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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.