South Carolina’s ‘red surge’ on election night gave GOP more power inside State House
That South Carolina’s high-stakes U.S. Senate race between Lindsey Graham and Democrat Jaime Harrison ended with the longtime Republican incumbent keeping power for another six years is not where the state’s Democrats felt the most massive gut check on Election Day.
The South Carolina Legislature, already in GOP control with a Republican governor, became even more red overnight, sending shock waves down the spine of a party that had mounted one of its most aggressive campaigns in years to flip legislative seats.
Democrats had what they thought was to be the most formidable and fatal cocktail for vulnerable Republicans: They had pushed hard to expand early absentee voting because of COVID-19 despite court losses on the witness signature requirement; they had cash, in the millions; they had a U.S. Senate race they knew would help draw turnout; and well-funded and moderate Democrats who were seen as competitive enough to win over Republicans in more conservative districts.
Nothing worked, and instead the strategy backfired, with Republicans successfully flipping Democratic seats that neither party thought was seriously in play.
“We got our butts kicked,” said state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, an Orangeburg Democrat and the longest-serving House member.
Or, as state Republican Party chairman Drew McKissick described the final score in his Thursday morning email to supporters: “A total wipeout.”
The consequences of Tuesday’s victories for Republicans will ricochet through the Legislature for years, giving the GOP a huge advantage as they take on the redrawing of district lines triggered by this year’s Census. With that advantage, Republicans also could attempt to erode what has been a tool used by Democrats in the state Senate to block controversial legislation introduced by GOP lawmakers on abortion, gun rights and other key wedge issues — issues that some Republicans say they want to get before the nation’s highest court, which this year also became more conservative.
Republicans “were already emboldened” before this election, Cobb-Hunter continued.
“They will just be even more so, particularly the newer members of the Republican caucus and so we all need to just buckle up, because it’s going to be a hell of a ride.”
Blue wave hopes crash into red surge
Republicans expanded their dominance in both legislative chambers on Tuesday.
When the S.C. House’s 124 members return in January, they’ll have two more Republican seats than they do now, expanding their ranks to 81 from 79 Republicans to Democrats’ 43 members, down from 45.
But the biggest and most consequential power shift will have occurred in the Senate. In January, 30 of the Senate’s 46 members will be Republicans, up from 27 now. Democrats’ ranks will drop to 16 from 19, a loss that stymies their ability to block GOP efforts to sit them down when they filibuster legislation and diminishes the need for Republicans to work across the aisle with them.
“I think the election results give us an opportunity, but it also gives us greater responsibility that South Carolinians have entrusted to us,” said Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield. “But, I also think with this large of a majority, it’s a clear indication South Carolina intends for us to govern.”
The large shift in power took many by surprise in a year when Democrats had high hopes of flipping GOP-held seats and instead lost in those efforts. Adding salt to the wound, Democrats were blindsided by the GOP’s success in flipping Democratic-held seats no one predicted would go red.
On Tuesday, Republicans flipped two seats in the House held by state Reps. Laurie Funderburk, of Kershaw, and Lancaster’s Mandy Powers Norrell, seen as a rising Democratic star who ran for lieutenant governor unsuccessfully in 2018 on a joint statewide ticket with gubernatorial candidate James Smith.
The one exception to Democratic losses was a Charleston district that flipped blue in an August special election to fill the vacancy of state Rep. Peter McCoy, now South Carolina’s U.S. attorney. Democrat Spencer Wetmore won her seat again Tuesday.
In the Senate, Republicans beat Sens. Floyd Nicholson, of Greenwood, and Glenn Reese, of Spartanburg, and, in the third but arguably the most stunning upset for the party, Kershaw County’s Vincent Sheheen, a two-time Democratic candidate for governor who lost the 2010 governor’s race to then-state Rep. Nikki Haley by just 4.5 percentage points.
Each county Republicans flipped trended red this year, voting for President Donald Trump and foreshadowing the possible eventual end of moderates, particularly Democrats in rural districts.
“I think they’re getting more and more extinct,” McKissick told reporters.
Borrowing a phrase McKissick said came from McMaster speaking about Democrats overall when he was state GOP chairman, “They’re getting more rare and eventually we’re going to have to hunt them with dogs to find them.”
Robertson also told reporters, “I think we’re seeing the end of moderates period. I mean, think about it this way. Lindsey Graham’s no longer a moderate. He gave up being a moderate when he refused to defend John McCain after he passed away and started attacking him.”
Impact of national races down the ballot
The presidential race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was expected to drive turnout in a state that has not picked a Democrat to send to the White House since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
That interest and a huge, expensive, national Senate race between a three-term incumbent and Jaime Harrison, the first Black chairman of the S.C. Democratic Party, at the top drove turnout in this month’s election.
Out of about 2.5 million S.C. voters who voted for a presidential candidate, about 1,800 more voters cast a ballot for a Senate candidate. Democrat Harrison also received more votes than Biden, more than 19,000 more.
But to narrow the gap toward a win in South Carolina, Biden and Harrison needed to convince typical Republican voters to vote outside of their party for them. Instead, three out of five Republicans voted straight party, showing that Harrison failed to grab enough moderate Republicans.
He wasn’t alone. That high percentage of voters who voted straight-party was possibly the Achilles heel to a party that desperately needed enough Republicans to cross the aisle for Democrats to flip or hold on to seats including the 1st Congressional District, which landed back in the GOP’s hands.
Early on, “it appeared that there was this blue wave on the coast and red wave in the Upstate,” said House Majority Leader Gary Simrill, R-York. “In reality ... it was much more of a red tide, the red surge was bigger in the Upstate.”
Harrison’s campaign also made critical errors that led to the red wave sweeping up legislative seats, Republicans and some Democrats said.
The nationalization of the Senate race, with millions raised for it, made ad spending expensive for down-ballot candidates. And Harrison’s attempt to pull Republican support away from Graham and on to third-party candidate Bill Bledsoe — who had dropped out and endorsed Graham — went south for Democrats, Republicans said.
“I truly believe that Jaime Harrison raising $130 million from out-of-state liberals, Hollywoods ... plus the deception campaign he waged on the Bledsoe front, plus what that means to people here that he thought we were idiots for falling something like that, that so backfired on Jaime Harrison, that so backfired on Vincent Sheheen and Mandy Powers Norrell and Laurie Funderburk and Floyd Nicholson and Glenn Reese,” said Republican strategist Walt Whetsell.
“They paid the ultimate price because of Jaime Harrison’s mishandling and gigantic strategic mistake,” he said.
“You have to lay blame right at the feet of the consultants on the Jaime Harrison campaign and how they nationalized local elections in a conservative state,” said Democratic state Rep. Todd Rutherford, minority leader in the House. “I’m talking about everything they did was seemingly on TV, very little ground game, this in a state where they needed 10 to 12 percent of moderate Republicans to switch and vote for Jaime.
“I know that that’s not effective and know that it has cost us seats,” Rutherford said.
Others disagree.
Trav Robertson, the chairman of the S.C. Democratic Party, said Harrison isn’t the only one to blame for nationalizing the race, and leading to losses down the ballot.
“The fact is that we’re living in a pandemic. It made the way we campaign different. It made the way we communicate with voters different,” Robertson said. “I think there are other aspects of that campaign that we’ll talk about in the months to come as to how it affected the ticket, but I don’t necessarily know that that’s one of them. This campaign was going to be nationalized when they brought (Vice President Mike) Pence here to bail Lindsey Graham out and consolidate conservatives in the Upstate.”
‘Sit back and watch and enjoy the show’
The shift in power favoring Republicans will have implications in two major ways come January.
The first is the debate over redistricting, the process of lawmakers drawing district lines which will be carried out once the U.S. Census is finalized. At stake in the debate will be whether lawmakers are drawing lines to make districts less competitive, ensuring those districts stay red for at least a decade.
The redistricting effort could turn into one of the most contested, and potentially ugly, fights in the State House.
Democratic Party officials have already started conversations with attorneys on what they predict will be “an extended prolonged fight over reapportionment,” Robertson, the party chairman, said Wednesday. He expects the Republicans are doing the same.
Democrats must play ball with Republicans, who will now hold a stronger majority, but Republicans may have to strike a balance, too, some said, specifically mentioning state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a Columbia attorney and former prosecutor known for filing extensive public records requests and for filing lawsuits aimed at making government more transparent.
Harpootlian flipped a GOP-held seat in 2016, a district redrawn to increase a Republican’s chances of keeping it, and ran his campaign in large part on tackling redistricting.
Democrats in the Legislature are gearing up for the fight.
Republicans are “going to have to justify why keeping (U.S. Rep.) Jim Clyburn’s district from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Murray,” Harpootlian said, referring to the 6th Congressional District, the state’s only congressional district where Black voters constitute the majority. Such districts, called “majority-minority” districts, were created to ensure Black representation. But critics say GOP-controlled legislatures use gerrymandering to pack Black voters into those districts, diminishing the power of Black voters in neighboring congressional districts.
Harpootlian continued: “I’m going to be questioning that. I want to see how, with a straight face, that’s consistent with the conservative approach to everything. Our legislative process, it is very segregated right now. If we don’t desegregate, then in the long term this state will always be dominated by the most conservative of the conservatives.”
The second major way the shift in balance of power will impact the legislative debate next year is in the policy debates. Republicans — whose members include lawmakers committed first-and-foremost to overturning Roe v. Wade and expanding gun rights — could see a pile of legislative proposals come up from their caucus.
Limiting abortion and expanding gun rights are two areas of interest Simrill said House lawmakers already are discussing ahead of legislators returning to work in January.
“For the South Carolina House, conservative budget principles, pro-life legislation, pro-law enforcement legislation, pro-Second Amendment legislation, I think those will be at the forefront of what we tackle in 2021,” Simrill said.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, said his caucus will meet in a few weeks and tackle a game plan for 2021.
With five new Republican senators — including two who won seats left by retiring senators — Massey said no master plan has been struck, including whether he as chairman of the powerful Senate Rules Committee will attempt to tweak rules that favor Republicans next year.
What could also be both a benefit but also an obstacle for Republicans, with the retirements of two Republican senators and one Democrat and the defeat of three Democrats — all who served on the Senate Finance Committee — there are now six vacancies on one of the most powerful Senate committees which help control the state’s purse strings.
“I think you’re still going to have a large number of people in the Senate who want to try and continue to get along and work together,” Massey said. “I don’t want us to be Washington. But the flip side to that is, I think with 30 members in the body, we’re not going to tolerate the other side being Washington either.”
Even in the minority, Democrats in the State House are looking forward.
“We will greatly miss the wisdom, passion, and steady voices of our colleagues who will not return next session, but our work continues,” state Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, said in a provided statement to The State. “We look forward to working with our new members, and with our colleagues in a bipartisan manner in January.”
Either way, prepare for the “wild, wild West” of South Carolina politicking, Cobb-Hunter said.
“Sit back and watch and enjoy the show.”
Reporters Joseph Bustos and Zak Koeske contributed to this report.
