COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Like the dozen other elections this century, it was a good night for Republicans in South Carolina.
The Republican Party continues to gain seats nearly 25 years after taking control of nearly the entire state government. On Tuesday, they did not lose a single incumbent seat and likely added four Senate seats to have a 34-12 lead in the House. In 1992, the Democrats had a fourteen-seat lead.
It’s the first time Republicans will have a two-thirds majority in the Senate, ensuring they can end filibusters with ease. In the House of Representatives, Republicans held on with 87 seats in a chamber with 124 members and two vacancies. The combination means Republicans can make constitutional changes to the ballots without a single Democratic vote.
Two of the Republican-flipped seats have margins under 1% of the vote that would trigger a mandatory recount, including one race with a margin of 32 votes in unofficial totals. But with modern voting machines, recounts almost never change a result in South Carolina.
“South Carolina sent us 34 Republican senators. We owe it to them to use them,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said Wednesday.
What exactly that means will have to wait until he assembles the 34 members for a caucus meeting later this month, Massey said. Further loosening gun laws is a long-desired conservative goal, and for some a total ban on abortion is in place of the current state law that makes abortions illegal after heart activity is detected about six weeks into pregnancy.
“Life is a personal matter. Like many things, I will have to find out where my new members are,” Massey said.
And there are many. In an institution where senators often stay for decades, there will be thirteen new members in 2025. Nine of them are Republicans.
South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick compared his 2024 election plans to a buffet at the Golden Corral. There were so many seats both locally and in the General Assembly that he was hoping to flip, he couldn’t do everything.
“You can’t win everything,” McKissick said Wednesday. “But I hate losing more than I hate watching the Lifetime Channel.”
The story Tuesday night was not much different than past election nights. South Carolina Republicans swept the Democrats in a massive wave in 1994, taking over the House of Representatives and retaking the Senate in 2000.
And the waves keep coming, claiming more of the state’s political beach, even as Democrats picked South Carolina for their first presidential primary this year.
Redistribution helped. Republicans won at least 57% of the vote in every Senate district they controlled at the start of election night.
Republicans have not lost any Senate seats in the past eight elections, and they now control more than 75% of the chamber in a state where Donald Trump has never reached 59% in a presidential race.
The trend of rural areas becoming quite Republican fairly quickly continues, and all four seats Democrats lost were outside cities. Four Democratic senators — three black and one white — became swamped in their rural areas and a few fast-growing suburban areas, and the dwindling minority population wasn’t enough to keep up.
The Republican Party has flipped four sheriff’s and three coroner’s offices from Democrat to Republican. McKissick said success on that side of the ballot digs the hole even deeper for Democrats, because rural voters are more likely to vote for the local official they like by hitting the direct ticket button for all Republicans.
On Tuesday, nearly 800,000 of the 2.4 million votes cast were directly Republican. The Republican Party has 21% more “real” voters than the Democrats. Only starting in 2016 did Republicans top Democrats among voters.
“Straight ticket support and the more people not having a reason to split the vote is a big, unsung part of the secret sauce that we’ve had here,” McKissick said.
Democrats had a plan to boost local support in elections where there was no statewide candidate on the ballot. But after Tuesday, they left with protecting a seat in the House of Representatives and Senate in the Columbia area and throwing away a House seat neutralized by the loss of an incumbent in another district. Party officials did not immediately comment on Tuesday’s results.
As for McKissick, he plans to enjoy all the Republican gains in South Carolina and nationally for a few days before turning his attention to 2026. The governor’s seat will be open. Lindsey Graham’s U.S. Senate seat is filled. And more options on the political buffet beckon.
As much as he would like to try, it won’t always be this way for McKissick and the Republicans.
In 1932, 98% of South Carolina voters—almost all white in a state where nearly half of residents were black but systematically excluded from casting ballots—elected Democrat Franklin Roosevelt as president at the dawn of the Great Depression . It was his biggest single-state landslide victory.
“The only thing that is permanent in politics is the next election. You can do it well, or you can do it poorly,” McKissick said. “You have to focus on the basics of having a good message that is relevant to people, the organization to connect with them and get votes and raise the money to pay for it.”
