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Strip away the television ads and the mailers, and the job of Attorney General comes down to a single word: prosecutor. The Attorney General is South Carolina’s top prosecutor – the law enforcer who stands between a violent criminal and the family he hurts, who protects the taxpayers by fighting fraud, and who has to know the inside of a courtroom because that is where the work actually happens.
So the question in this runoff is simple. Do you want a prosecutor running the prosecutor’s office, or a politician?
I have spent my career on one side of that line. I have been a South Carolina prosecutor for more than two decades. For the last fourteen years I’ve served as Solicitor leading the 8th Judicial Circuit and prosecuting cases that have shattered families. I have personally tried child predators, drug traffickers, and murderers. I have sat across a table from the parents of a murdered child and promised them justice and then delivered it. That is not a talking point I workshopped for a campaign. It is the work. It has been the work, day in and day out, for more than twenty-two years.
My opponent was first elected the very same year I was, in 2012. We have spent those fourteen years on opposite sides of that line. Stephen Goldfinch went into politics, first the S.C. House, then the State Senate, moving up the ladder one office at a time. He is a trial lawyer who has never prosecuted a single case alongside a South Carolina sheriff or police officer. When he asks for the title of our State’s “chief prosecutor,” he is asking voters to give him a job he has never done.
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JUDGE ME ON MY RECORD
Here is the part I am proudest of, and it is the part that should matter most to anyone who calls themselves a fiscal conservative.
The office I run is, by the numbers, the most efficient and most cost-effective prosecutor’s office in South Carolina. We carry one of the heaviest per-capita caseloads in the state, more than double that of some similar circuits, and we close those cases at around one quarter on the dollar of the statewide average cost per case. Unlike some judicial circuits around the state, we do not have a years-long backlog of murders and other violent crimes. And because I have been a hands-on, in-the-trenches leader for the prosecutors and investigators around my four counties for the past fourteen years, we do it while spending less of your money than nearly everyone else doing the same job.
That is not luck and it is not a press release. It is management. It is what happens when you squeeze every dollar for the taxpayer, doing the hard work and cutting the waste big government takes for granted.
The results show up where it counts. When I took office, Greenwood County was among the most violent counties in South Carolina. Today, the counties I serve rank among the safest in the state. We did that by prosecuting hard, prosecuting smart, and refusing to waste a dollar doing it.
If we can run the leanest, hardest-working prosecutor’s office in South Carolina here in the Upstate, we can bring that same approach to Columbia. The Attorney General’s Office has real power to fight public corruption, stop fraud, and protect your tax dollars. I intend to use it, and to run the office the same way I have run mine: lean, accountable, and focused on results instead of headlines.
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RELATED | A ‘CO-ENDORSEMENT?’
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THE OTHER CHOICE
I would rather talk about my record than my opponent’s. You can research and read about his record for yourself. Voters deserve the full measure of the man. I am more interested in the choice you have in front of you: two very different ideas of what it means to be a crime-fighting conservative.
My opponent likes to campaign as a conservative. His record in Columbia tells a different story.
On the Club for Growth’s South Carolina scorecard, Stephen Goldfinch has built one of the most liberal spending records of any Republican in the State Senate. Over his career, his average score sits barely a point above the average Democrat’s. And in 2022, he finished dead last among Senate Republicans, scoring below the Democratic average outright. Why so low? Because year after year, he has voted to grow government. The state’s General Fund has more than doubled during his time in office, far outpacing population and inflation combined, and today he helps write that budget from his seat on the Senate Finance Committee. That is not a record you defend. That is a record you hope no one sees.
I have spent my career working getting the most for your tax dollars to fight for justice for crime victims and law enforcement. He has spent fourteen years voting to spend your tax dollars. I believe in limited government and taking care of core functions. As your Attorney General, I will fight overreach wherever it comes from, in Washington or here at home. That is the difference between a prosecutor and a politician, and the distinction could not be clearer.
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WHAT THIS OFFICE IS FOR
I did not come up through the political system, and I am not running to climb anything. I started my career at the Attorney General’s Office, fighting internet crimes against children. That fight to protect children, against online predators, human traffickers, and the cartels pushing fentanyl into our towns, has been the throughline of everything I have done since. As Attorney General, protecting South Carolina’s families will not be one priority among many. It will be the mission of the entire office.
I will stand with our sheriff deputies and police officers, because I have stood beside them in courtrooms for over two decades and they know I will not flinch. That’s why a growing list of 31 Sheriffs and Solicitors across South Carolina have endorsed my campaign. I will fight federal overreach and defend South Carolina’s constitutional rights. And I will guard the public’s money in Columbia the same way I have guarded it as the electer chief prosecutor for the 8th Circuit for the past 14 years.
On June 23, South Carolina gets to decide what kind of person should hold its highest law-enforcement office. I am asking for the chance to keep doing the only job I have ever wanted: being a prosecutor and servant-leader for the people of South Carolina.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
David Stumbo is a lifelong conservative Republican, career criminal prosecutor and the pro-Trump, pro-Law and Order candidate for South Carolina attorney general.
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SOUND OFF…
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