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by ANDRE CHANG
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On June 23, South Carolina Republicans will choose between Attorney General Alan Wilson and Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette as their nominee for governor.
For decades, the same political mindset has dominated this state. Another corporation relocates. Another incentive package is announced. Another ribbon is cut. Politicians smile for the cameras and congratulate themselves on South Carolina’s booming economy.
Then ordinary South Carolinians go home and wonder how they will afford groceries. They watch housing costs climb beyond the reach of their children. They watch communities their families spent generations building become unaffordable to the people who already live there.
The people running South Carolina call that prosperity. But prosperity for whom?
Pamela Evette has served as lieutenant governor for nearly eight years now. During that period, South Carolina housing prices have sharply outpaced household incomes. From the first quarter of 2019 to the first quarter of 2024, the state’s house-price index rose nearly 67 percent, while nominal median household income increased by about 29 percent between 2019 and 2024. By the first quarter of 2026, the house-price index stood more than 83 percent above its early-2019 level.
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Today, 67% of South Carolinians find groceries difficult or very difficult to afford. 58% say the same about housing, and 59% struggle with health-care and prescription costs. Nearly half report being financially worse off than one year earlier.
These numbers represent parents returning food to the shelf, young couples delaying marriage and homeownership, and South Carolinians realizing that the state their leaders boast about may no longer have room for them.
Columbia cannot answer this with another factory announcement.
Economic development should strengthen the people who already live here. Growth should make South Carolina a better place to build a life, not merely a more profitable place to build a subdivision. Prosperity must be measured in the lives of South Carolinians.
Pamela has spent nearly eight years in the second-highest office of an administration that celebrated growth while housing prices raced ahead of incomes. So where is Pamela amidst this affordability crisis? Surely, this question cannot be answered by endorsements alone?
Because this election is about something more than competing tax plans. Rather, it concerns the judgment, loyalties and priorities of the person trusted to carry them out. A campaign promise is only as reliable as the person expected to keep it. And when it comes to this election, I ask you to consider one critical fact.
Personnel is policy.
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RELATED | ALL EYES ON RALPH NORMAN
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Herein lies the real choice in this runoff. South Carolinians must decide whether or not they are satisfied with a government that measures success by corporate investment while ignoring the people being priced out of their own state.
I, for one, am not satisfied and that is why I support Alan Wilson.
During the upheaval of 2020 and 2021, conservative students at the University of South Carolina often felt abandoned. Concerns about mandates and institutional overreach were easy for officials to dismiss. Students had little power and few people in authority were willing to take them seriously. Alan Wilson did.
When I first met him at a speaking event in 2021 as a college sophomore, I saw the same quality firsthand. He did not simply deliver his remarks, shake hands and leave. He listened to the people before him and treated their concerns as worthy of his time.
One encounter cannot tell you everything about a public official. But it can reveal how he regards people who possess no influence beyond their vote. Wilson treated us as citizens whose concerns mattered.
That experience stayed with me because governing is an exercise of judgment. Wilson’s conduct gave me reason to believe that he understands public office as a duty toward actual people rather than another rung on a political ladder.
Wilson has placed taxes, government spending and the rising cost of living near the center of his campaign. Every proposal deserves scrutiny, but at least his agenda begins with the right question: Can South Carolinians afford South Carolina?
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Thus, Wilson’s agenda meets with the South Carolinians most often overlooked by Columbia’s politicians. He has proposed supporting rural clinics, expanding telemedicine and creating incentives for medical professionals to serve communities where families struggle even to see a doctor. He would end corporate bailouts and require enforceable clawbacks when subsidized companies fail to deliver what they promised. He has also called for reforming Act 388 so that inflated taxes on rental properties are not simply passed down to tenants through higher rents. And he has pledged to veto any state budget containing earmarks without exception. These proposals are connected by one common sense principle: South Carolina’s government should serve its families and communities, not favored corporations and politically connected developers.
We should also remember what happens when frustration doesn’t manifest into political will.
Lindsey Graham has won his primary. And the lesson for the political class is obvious: voters can be treated worse than an abused dog and they’ll still come begging for more. Columbia will be watching this runoff for the same reason.
A Pamela victory would reassure the governing class that continuity remains enough. It would teach politicians that they can ignore the affordability crisis during campaign season, collect the right endorsements and expect Republican voters to fall into line.
South Carolinians should not teach that lesson twice in one month.
South Carolina is more than an attractive destination for corporations, developers and newcomers. It is the common home of our people. Its economy should allow us the people to work, own homes, raise families and pass something tangible to our children. The political class has spent years telling South Carolinians that the state is winning. On June 23, people should ask whether we have been allowed to share in the victory. We have no other choice but to stand up for our families, our communities and our home.
We have no other choice but to elect Alan Wilson.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Andre Chang grew up in South Carolina and attended the University of South Carolina, where he became involved in conservative student organizing and state politics. He is the founder of Our American Restoration, an initiative focused on developing a new generation of conservative leaders rooted in South Carolina.
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