GOP picked up most SC House seats since chamber flipped in ’94. How’d they do it?

After a dominant performance in last week’s election, South Carolina Republicans will enter the 2023 legislative session with a two-thirds supermajority in the state House for the first time since the 1870s.

Republicans flipped eight seats and ceded only one district to Democrats to cement an 88-36 advantage in the House. The seven-seat gain is the party’s largest since 1994, when Republicans picked up eight seats in the lower chamber on election night and another three members moved to the GOP before reorganization in what ended up being the last time Democrats controlled the House.

South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick chalked up the party’s strong showing to its messaging, voter outreach and targeted allocation of resources in close races.

“Whether it’s knocks, texts or phone calls, we know it pays off,” he said. “That’s why we made sure we were putting together the biggest get-out-the-vote operation we’ve had (for a midterm election) in party history.”

Republican Party members knocked on nine times as many doors as they had in 2018, McKissick said, and the South Carolina GOP election apparatus, which works to elect candidates up and down the ballot, ballooned to five times its 2018 size.

“We were talking about things that are relevant to people’s everyday experience, and Democrats were not talking about it. That gave us an opening,” he said. “We had good candidates, and then at the right time we put the right resources into those campaigns. We doubled down and tripled down at the end and caught some Democrats napping.”

Four of the Republican pickups in the House were predictable and attributable largely to redistricting changes enacted last year by the GOP-controlled Legislature. The other four were bona fide flips in which Republican candidates won districts that favored Democrats and had, in some cases, been held by Democrats for decades.

The party’s lone House loss came in the Richland County swing district represented by Rep. Kirkman Finlay, a five-term incumbent. Democrat Heather Bauer narrowly defeated Finlay, a large landowner and restaurateur, by tying him to Republican-led efforts to restrict abortion access.

“He ran on the issues that are important to the citizens of this state, and unfortunately, sometimes we come up short,” House Speaker Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, said of Finlay.

SC House will be less diverse in 2023

Unlike the 2020 election, which saw the Legislature add more conservatives but also more women and Black members, the recent election will turn the House into a more male-dominated institution with fewer people of color as its members.

In a state with a population that is 51% women and 27% Black, the incoming House will be 16% women and 21% Black.

Twenty-two of the 27 new members are men and 25 of the 27 are white.

When the House convenes in January, it will have four fewer women and six fewer Black members. Black women, in particular, will have their representation in the lower chamber cut most dramatically, dropping from 11 members to five, a 55% reduction.

“It’s disturbing in the fact that it will not reflect South Carolina and its demographic makeup the way that it should,” House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, D-Richland, said. “We lose perspective … when we lessen the diversity in the chamber.”

Representatives-elect Wendell Jones and Fawn Pedalino will be the House’s lone new minority members.

Jones, a Greenville pastor and businessman, is a Black Democrat, and Pedalino, a Republican small business owner and real estate agent, identifies as Native American and is a member of the Natchez-Kusso Tribe.

Jones will take the seat of Rep. Leola Robinson-Simpson, D-Greenville, who did not seek reelection, and Pedalino flipped a historically blue seat in Clarendon County held by freshman Rep. Kimberly Johnson.

The majority of new House members work in business, but the incoming class also includes several licensed Realtors, lawyers and military veterans.

Last week’s election also appears likely to bolster the House Freedom Caucus, a group of 14 conservative lawmakers who want to slash government spending and frequently weigh in on hot-button cultural issues involving schools and public health.

Freedom Caucus Vice Chair R.J. May, R-Lexington, said the group could grow its ranks considerably next year by adding multiple members of the incoming Republican class.

“Tuesday (Nov. 8) was a big win for the South Carolina Freedom Caucus,” he said last week. “We expect to welcome at least seven, perhaps as many as 12, transitional members in the fight against federal overreach and against those — in both parties — who prioritize seizing political power over representing constituents.”

How did Republican challengers flip seats?

Each Republican challenger’s winning formula was unique to their own district.

Some focused on hyperlocal issues, such as schools and roads. Others amplified and exploited growing dissatisfaction with an incumbent. All involved plenty of shoe-leather campaigning to get in front of voters.

Bill Hager, a retired electrical engineer and former chairman of the Hampton County Economic Development Commission, said his victory over incumbent Shedron Williams, D-Hampton, surprised many in the majority-minority district that encompasses Hampton and parts of Beaufort, Colleton and Jasper counties.

“I was going from polling place to polling place and a lot of people said, ‘You can’t win here as a Republican,’” said Hager, whose shoestring campaign relied on door-knocking, phone calls and meet-and-greets at local restaurants and coffee shops. “It was a shock to the community, I believe, that we pulled it off.”

Hager, whose priorities are bringing jobs to the district, repairing poorly maintained roads and preparing students for college or trade school, said it took a “perfect storm” for him to prevail in a district where Democrats have a significant advantage.

Working in his favor, he said, was the “terrible” economy, anger over consolidation of the Hampton County school district, a new election law that placed additional restrictions on absentee voting — which historically favors Democrats — and redistricting, which pulled several conservative areas in Jasper County into the district.

Hager said it also helped that Williams, a two-term incumbent who won the seat by 14 points in 2020, ran as if he expected to coast to reelection.

“They took the Democratic vote for granted and they didn’t get it,” he said.

Williams did not respond to The State’s request for comment on the race.

Pedalino, a 35-year-old former EMT who owns a tech support and repair shop in Manning, ran her campaign on local issues, namely school district consolidation and school board spending and transparency.

She defeated Johnson, D-Clarendon, by more than 10 points, a stunning result in a Democratic stronghold Johnson had won by nearly nine points in 2020.

Pedalino, whose two daughters attend Clarendon County public schools, said she took issue with the local school board’s spending and hiring practices. She couldn’t run for the board herself — Johnson and her father, Sen. Kevin Johnson, D-Clarendon, appointed the board — so she stepped up to challenge Kimberly Johnson instead.

Clarendon is one of two counties in the state with a school board appointed by its legislative delegation.

“I think that a lot of people didn’t like the simple fact that it seemed like one family held a lot of power in one community,” she said. “There’s nothing illegal about that, but I think ethically a lot of people didn’t like that, even on the Democratic side.”

Johnson did not return a request for comment.

Pedalino said she’ll focus on education issues once she’s sworn in. She’d like to see a new school board installed in Clarendon County and supports legislation that would ensure all local school boards are elected.

“It just doesn’t give the people in the community a voice to have an appointed school board,” Pedalino said.

Political newcomers Daniel Gibson and Matt Leber, who both flipped Democratic seats, also ran against their opponents’ record, or lack thereof.

Gibson, who could not be reached for comment, beat longtime Greenwood Rep. Anne Parks by nearly 6 points. Parks has served in the House since 1997.

Gibson’s campaign website doesn’t contain any personal information, and instead focuses on Parks, whom it says “seldom bothers to vote on bills” and “just doesn’t care.” Gibson singles out Parks’ vote against South Carolina’s six-week abortion ban to highlight his contention that her views are out of step with constituents.

Parks said she stands by her abortion vote and that her defeat, as well as the losses suffered by other Democrats, will have repercussions for women’s health care in the state.

“I think women’s health care is going to suffer,” Parks said.

She attributed her loss to an inexplicable lack of Democratic voter turnout, and said she didn’t run her campaign differently than she has in the past.

“People were just not interested in going to vote,” she said, explaining her belief that many voters are disillusioned by the electoral process. “You have a large number of people who feel they just don’t count and it’s a waste of their time to go and vote because it makes no difference.”

Parks said she had no inkling her seat might be in danger until Election Day, when she visited precincts and realized that her reelection was in jeopardy, based on voter turnout.

After holding state and local office for more than three decades, Parks said she plans to retire from politics and focus on her family funeral home business.

Leber, a former paratrooper who manages several rental homes in the Charleston area, also targeted the voting history of his opponent, Charleston Rep. Chardale Murray, dedicating a portion of his campaign website to the votes she missed.

“If you don’t show up for the vote, you’re not showing up for the debate,” he said. “I just felt like we needed somebody who was going to show up for the job and do the job, give the people in the district a voice.”

Leber, a self-described “political animal,” raised more than $130,000, or 10 times more money than Murray, a freshman lawmaker who owns Murray’s Mortuary in North Charleston.

He attributed his fundraising success to his ability to connect with people.

In the waning days of the campaign, House Democrats made a last ditch effort to paint Leber as a racist extremist after uncovering his past involvement with the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia group, and offensive tweets he’d made demeaning African Americans and other marginalized groups.

But it wasn’t enough to prevent his election.

Leber, who beat Murray by 3 points, denied he’d ever belonged to any militia group that sought to overthrow the government and claimed he’d merely belonged to a Three Percenters Facebook group many years ago, but never attended any meetings or took any action.

He said the conservative website Breitbart News once referred to him as a spokesman for the group because he gave a reporter friend there information about a Muslim prayer rug allegedly found on the Arizona border.

Leber insisted he was just a “regular guy” and denied harboring racist beliefs, saying he wanted to be judged based on the votes he takes as a lawmaker.

“There’s no one in my district who truly knows me who doesn’t think I have a good heart,” he said. “Those are the constituent services I’m going to continue on.”

Murray, who narrowly won the district in 2020 and became the first Black woman to hold the seat, did not respond to a request for comment.

Benefiting from redistricting

For Republican challenger Jordan Pace, who flipped Rep. Krystle Matthews’ Berkeley County seat, the third time was a charm.

After losing to former Rep. Bill Crosby in the Republican primary in 2018 and falling to Matthews by 5 points in the 2020 general election, Pace cruised to a 27-point victory this year.

He benefited considerably from redistricting, which turned the former swing district ruby red, and from Matthews’ multiple political scandals that prompted members of her own Democratic party to call for her resignation.

Matthews did not return a call for this story, but told The State in December, after reapportionment, that she was disappointed with the way her district had been redrawn to reduce the Black voting age population by nearly 60%.

“They tried to load me up heavily with Republicans,” she said at the time. “But honestly, my district was already heavily Republican.”

Matthews said at the time she wasn’t concerned about losing, despite the odds shifting against her.

“I think people will see the work that I’ve done and find out that, man, you know what, it’s not a bad idea to have her over here,” she said.

Pace, a 33-year-old Goose Creek resident who works in commercial real estate, grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh with his grandfather and got involved in politics at an early age.

He worked as a go-fer on former Gov. Mark Sanford’s 2013 congressional campaign and eventually rose to become his driver and bodyman. From there, Pace took a job as field director with Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers, before finding his way into real estate and, for a time, teaching.

He credited the district’s new geography for his large victory, but said his campaign didn’t rest on its laurels. Pace and his team knocked on thousands of doors to engage with voters.

“My top priority is for the government to leave people alone as much as possible,” he said. “It’s the idea of liberty and freedom as a broad overarching idea.”

Despite his laissez-faire philosophy, Pace favors a total abortion ban, with exceptions only to save the mother’s life, and called out Republican senators who earlier this year voted against a restrictive House ban, saying he hoped voters would remember their vote “against life.”

A ban on abortion, Pace said, should ideally be paired with a more streamlined adoption process and additional support for crisis pregnancy centers that help women with unplanned pregnancies.

Can Republicans continue to grow their advantage?

McKissick, the GOP party chairman, said he doesn’t view last week’s election as an aberration and expects Republicans to flip more blue seats in both chambers in 2024.

House District 102, a Berkeley County district held by Democrat Rep. Joseph Jefferson for the past 18 years, is one seat he said is prime for the taking. Jefferson, who ran unopposed in 2020, held off his Republican challenger by fewer than 300 votes last week.

“That’s a district that’s growing in our direction, the way it’s drawn now,” McKissick said. “We’ll come back along and should be able to pick it up two years from now.”

Going forward, the Republican supermajority should give party leaders more breathing room to pass polarizing legislation and may inspire them to get a bit more bold in their proposals, he said.

Amendments to the state Constitution require a two-thirds vote of both chambers, which is now a bar the House can reasonably meet.

“Those are things you’ll probably see members start to look at,” McKissick said.

House Majority Leader Davey Hiott, R-Pickens, wouldn’t tip his hand about any bills the lower chamber has planned for next session, but said the supermajority would help Republicans guarantee the legislative election of judges and board trustees.

“There’s a lot of things we can do now that we’ve never been able to do before in South Carolina,” Hiott said.

Senior Politics Editor Maayan Schechter contributed to this report.