against all those folks in, as Mullins puts it, “the political class and donor class.”

You toss out a long list of promises — a wall to keep Mexicans out, or a living wage, or whatever. But one thing you don’t do, if you’re Mullins, is explain how you’re going to get a Republican Legislature to do these things.

And while you say “judge a candidate not by what they promise but by the deeds they have done,” he doesn’t bother to list any, you know, deeds he has done. His website is light on those as well.

This post is not intended to pick on Mullins McLeod particularly. That text just hit the button that made me think of that strip, and I wanted to share it because I’ve always thought it was brilliant.

But no, I would not vote for him. Nor would I vote for most of those people over in the other primary. If you really want to get depressed about the state of politics in America, go over and review some of their nonsense. It follows the same formula — show you resent the same things they resent, and get them to vote for you on that basis (which is, seriously, not a rational basis for governing):

Nancy Mace has a plan to work with President Donald Trump and stem the tide of illegal immigration. She is also the only governor’s candidate to actually fire a sanctuary sheriff in South Carolina!

Nancy Mace has a plan to address crime in South Carolina since our Attorney General and Solicitors won’t do their job.

(Pam Evette:) I’ve been with you from the beginning. I’ve been with President Trump from the start, and I’ve been fighting for conservative values every single day — as a mother, as a businesswoman, and as your Lieutenant Governor. What we’ve seen with President Trump, we can experience in South Carolina

Ralph Norman knows that to change the system, you can’t be a part of it. In Congress, he’s a member of the House Freedom Caucus, pushing to make legislation more conservative and hold weak-kneed politicians accountable for every dollar spent.

To translate…

  • I don’t like those wetbacks any more than you do. And if I find somebody givin’ ’em sanctuary, I’ll kick his ass! I’ve done it.
  • Note that the guy I claim without justification is not doing his job is running against me!
  • I love that guy that you all love because he hates the same people you hate. I promise more of what he’s brought to America. Of course, I’ve never done a thing in office for South Carolina, but you can see I have the right attitude!
  • You can’t be a part of the system… the way, you know, I have been for more than 20 years — holding office and accomplishing nothing while ranting about what an outsider I am.

That’s enough about them. Back to the Dems…

I don’t know Jermaine Johnson, but people who do say he’s a good guy. Of course, he engages in some of the same kind of rhetoric, although perhaps with greater justification:

Dr. Jermaine Johnson wasn’t born into power—he fought his way into it. He’s not a career politician or a wealthy insider…

In his defense, he does list some things he’s actually done, on this page of his website, but it doesn’t take up a lot of space:

In his first term alone he passed a bill to lower sales tax for seniors, repaired a bridge that had been closed since the 2015 Thousand Year Flood and expanded broadband access. Since then, he began construction on an emergency medical center in rural Lower Richland, struck down an anti- DEI bill, and commissioned a statue of Civil War hero, congressman, and civil rights champion Robert Smalls.

Still, it’s something.

Billy Webster can’t claim all that much himself. Of course, he hasn’t held elective office — although he can point to his service in Dick Riley’s U.S. Department of Education.

And in his defense, I found this page of his site refreshing. Nothing about “I resent the same things you do!,” and serious words about things that an actual governor of an actual state ought to be concerning himself with…. Infrastructure, education, healthcare…

My main concern about Billy is his involvement in payday lending. But I haven’t made up my mind about him, either.

And I’m not sure it matters, for two reasons:

There is not one strong, well-known candidate with a proven ability to win a statewide election in the entire Democratic field. No one with a measureable fraction of the experience and name recognition of James Smith or Vincent Sheheen. And they couldn’t get elected in this state. I’m as certain as I can be that none of this year’s candidates have anything resembling a chance. That means the winner of the Republican primary is going to be governor.

The Republcan field, with one exception, is crammed with with people with no useful abilities or relevant experience, and their heads mostly seem crammed with a bunch of nonsense that would never do South Carolina a scrap of good, and probably would do a good bit of harm. So the most important thing is that none of those people get the nomination.

Yeah, the one exception is Alan Wilson. He’s a solid guy — a decent, trustworthy man who has served capably, at the statewide level, for 15 years. I would trust him with the office of governor, and I don’t think he’d let South Carolina down.

You might find it hard to tell that from his website and ads. He can’t be governor without winning the Republican primary, and he knows most of the people who vote in that are people who think having Donald Trump running our country is a good idea.

So we’re treated to things like the appalling “Alan Wilson is Trump-Tough” page. Lord have mercy upon us.

But elsewhere, you’ll find something approaching the kind of pragmatic, to-the-point addressing of issues that I liked on the Webster site. There’s some silly ideological junk there, too, but I’m never going to get what I want at this stage in our history, so I go for what seems least bad.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, eh? Well, it’s not endorsement. This post started exactly as I wrote it. I got irritated by the latest example of McLeod’s ideological nonsense, and got a smile out of remembering a joke from long ago, making fun of the same sort of stuff. Then I figured I’d look around and mention the other people, too.

After all, we do have this election coming up…