Why South Carolina special election is no big deal

With a quirky cast of characters, the special election in South Carolina for a seat in the US House is more idiosyncratic than most – but it's still likely to go Republican.

|
Bruce Smith/AP
Former Charleston County Councilman Curtis Bostic and his wife, Jenny, greet voters at a polling place in Charleston, S.C., on Tuesday. Mr. Bostic faced former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford on Tuesday in the Republican primary runoff for South Carolina's vacant First Congressional District seat.

In South Carolina’s First Congressional District on Tuesday, voters will decide which Republican – former Gov. Mark Sanford or local city council leader Curtis Bostic – will survive to face Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch in a special election next month.

Could the seat shift power in Congress? No, as Republicans hold an advantage of better than 20 seats in the House.

Will the quirky race for the Palmetto State’s First Congressional District prove a harbinger of the 2014 electoral climate?

Recent history has shown special elections are not clear heralds of the full contests to come. In 2011, Democrats crowed that Kathy Hochul’s victory in a conservative, upstate New York district proved that the budget from Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin would spell political doom for the GOP House majority.

Republicans likewise swore that the win by Rep. Mark Amodei (R) of Nevada in a separate special election that year proved the GOP could withstand a barrage of attacks regarding the Ryan budget.

What turned out in 2012? Murkiness.

First, Ms. Hochul lost her seat, even as Democrats cut into the GOP House advantage. Yet Democrats made very few gains in the sort of solidly red territory where Mr. Amodei was elected.

In the South Carolina special election, the particular characters at play may make the race even more idiosyncratic than most. Ms. Colbert Busch hails from James Island, a particularly distinct suburb of Charleston, and plays up her bona fides as a pragmatic businesswoman. She also has the star power of her brother, comedian Stephen Colbert, at hand.

On the other side are Mr. Sanford, the disgraced former governor who made “walking the Appalachian Trail” an epithet for less modest behavior when he disappeared to Argentina with his mistress; and Mr. Bostic, a lawyer and former US Marine who is a both a champion of the tea party’s fiscal message and a warrior for the homeschooling, evangelical Christian movement.

No matter which Republican comes out on top, could Colbert Busch win in deeply Republican territory?

At first glance, it looks like a long shot. Mitt Romney carried the district with nearly 6 in 10 voters, and Sanford’s first-place showing in the first round of the GOP primary saw him pull in nearly 20,000 votes – more than Colbert Busch’s near-unanimous 15,700 votes.

Sanford represented the district for six years in the 1990s before his eventual governorship and fall from grace.

The last member to represent the district was now-Sen. Tim Scott (R) – a member so deeply imbued with the slash-spending ethos of the tea party that he was tapped to replace the movement’s godfather, Jim DeMint, when Mr. DeMint left the Senate for the presidency of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

That sort of pedigree doesn’t exactly scream “Democratic takeover opportunity.”

But while a GOP win is the projection from professional election-watchers in D.C., there’s also reason to foresee an upset. First, while Sanford has the name recognition and money to win the race, he also has loads of political baggage.

Also, some analysts have suggested the district may have shades of northern Virginia or the North Carolina Research Triangle: A “gentle-ification” and potential political moderation, due to an influx of skilled and highly educated workers, could help a centrist Democrat.

Colbert Busch, no fundraising slouch herself thanks in part to her brother’s celebrity, has internal polling and one poll from liberal-leaning pollster Public Policy Polling placing her neck-and-neck with Sanford and either tied or ahead of Bostic.

And she could get help from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is watching the district “very carefully,” DCCC chairman Steve Israel of New York told Politico’s Mike Allen on March 20.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Why South Carolina special election is no big deal
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/House/2013/0402/Why-South-Carolina-special-election-is-no-big-deal
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe