I expect the answer from most of you will be “no.”
But I did. This is the kind of situation in which careful, thoughtful voters have the greatest obligation to vote. Primaries are bad enough — for the most part, the only people who turn out (for both parties) are the most devoted party members, and therefore, far too often, the most dangerous ideologues.
But runoffs are worse. Fortunately, some of the most dangerous characters (Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace) were eliminated on June 9. And happily, we won’t have either of them in Congress any more after this year, either.
The runoff is still critical, as it’s between the best of the lot from the original crowd, and someone who had no business running for the office she had already held since 2018, much less for governor. (Things could have been very different, as I have explained before — but voters threw away that opportunity.)
By contrast, Alan Wilson is an intelligent, decent person who has an unusual amount of experience in government at the statewide level. Does he say some ridiculous stuff in the course of a GOP primary? Yep. Because you have to do that to win a Republican primary (which is the only way to get elected governor, unless you’re a Democratic governor of greater popularity than we’ve seen in a generation; if James couldn’t do it, no Democrat on the scene today can).
If you wonder how Alan differs from his opponents (including the only surviving one) in this contest, look at that editorial I called your attention to yesterday. The older I get, the less and less it’s about the “issues” pols yammer about, and more and more about character.
That’s why I voted for him two weeks ago, and again today. And fervently hope he wins, because the one who wins today will be our governor starting next year.
The problem is, how many people like me — people who despise parties and do all they can to elect the best (or at least, least bad) candidate — voted today?
Not as many as should have, I’m sure. But will the ones who did be enough?
Just to make sure I don’t leave you with the wrong impression…
I’m under no delusion about whether there’s a chance of Alan winning on the strength of “voters like me.” On the contrary, if he wins, it will be because enough of the other kind of voter — the party loyalists — decided for their own reasons to vote for him.
Those reasons are likely to include the facts that Ralph Norman has endorsed him, as has… Donald Trump.
The latter of those two gives us one of the most delightful ironies of recent elections in South Carolina. Why? Having been endorsed by Trump was the ONLY justification Pam Evette has ever offered for her candidacy. She has no accomplishments, relevant experience or skills to offer, so she has gone with that from the start.
And now her hero is endorsing the OTHER guy.
Not that he’s dropped his endorsement of dear Pam. Oh, no. He’s endorsing them BOTH. Apparently, as imperceptive as he is, he’s noticed that the people he backs in GOP primaries don’t always win. So he’s backing both candidates, so that he — the most absurdly unprincipled and cowardly man ever to hold such a high office in our country — can claim a “win” when it’s over.
Before this, I would called the NYT’s endorsement of two Democrats in the 2020 primaries (but of course, NOT the one who would win both that race and the general election) as the stupidest non-endorsement endorsement of recent times. But Trump is doing all he can to outdo that.
Still, if it leads to the right guy winning today, I’ll be smiling and applauding. As messed up as American democracy is today, if we wait for the right thing to happen for the right reasons, we may be perpetually disappointed…
Trump knifed Evette in the back just so he could be right. Not only do you have to be the Republican in the race who gets endorsed by Trump, you need to be the *last* Republican in the race to be endorsed by Trump. No guarantee that she would have won had she remained the only Republican gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Trump, but she likely would have made a better showing
No, she wouldn’t have won. But yeah, her numbers would have been a little better.
But as I said before, there’s no indication that the Trump endorsement helped Wilson. The reason I’m so encouraged by this result is that it indicates that Republican voters are wising up somewhat. I think they realize that if it had been Nancy Mace in the runoff with Pam, and polls were indicating that Nancy was going to win big, Trump would have endorsed her, in spite of not liking her at all…
If electoral politics isn’t about issues, then it isn’t bout much of anything.
That being said, yes, there wasn’t much point in examining the differences between the 2 remaining GOP gubernatorial candidates – because there weren’t any significant differences. They’re both members in good standing of the Irresponsible Party.
only 3.9% of south carolinians voted for alan tuesday. thats all it takes.
Yep. That’s the trouble with primaries, and ESPECIALLY runoffs. Almost no one turns out in the first category, and far fewer in the second.
It’s a scary situation. That’s why I make sure I vote in the primary where I can either do the most good, or prevent the most harm, with my one feeble vote. And in this case, that unquestionably meant I needed to vote in the Republican. I didn’t have reason to have positive feelings about any of the Democrats that were strong enough to waste my vote on an empty gesture. And it would have been an empty gesture, since none of them appeared to have any chance to win in the fall.
This situation was one in which it was more certain than usual that the Republican would win — and that would happen no matter how awful the nominee was. And there were some really awful candidates on the Republican ballot, some demonstrating the worst characteristics of the Trumpist era.
Of course, to see the strongly different characteristics between them, you have to perceive that the world is not the way that many smart people — such as our regular Ken, or my good friend of many years Randle — see it. There is not simply a Good Party and a Bad Party. Politics isn’t a 1950s B Western movie. Yes, folks, in the Trump era, the GOP has gotten as close as anything has ever been to a Bad Party. (For another discussion, I ask you to also consider that the Democratic Party is farther away from being a purely Good Party than it’s ever been in my lifetime. The mad dysfunction of the Trump Era has ill effects across the political spectrum.)
But it’s not quite there, and people like Alan Wilson are the reason why. He’s a real Republican, not an interloper like Trump and his populist followers.
I don’t mean he’s Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. He’s more of a 1960s-2010 kind of Republican, like his stepdad. And many, many of those real Republicans were pretty solid people. Even those who were not so good — I’m thinking Nixon — look good from a 2026 perspective
And Alan’s better than most that we see today. And he was up against some really terrible candidates.
I sort of resist doing this because these things aren’t really linear, and it makes it look like, say, Alan Wilson and Pam Evette were close in quality as candidates. They were not, and the good news of this election was that it appears the few voters who turned out could see that.
Think of it this way. If you rate them from 1 to 10, Alan would come in as a 7 or 8. None of the others would rise much above zero. A couple would be in negative numbers. Anyway, forcing myself to rank them, here they are from best to worst.
an illegal act by norman – one in which law enforcement ignored because he was a politician