SC GOP chairman cruises to his 5th term over former state senator

COLUMBIA — The state GOP chairman fended off challenges Saturday from a former senator and an Upstate GOP officer to win a fifth term leading South Carolina’s dominant political party.

Chairman Drew McKissick of Columbia won in the first and only round of voting needed at the state GOP convention. He was backed by 56% of the 907 delegates attending the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

Former Sen. Lee Bright of Spartanburg County came in second with 41%, followed by Denny Floyd, longtime treasurer of the Anderson County GOP, at 3%.

“We’ve proven we know how to win in South Carolina,” McKissick told delegates gathered in South Carolina’s capital.

Chairman since 2017, McKissick has presided over a red wave that has given the Legislature its biggest Republican majority since Reconstruction.

A Democrat hasn’t won a statewide office in South Carolina since 2006, and Republicans hold six of the state’s seven U.S. House seats.

Nominating McKissick was 7th District Rep. Russell Fry of Murrells Inlet, who in November won his second term in the seat anchored by fast-growing Horry County.

“We need to keep mobilizing the grassroots, and there’s no stronger person to do that than Drew McKissick,” said Fry, a former state legislator.

In the last eight years, 20 elected officials have switched parties from Democrat to Republican. The latest was Solicitor David Pascoe — chief prosecutor for Calhoun, Dorchester and Orangeburg counties since 2004 — who’s considering a 2026 run for state attorney general.

Others include freshman state Rep. Harriett Holman, who changed parties in 2022 while she was on the Dorchester County Council. She ousted a 20-year Democratic incumbent in the Statehouse last year — among 11 House seats and seven Senate seats flipped since 2020 — to become the Legislature’s only female Black Republican.

Holman, of Ridgeville, said she never would’ve been able to flip the seat held by Rep. Joe Jefferson for two decades if not for McKissick.

Other freshmen flipping a seat in November include state Sen. JD Chaplin of Hartsville, whose ousting of 22-year incumbent Sen. Gerald Malloy stunned even political observers. If not for McKissick, Chaplin told the crowd Saturday, that seat would still be blue.

“If it wasn’t for the support that Drew McKissick gave me, we would not have a supermajority in the Senate,” he said to applause.

But both Floyd and Bright, a firebrand former senator, argued the state has become too liberal. They argued the party needs to elect Republicans further to the right on the political spectrum.

The vote showed most delegates rejected hard-liners’ push to fire McKissick.

Bright, a Freedom Caucus-like legislator before the archconservative Republican caucus existed, lost a bid last year to regain the Senate seat he lost in 2016.

“One thing that’s so discouraging: People are so trusting that if I elect a Republican, I’m going to get conservative government, and we don’t,” he said.

Attendees included two people considering a 2026 bid for governor: Lt. Gov. Pam Evette and Attorney General Alan Wilson, who was a delegate for Lexington County.

McKissick was the national Republican Party co-chair for more than a year before announcing his resignation in February 2024.

His decision came as then-former President Donald Trump called for new leadership on the national level. Though Trump had not yet become the party’s official nominee, he’d won every state contest, including a 20-percentage-point win against former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in her home state.

Trump’s picks as the new co-chairs of the Republican National Committee were Michael Whatley, chair of the North Carolina GOP, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

As McKissick was announced Saturday, one delegate in the crowd shouted, “He was fired by Trump.”

But McKissick said the suggestion that he has anything but a good relationship with Trump is false.

“People will try to mislead and lie to some folks about people coming into our party — trying to make it to be that they are more MAGA than someone else or they are more America First,” McKissick said to the SC Daily Gazette, referring to Trump’ Make America Great Again slogan.

Trump carried South Carolina by 18 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Everybody in this room supports Donald Trump. Everybody in this room voted for Donald Trump,” McKissick said. “Anybody here claiming they are more this or more that — makes no difference.”