SC governor candidate Joe Cunningham announces campaign staff with sitcom-inspired video
A candidate running to become South Carolina’s next governor found a creative way to introduce his campaign staff on Monday.
Joe Cunningham, the former congressman running for the Democratic nomination for governor, announced his new staff with a video that parodies the opening to the 1990s sitcom “Family Matters,” with staffers appearing to the show’s signature theme song.
The show was a hit. Its nine-season run made “Family Matters” the second-longest-running live action U.S. sitcom featuring a predominantly African-American cast, second only to “The Jeffersons.”
Cunningham, who is white, appears at the start of the minute-long video released on Twitter with the title “future governor.”
Trevor Maloney will be Cunningham’s campaign manager. A veteran of President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, Maloney served as regional political director of U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy’s 2016 U.S. Senate campaign in Florida.
Jade Tacka will be the deputy campaign manager and finance director. A longtime congressional fundraiser, Tacka will take on the same duties she did during Cunningham’s 2020 re-election bid in South Carolina’s 1st congressional district, when the campaign broke fundraising records for U.S. House races in the Palmetto State.
Other S.C. names added to the team are Columbia’s Bre Spaulding, who will be Cunningham’s political director, former U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn staffer Bre Maxwell as a senior adviser, and Charleston-based consultant Tyler Jones as a senior adviser. (In the video, Jones has a basketball bounce off his head like Shawn Harrison’s “Family Matters” character, Waldo.)
If you’re wondering who takes Steve Urkel’s place in the intro, that would be call time manager Juan Munoz, who appears wearing Urkel-like suspenders as the rest of the staff block him from opening the office door.
“This is a diverse and experienced team that is built to win and prepared to make history in November,” Cunningham said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “I’m honored to be fighting alongside each and every one of them as we lead South Carolina out of the past and into the future.”
The campaign notes that the team is 70% minority, 50% female and 90% South Carolina residents.
Cunningham is running to take on Republican Gov. Henry McMaster in this November’s election. He faces state Sen. Mia McLeod, D-Richland, in the Democratic primary for the nomination.
Cunningham previously served in Congress after he became the first Democrat to win South Carolina’s coastal 1st District in almost 40 years in 2018. He lost his re-election bid in 2020 to current U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-Charleston.
This story was originally published February 21, 2022 at 11:27 AM.
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