South Carolina's political landscape will look different in 2027 with Democrat wins in the U.S. House and Senate Tuesday. Sen.-elect Annie Andrews will be the first Democrat to hold a Senate seat for South Carolina since the late Sen. Fritz Hollins left office in 2005.
And Andrews’ victory had a lot to do with rural voters in the state.
Sarah Melotte covered the rural effect on Andrews’ victory for the Daily Yonder, where she serves as data editor. Her piece is Rural Voters Helped Democrats Win South Carolina's US Senate.
Scott Morgan: Something you said in your story that really struck me immediately was that without the 138,500 rural voters who supported her, Andrews would have garnered about 44% of South Carolina's popular vote. How big a deal is it that rural voters really turned out for Annie Andrews?
Sarah Melotte: To me, it's a big deal. Sometimes rural voters are the deciding margin in races that are close, and I think this is why in places like North Carolina and other purple states, there's a lot of rural organizing, because people know that rural voters could be the margin that kind of flips a state in a certain direction.
The really surprising thing about this to me is that it flipped it in the blue direction instead of the red direction. Previously, more than two-thirds of rural voters have supported Trump in the last several elections. So it's a huge change in the general trend of rural voting behavior. Fifty-one percent of rural voters supported Annie Andrews and a lot of these rural counties voted for Annie Andrews at a higher margin than, than other metropolitan or suburban counties did.
Scott: In your data, you're looking at how many red counties actually flipped blue, and six of them turned out to be rural. What do you think connected so much with rural voters in the Andrews campaign?
Sarah: I don't know if we can pin down one thing that made rural voters flip this year. I was just talking to a colleague about this exact thing, about how it's really hard to simplify this down to one trend.
It does seem, in my opinion, to be connected to economic stress, affordability issues. I think people in general are very upset with Trump's promise not to start any new wars and to lower gas prices, and he did the opposite, and his former supporters are not happy about that.
I don't know if in rural places there was another factor that made them swing more left this year. In other states, Georgia specifically, there is a lot of organizing from Black women in the state who won most of these Democratic flipped seats. I can see South Carolina maybe having some of that trend as well.
A lot of these counties that are really blue, have been blue in the past, but really showed up this year for the Democratic nominee, are located in majority Black rural counties in South Carolina, although this trend was not relegated to one specific region in the South Carolina. I'm looking at Fairfield County, Marion County – they all went blue this year, too, and those, those are outside the Black Belt region. So it's it's kind of a statewide trend.
Scott: Well, in your reporting from the past, have you seen this trend building, or does it look like a one-off?
Sarah: It doesn't seem like something that was gradually starting to sway blue and then finally flipped. Rural places in the Southeast have been reliably red for a long time, with a few exceptions, like Black Belt region.
This is such a surprise. I think the tip that maybe things were not gonna go the GOP way this year were all of the worry about the economy and about war and mass deportation. But I was just so surprised that so many of these places actually flipped – and didn't just shift more blue, but actually flipped. Every single county in South Carolina went more blue this year than the previous midterm cycle. Every single one.
Scott: Do you see that echoing across other states? Has what just happened in South Carolina happened everywhere as well, as far as you're seeing?
Sarah: As far as I'm seeing, this is not something specific to South Carolina. There was a really good map in The New York Times recently showing the directional shift – I can't remember if they were looking at the 2024 presidential election or the 2022 midterms – which places were more left.
And you could zoom in and see a few red counties in the Southeast, but there weren't that many. It was a massive blue shift. So even if you're looking at the overall vote share map in South Carolina that I made for this story, there are a lot of red counties still that still supported Darline Graham at a higher, share than Annie Andrews, but if you compare them to the previous election cycle, they're still more blue.
