Lowcountry Businessman Challenges South Carolina State House Incumbent

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by DYLAN NOLAN

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Late last year, Lowcountry insurance entrepreneur Woody Sprouse announced his intention to run for South Carolina House District 112 (.pdf), a coastal seat which runs from Mount Pleasant through Awendaw just north of the city of Charleston.

The seat is currently held by Republican incumbent Joe Bustos.

This week, FITSNews had the opportunity to speak with Sprouse to get to know him and discuss his candidacy.

A native of North Carolina, Sprouse has spent more than four decades in the insurance and reinsurance industries and has resided in Mount Pleasant with his wife, Debi Sprouse, for the last 24 years.

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Sprouse traces his interest in politics to his childhood, where he told FITSNews he was first exposed to the world of government through his grandfather’s barber shop.

“I grew up in Durham, North Carolina and my grandfather was a barber who happened to cut one of the state senator’s hair,” Sprouse recalled, stating this gave him an “interesting kind of learning about how how the state government works.”

“He named me as a page to serve under him, so I served in the capital of Raleigh, North Carolina, as a page for a state senator who later became chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court,” Sprouse said, referring to this as his “entry into how government works.”

Sprouse earned a degree in psychology, but decided to pursue a career in the business world after completing his undergraduate education.

“I took a job right out of college, working for a company called Prudential,” Sprouse said, adding he spent his first few years attempting to make sales to individual policy holders, something he said was no easy task.

“If you can make it doing that, you can pretty much make it doing anything,” he said.

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Sprouse next moved into the industry of reinsurance – or the issuance of policies to insurance companies to help them spread risk and avoid defaulting during economically trying times.

“I think this has been the greatest career you could ever have because it teaches you how to work with different types of people,” Sprouse said.

The reinsurance industry expanded Sprouse’s worldview by exposing him to executives across the nation and around the globe. This taught him “how things work, especially as an entrepreneur and businessman.”

“I also learned you may not be treated fairly in a municipality or state government through how much taxes you’re paying, or through restrictions and licensing that force you to operate through an intermediary,” he added.

It was during his reinsurance career that Sprouse became friends with the Palmetto State’s 113th governor, David Beasley.

“I became really good friends with former governor David Beasley back when he ran for the U.S. Senate over twenty years ago,” Sprouse said, adding that the two were affiliated through the Fellowship Foundation in Washington, D.C.

“We just got back last week from attending (the Fellowship Foundation’s) National Prayer Breakfast,” Sprouse said. “Participating in that allowed me into this get to know people from all over the world and understand what life is like for them. (This) piqued my interest in serving other people.”

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Sprouse said he’s been contacted by neighbors and friends about running in the last two election cycles, and decided now is the time to run after speaking with other Mount Pleasant residents.

“I live in Carolina Park Riverside in North Mount Pleasant, it’s a huge development that has really taken off in the last five or six years, especially during Covid so you have a lot of people moving in here, including a lot of young people,” Sprouse said.

Sprouse asked many of his neighbors if they knew who represented them in the S.C. State House, saying “95% of them had no idea, and even more discouraging to me was the fact that 90% of them didn’t vote in the last election.”

Referring to Bustos, Sprouse claimed he “is certainly not getting out this way in the high growth area of Mount Pleasant.”

“I think he’s content to come to Columbia and say he’s a state representative, and I’m not in this to do that,” Sprouse said. “I really want to make a difference.”

Bustos served two stints on Mount Pleasant’s town council between 2000 and 2009 and 2015 and 2019. His local government legacy is one of attempting to control the massive economic growth that has flooded the South Carolina Lowcountry with new residential and commercial developments in recent decades.

During Bustos’ tenure on council he supported the town’s efforts to purchase a 30-acre tract that was sought for condominium development for $6,000,000 – land which has since been turned into Shem Creek Park.

Sprouse told this news outlet he views his electoral challenge of Bustos as more of a call to pass the baton than a repudiation of the man or his work.

“I certainly have no desire to speak ill of Joe – I just know what I hear, and I hear from everyone that it’s time for a fresh face,” Sprouse said.

If elected, Sprouse said he intends to use his experience in the insurance industry to solve multiple issues that he says make South Carolina more expensive and difficult to obtain policies in than other states in the region.

Sprouse said he’s heard a lot of the young business owners in his area complain about the expensive yet hardly-used health insurance policies.

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“I’ve spoken to young married couples with a premium that is $2,300 a month with a high deductible,” he said.

Sprouse recalled helping to establish a system for people in this predicament in Columbia, Missouri, where a legislative framework was written to allow the pairing of a more affordable “concierge” doctor on demand service with catastrophic medical care coverage. These plans save people who rarely visit the doctor thousands of dollars annually.

“I believe that needs to be introduced and put together in South Carolina,” Sprouse said.

Sprouse contrasted his experience working with insurance departments in other conservative states to South Carolina’s byzantine administrative maze.

“States like Arizona and Tennessee have very user friendly insurance departments, they’re business minded, they have a can do attitude, instead of, ‘how can we not do it?’ Or ‘how can we tax you to the hilt so that you don’t want to do it,'” he said.

Sprouse said that with legislative oversight from an industry veteran he believes “we can revamp our insurance department so that we can become user friendly, and that’ll only enhance every aspect of our insurance offerings in the state, and it’ll benefit the state.”

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DOGE SC – the pro-citizen movement founded by Lowcountry, South Carolina businessman Rom Reddy – has taken note of Sprouse’s anti-red tape stances and publicly endorsed his candidacy.

“He has committed to standing with us on restoring the separation of powers, cutting government waste and dismantling the unelected agency state that stifles innovation and freedom,” DOGE SC’s endorsement notes.

When asked about the DOGE endorsement Sprouse reaffirmed his commitment both to the group’s aims at bureaucratic reform as well as a rebalancing of power away from solely being in the hands of the state legislature,

“Our legislature has way too much power,” Sprouse said. “The legislature controls South Carolina, not the people.”

He pointed to the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution as a reminder that “this country was formed by the people and for the people, not by the people and for the government.”

South Carolina Republicans will head to the polls for statewide partisan primary elections on June 9, 2026. In races where no candidate secures a majority of the vote, a runoff election will be held two weeks later on June 23, 2026.

Because South Carolina holds open primaries, any registered voter can participate in the GOP contest regardless of party affiliation – provided they did not previously vote in another party’s primary that same year. Voters must be registered by May 11, 2026 to participate, with early voting available from May 26 through June 6.

Count on FITSNews for continued coverage of the Palmetto State partisan primary elections as we rapidly approach the Crossroads 2026 day of decision.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

(Via: Travis Bell)

Dylan Nolan is the director of special projects at FITSNews. He graduated from the Darla Moore school of business in 2021 with an accounting degree. Got a tip or story idea for Dylan? Email him here. You can also engage him socially @DNolan2000.

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