Pamela Evette in Greer, South Carolina, on Monday. Photograph: Meg Kinnard/AP
Trump-backed Pamela Evette and Alan Wilson advance to South Carolina GOP governor runoff. Lieutenant governor and attorney general advance but result signals decisive defeat for controversial Nancy Mace.
Donald Trump-backed Pamela Evette, South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, and Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general, have advanced to a runoff in a competitive race to represent the Republican party in South Carolina’s gubernatorial election. The winner of the Republican primary is favored to win the closely watched general election, given South Carolina’s conservative tilt, although Democrats are hoping to ride a wave of progressive enthusiasm to make political gains across the ticket.
That result also signaled a decisive defeat for Nancy Mace, the controversial Republican congresswoman. The Republican gubernatorial nominee in South Carolina will face Jermaine Johnson, the Democratic state representative and a former professional basketball player representing a Columbia-area district, who won broad endorsement from party officials before winning the Democratic primary on Tuesday night.
South Carolina changed its election process in 2012 so that the governor and lieutenant governor run on the same ticket in a general election; outgoing governor, Henry McMaster, chose Evette as his running mate in 2018. As an entrepreneur, Evette grew Quality Business Solutions, an HR and accounting software company, into a billion-dollar revenue business before entering politics. She led the contest in fundraising, with a war chest of about $3.5 million, including $1 million of her own money.
Meanwhile, Wilson, who has served as South Carolina’s attorney general since 2011, is a reserve colonel in the national guard’s judge advocate general corps and the adoptive son of long-serving Republican US representative, Joe Wilson. Ralph Norman, a US representative, is – per GovTrack, a government transparency site – one of the most conservative members of the US House of Representatives, and also one of its wealthiest, after building a fortune as a real estate developer. He trailed Evette and Wilson.
Norman, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, called in January 2021 on the White House to declare martial law to prevent Joe Biden from taking office as president. Though he has made infrastructure improvements his signature campaign focus, Norman pledged to sign state legislation into law that would eliminate remaining abortion exceptions for rape, incest and fatal fetal anomalies. Rom Reddy, child of immigrants and former Exxon Mobil executive, also sought the nomination and entered the governor’s race with $5 million of his own money, citing the frustrations of a years-long dispute with environmental regulators over a seawall he had built to protect his Sea Island mansion.
Mace has been a polarizing figure both nationally and in state politics. Her movement between support and opposition of Trump and her increasingly strident opposition to transgender rights has drawn disproportionate media attention. So have incidents like a confrontation with staff at the Charleston airport last year, which drew condemnation from both US senators Lindsey Graham and David Scott. But she has been able to raise millions from a national base of grassroots donors and polled closely to the pack during the campaign.
In another closely watched contest, Graham was confirmed as the Republican candidate for his US Senate seat, after facing five challengers – the most since he took office in 2003 – on Tuesday night. The former air force attorney’s hawkish positions on Israel and the US-Israel war on Iran made his campaign a measurement of conservative discontent on the conflict. Trump-backed Graham chairs the powerful Senate budget committee, and South Carolina’s lawmakers view his position as core to the state’s political interests. He has been instrumental in convincing Donald Trump to escalate tensions in Iran, a war that has proven unpopular across the US as gas prices rise and an end date remains fuzzy.
Graham’s allies had poured money into the fight against his most likely opponent, Mark Lynch, who owns an appliance repair store in Greenville. Lynch had positioned himself as an outsider who would focus on housing and immigration instead of foreign entanglements. Graham will face Democrat and pediatrician Annie Andrews in November.
South Carolina has been in the president’s crosshairs recently. State senators in South Carolina – including the Republicans who last month defied Trump over his bid to redraw the state’s congressional map – are elected in four-year cycles, and none are up for re-election this year. This has helped insulate them from immediate political blowback from the White House, as was seen in Indiana’s Republican primaries this year.
