STATEHOUSE REPORT | ISSUE 21.45 | NOV. 11, 2022
BIG STORY: GOP’s grip on S.C. House tightens
NEWS BRIEFS: Effort to toughen S.C. abortion ban fails
LOWCOUNTRY, Ariail: Taking the fifth
COMMENTARY, Brack: On the real meaning of accepting this year’s election results
SPOTLIGHT: AT&T
MY TURN: Biden, Democrats were surprise winners in the midterms
FEEDBACK: Send us your thoughts
MYSTERY PHOTO: Historic church
GOP’s grip on S.C. House tightens
By Andy Brack | South Carolina Republicans picked up seven S.C. House seats in this week’s elections to dominate the chamber like never before. In the 2023 legislative session, Republicans will hold 88 seats, compared to 36 seats occupied by Democrats. Democrats last held the majority in the early 1990s.
“The election results are disappointing for Democrats,” said Nick Sottille, executive director of the S.C. House Democratic Caucus. “We had many great candidates who just lacked the resources they needed to win.”
The party’s lone House bright spot was a single seat it flipped when Democratic candidate Heather Bauer got 50.7% of the vote against longtime Columbia moderate Republican Kirkman Finlay.
“Bauer’s victory over an entrenched incumbent shows that Democrats can continue to flip seats in suburban areas,” Sottille said. “She made her race a referendum on abortion and she won.”
Republicans, however, steamrolled the election by flipping five seats and picking up candidates in three other seats that were gerrymandered to favor GOP candidates. Click here to see election results. Among the flipped seats were:
- House 12 (Greenwood-McCormick counties): Republican Daniel Gibson garnered 53% of the vote to beat longtime Democratic Rep. Anne Parks.
- House 64 (Clarendon-Sumter): Republican Fawn Pedalino polled 55% to beat freshman Rep. Kimberly Johnson.
- House 116 (Charleston-Colleton): Newcomer Mat Leber captured a narrow win with 52% of the vote against freshman Rep. Chardale Murray.
- House 117 (Berkeley): GOP candidate Jordan Pace got 64% of the vote to beat Rep. Krystle Matthews, who also lost a U.S. Senate race to incumbent Republican Tim Scott.
- House 122 (Hampton-Jasper): Republican Bill Hager got 54% of the vote to beat Rep. Shedron Williams.
The GOP also picked up three seats redrawn this year with new census data to favor Republicans:
- House 61 (Horry Co.): Carla Shuessler, 69% of the vote.
- House 66 (York): David O’Neal, 58%.
- House 80 (Charleston): Kathy Landing, 63%.
“While Democrats lost ground in rural areas, I am confident we can come back in two years and win seats back,” Sottile said.
To do so, however, observers said there may need to be a shakeup at the state party. Comments swirling through social media indicated rank-and-file loyal Democrats were losing faith with the party’s leadership and that it might be in for a tough time before the next election.
- Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Effort to toughen S.C. abortion ban fails
Staff reports | South Carolina senators on Wednesday rejected a House-backed proposed bill that would further ban abortion. House members did not return for a meeting to attempt to compromise on the bill.
The House wanted a near total abortion, while the Senate wanted to tweak a current law that essentially is a six-week ban whenever a fetal heartbeat is detected. That law has been put on hold as the state Supreme Court considers a legal challenge on whether it is a state constitutional invasion of privacy.
Meanwhile Tuesday, voters in California, Michigan and Vermont chose to add abortion protections to their state constitutions.
In other recent news:
2022 election review. GOP Gov. Henry McMaster trounced Democratic challenger Joe Cunningham as voters reelected Republicans to statewide offices across South Carolina. In the S.C. House, the GOP will keep lopsided control of the chamber. Other elections of note:
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- Overall election results
- Weaver wins state superintendent race.
- Weathers, other GOP leaders win statewide races.
- Scott captures U.S. Senate seat again
- SC-6: Clyburn to head back to D.C. for 16th term
- SC-1: Mace nabs Lowcountry seat
- SC-7: Fry wins coastal seat to join congressional delegation
- No sign of GOP “red wave” in Congress
Flu season in S.C. sees worst start in decades. South Carolina is currently facing one of its nastiest flu seasons in nearly a decade. THe state has already seen a recorded 16,500 cases. Meanwhile, Covid-19 cases also continue to rise.
Murdaugh case looms over Laffitte’s fraud trial. Ex-bank CEO Russell Laffitte is currently on trial for fraud in Charleston. However, his connection to former lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who’s currently charged with the murder of his wife and son, has been a topic during the fraud trial. While no direct connection has been made between fraud and murder, Murdaugh’s prominence in Laffitte’s legal troubles hasn’t been understated.
State investigators worried about rise of murder cases. South Carolina is seeing an all-time high of murder cases across the state. South Carolina Law Enforcement said murder rates have increased 52.2% over the past ten years.
Santee Cooper borrows $621 million for new projects. Santee Cooper board members approved $621 million in funding for new projects in the area and to refinance existing debt.
Taking the fifth
Cartoonist Robert Ariail often interprets things a little differently, but always has an interesting take on what’s going on in South Carolina. Love the cartoon? Hate it? What do you think: feedback@statehousereport.com.
On the real meaning of accepting this year’s election results
By Andy Brack | Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 midterm elections.
What happened Nov. 8 was what was supposed to happen: People voted in a secure balloting system. One candidate in each race won. Others lost. No one worth fooling with complained about elections being stolen. They accepted the results – just like people do all of the time when one major sporting team beats another. And then they move on.
Even the so-called election deniers – the Republicans in Congress who in 2021 took a cue from one of the biggest political con men in history and claimed that Joe Biden “stole” the election – were pretty quiet. (Reminder: Biden garnered more than 7 million votes to beat Donald Trump and later win the electoral college vote soon after Trump incited insurrectionists to riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.)
Did you hear any squeaks from South Carolina’s contingent of congressional deniers – Joe Wilson, Jeff Duncan, William Timmons and Ralph Norman? Did you hear this week that there were any problems in their races with vote counting? Of course not. They won reelection. But drill down deeper and think about what that means – by accepting election results that favored them, they again endorsed the election system and didn’t squawk about how their election was rigged. It’s still a marvel that in 2020 they claimed Trump’s election was rigged but they accepted results that favored them. (It still defies logic how results in one race on a ballot could be tainted and other races not.)
This about this, too, as another backhanded endorsement that the post-election acceptance of results happened as it was supposed to: How often did you hear any Democratic losers complain about things being stolen from them? You didn’t. Why? Because they trusted the process.
Maybe when all is said and done, the biggest takeaway of the 2022 midterms is that America is starting to trust the election process after being periodically swayed by a shiny ball of untruth offered by a petulant former president who upset the apple cart for a while.
It’s kind of encouraging, in fact, that most folks seem to be ignoring a new spew of falsehoods emanating from Trump – that Republicans had a big wave of victories across the country. As comedian and South Carolina-raised Stephen Colbert observed, what happened at best was a “pink trickle.” So while the GOP might take control of the U.S. House, the margin will be much slimmer than most predicted. The Senate still is in play for the Democrats.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson observed Nov. 10 that Republicans may be tiring of the Trump bluster: “He has led the party to defeat now for the third time. In the 2018 midterms, Republicans lost control of the House, with Democrats picking up 41 seats. In 2020, of course, he lost the election, as well as control of the Senate. And while this year’s outcome is not yet clear, the Democrats have had one of the best midterm performances in recent memory. Suddenly, Trump no longer seems to have a magic formula.”
Part of being a mature democracy and the “leader of the free world” is to have elections, accept victories – and accept defeats. In the months ahead, let’s start working on relationships fractured over the last few years by the tempestuous Trump. He’s not a role model for a representative democracy. He’s an example of what our leaders – Republican and Democrats – need to strive to be the opposite of.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
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E. BRACK: Biden, Democrats were surprise winners in the midterms
By Elliott Brack | Who was the big winner in the 2022 midterm elections?
It was President Joe Biden, no doubt about it.
President Bill Clinton and Barack Obama lost heavily in their midterms. (The Democrats lost 63 House seats in Barack Obama’s first midterm, and 52 in Bill Clinton’s.) The change this year will be a far smaller loss for the Democrats. The election mainly gave the Democrats a majority in the Senate.
Our United States will therefore end up with perhaps its best form of government, a divided Congress. That means that both parties must work together to move our country forward in any way.
Biden, though himself not on the ballot, found the country accepting of his programs through their choices of candidates. He surprised a lot of people by Democrats not losing as badly as the pollsters had predicted. While the Democrats have lost the House, it was as one source said: “The red wave never materialized, Trump’s handpicked candidates underperformed, some new faces emerged—but the country appears as evenly divided as ever.”
And though Donald Trump will never admit or understand it, he probably lost more than anyone else in the midterms. His cachet is no longer automatically a winning one for Republicans, as voters in many areas rejected his divisive politics.
And Trump’s anticipated announcement that he might be a candidate in the 2024 presidential campaign ought to cause the more clear-thinking Republicans to wonder: Do we really want more of his antics? It could damage his running again.
For now, more people seem content to rely upon “Uncle Joe Biden” to guide them through living in modern day America.
Prior to election day, the pollsters were saying that inflation was the key issue. There appears to have been another overwhelming factor in this election: the right of a woman to have control over her body. It turned out that, indeed, abortion was much more deep-seated as an issue.
In four states, Michigan, California, Vermont and in Kentucky, the right to an abortion won the day, much like it showed earlier this year in Kansas.
Republican-controlled state legislatures may try to push through more abortion limitations. But the nation’s people seem to line up as pro-abortion. The legislatures that try to limit abortions will do so at their peril.
The New Yorker summed up Election Day in this way: “By limiting their losses in the House to less than the average for such elections, and likely keeping the Senate as well, the Democrats scored an against-the-odds political upset that suggests that the country remains deeply skeptical of handing too much national power to the Trumpified Republican Party.”
Veteran Georgia journalist Elliott Brack is editor and publisher of GwinnettForum.com. Have a comment? Send to feedback@statehousereport.com.
Send us your thoughts
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Historic church
Here’s an historic South Carolina church. Where is it? Tell us a little about it. Send your guess – and your name and hometown – to feedback@statehousereport.com.
Last week’s image of “Rustic,” showed a stockade fort scene from Ninety Six National Historic Site in Greenwood County. Congratulations to those who identified it: Jay Altman and Elizabeth Jones, both of Columbia; Allan Peel of San Antonio, Texas; George Graf of Palmyra, Va.; Charles Davis of Aiken; Curtis Joyner of Charleston; David Lupo of Mount Pleasant; Frank Bouknight of Summerville; and Pat Keadle of Wagener.
Jones shared, “Gov. William Lyttleton established Fort Williamson, a precursor to Fort Ninety-Six, in 1759. It remained until 1775. Later, the British held Fort Ninety-Six, as it had come to be known, from 1780-1781.”
>> Send us a mystery picture. If you have a photo that you believe will stump readers, send it along (but make sure to tell us what it is because it may stump us too!) Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com and mark it as a photo submission. Thanks.
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