The S.C. Senate chamber is seen in session in Columbia, S.C. on Wednesday, March 23, 2022. (Travis Bell/STATEHOUSE CAROLINA/Special to the SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — South Carolina Republicans took a victory lap Wednesday celebrating wins that stretched from the White House to the Statehouse.
President-elect Donald Trump won South Carolina by 18 points over Vice President Kamala Harris on his path to a second term, according to unofficial state vote tallies. The Associated Press declared him the 47th president at 5:35 a.m. Wednesday, after Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes put him over the top of the necessary 270 votes in the Electoral College.
“Yesterday, Republicans all across our state added an exclamation point to what we already knew, and that is that South Carolina is Trump country,” state Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick told reporters at GOP state headquarters.
“Up and down the ballot in South Carolina, we aggressively worked not only to defend our incumbents, but also to expand the playing field — to use what we knew would be a wave of support for President Trump to pick up as many other seats at every level as we could all around the state,” he said. “The results speak for themselves.”
Republicans flipped one seat in the state House to maintain their supermajority advantage — two years after flipping eight seats — with Republican Harriet Holman defeating 20-year incumbent Rep. Joe Jefferson from rural Berkeley County.
The Pineville Democrat was the fourth Black Democrat ousted of the night, losing to Holman, who will be South Carolina’s first Black female Republican legislator.
The party also ousted four Democrats in the upper chamber: Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Hartsville, a 22-year incumbent; Sen. Kevin Johnson, D-Manning, a 12-year incumbent; Sen. Mike Fanning, D-Great Falls, who was seeking a third term; and freshman Sen. Vernon Stephens, D-Bowman.
That gives Senate Republicans a supermajority for the first time since Reconstruction, McKissick said.
“It was the biggest Republican wave in this state since Ronald Reagan,” he said, referring to the so-called Reagan revolution of 1980 that followed South Carolina’s first ever GOP presidential primary.
Two of Republicans’ four flips — the Malloy and Fanning races — are headed to automatic recounts, since the GOP challengers won by less than 1 percentage point. The state Election Commission said it will complete those recounts by Nov. 14.
If the margins hold, just 12 Democrats will remain in the 46-member chamber.
McKissick credited the party’s focus on encouraging straight-ticket voting.
More than half of all voters cast a straight-ticket ballot for the general election. Of those, 60% were Republicans, according to state election data.
McKissick pointed in particular to rural areas of the Pee Dee, where Republican J.D. Chaplin beat out Malloy, who first won office in 2002.
In Darlington County, Republicans also took the sheriff’s department and the Fourth Circuit solicitor’s office. The changeover in that county started further down the ballot, when the county clerk of court and coroner recently switched parties to join the GOP, McKissick said.
Though he did acknowledge some aid from the Legislature’s decennial redrawing of voting lines following the 2020 census.
“I don’t want to discount redistricting in some cases, but my point is the more people don’t have a reason to split a ballot is a bit of a secret sauce that we’ve had here in the last four cycles in South Carolina,” he said.
The party did have a few of what McKissick called “missed opportunities.”
“You can’t win everything,” he said. “You only have so many resources and so much time.”
Freshman Rep. Heather Bauer of Columbia represented a bright spot for Democrats for the second consecutive election. In November 2022, she was the lone flip for Democrats.
On Tuesday, she kept her seat in a tough rematch against former Republican Rep. Kirkman Finlay, who was fighting to get his seat back.
Bauer defeated Finlay with 53% of the vote in the Richland County district that covers Forest Acres, Lake Katherine, and neighborhoods just outside U.S. Army Fort Jackson’s gates.
“Over these last two years, I have pursued my duties without fear or favor because I believe no public servant is owed a second term, so we should act with urgency to get things done. I’m honored to continue to serve and grateful for the continued confidence of my neighbors in District 75,” Bauer said in a Wednesday morning statement.
Democrats also technically picked up a seat with Rep. Jermaine Johnson’s win in a newly drawn district for Richland County that was part of a 2022 settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union. But that wasn’t a net benefit to Democrats due to Jefferson’s ousting.
Christale Spain, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, blamed the losses on Trump’s coattails.
“We worked hard, we spent money, but we came up short,” she told reporters Wednesday afternoon. “Trump ended up having pretty strong tailwinds.”
Spain said the party would have needed a “couple million dollars” to flip back seats in the House and hold in the Senate, and did not have enough money to invest in the congressional races where Democrats failed to come anywhere close to defeating Republican incumbents.
“This was a pretty heavy shot but it’s not fatal,” she said. “We’re still here; we’re still fighting.”
She considers it a win that Republicans failed to pick up open seats vacated by Sen. Thomas McElveen of Sumter, who didn’t seek a fourth term, and the dramatically redrawn district of retiring Sen. Nikki Setzler of West Columbia.
Democrat Jeffrey Graham, the former mayor of Camden, beat out Republican Mike Jones for the seat held by McElveen since 2012 with 52% of the vote.
State Rep. Russell Ott, a Calhoun County Democrat who’s been in the state House since 2013, won the seat held for 48 years by Setzler, the longest-serving senator in state history.
Despite these losses, McKissick pointed to vote gains in other Democratic strongholds.
For example, 25-year incumbent Rep. Lonnie Hosey, D-Barnwell, narrowly held on to his seat representing all of rural Barnwell and Allendale counties and part of Orangeburg County. He beat out Republican Ben Kinlaw by less than 600 votes.
“Let’s just keep in mind where we were going yesterday,” McKissick said. “We were going into deep Democrat territory.”