He’s in: Democrat Joe Cunningham, former congressman, to announce run for SC governor

Democrat Joe Cunningham, a former congressman from Charleston whose short but meteoric political rise made him an oft-cited example of how Democrats can win in deep-red states, will run for governor of South Carolina in 2022.

Cunningham’s candidacy will be announced Monday, a source with Cunningham’s campaign confirmed to The State newspaper on Sunday evening.

Ending months of speculation about his political aspirations, Cunningham now becomes the first major Democrat to seek his party’s nomination in the South Carolina governor’s race. Democratic activist Gary Votour of Columbia declared a bid earlier this year.

No Republicans have announced plans to challenge the sitting governor, Henry McMaster, whose 2022 reelection campaign has already begun.

Cunningham, an attorney specializing in construction law, had never run for political office when he was narrowly elected to represent South Carolina’s coastal 1st Congressional District in 2018. He won in the suburban district by zeroing in on local issues, especially his opposition to offshore drilling. He modeled himself as a moderate Democrat who pledged to put the needs of his district above national political interests.

His victory that year stunned national political watchers, as he became the first Democrat in nearly 40 years to represent the reliably Republican district. But two years later, buoyed by a polarized presidential election in November 2020, former state Rep. Nancy Mace, of Daniel Island, defeated Cunningham and won the seat back for Republicans by fewer than 6,000 votes.

Earlier this month, Cunningham terminated his federal campaign fundraising account, an outward sign that he had no desire to run again in the 1st District, which includes parts of Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester, Colleton and Beaufort counties.

As he prepares to officially enter the gubernatorial race, Cunningham faces a Herculean task not unlike the long-shot odds he encountered in his 2018 congressional bid. Republicans have accounted for six of South Carolina’s past eight governors.

The Palmetto State has not elected a Democrat as governor since Jim Hodges in 1998. In 2018, McMaster defeated Democrat James Smith by 8 percentage points.

After news broke Wednesday that Cunningham had filed preliminary paperwork for a gubernatorial bid, S.C. Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick issued a challenge to Cunningham: “Bring it on.”

“Any time a Republican goes head-to-head with a Democrat on the issues, Republicans win. We expect to see the same result in 2022 as we did in 2018 – a Republican in the governor’s mansion,” McKissick said in a statement Wednesday.

However, recent voting history shows Cunningham could be a formidable opponent with crossover appeal.

In South Carolina’s 2018 governor’s race, Democrat James Smith secured 46% of the vote statewide. In the 1st Congressional District, Cunningham outdid Smith. While Cunningham won the district by about 1.5 percentage points, Smith lost by 4 points.

In 2020, Cunningham outperformed President Joe Biden in the same coastal district by 5 percentage points.

Still, Cunningham will be seeking his party’s nomination to challenge McMaster, a 73-year-old lifelong South Carolina Republican who, if reelected, stands to become the longest-serving governor in South Carolina history.

McMaster was appointed to the state’s top job in January 2017 to finish out the remaining term of Gov. Nikki Haley after she was nominated by then-President Trump to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. McMaster was then elected to his first full term as governor in November 2018.

If McMaster remains governor through the two successive terms, as permitted by the state constitution, he would leave office in January 2027.

McMaster’s latest campaign finance reports show he has already raised more than $1.6 million for his 2022 reelection bid and has nearly $1.1 million in his war chest.

In Cunningham’s 2020 congressional race, which attracted national attention, he raised nearly $7 million.

For months, Cunningham has been laying the groundwork for a possible run. On almost any given weekend, Cunningham can be found crisscrossing the state, giving speeches at county Democratic conventions and making virtual appearances with civic and political groups.

At a recent York County Democratic Party social in Rock Hill, Cunningham told the crowd that South Carolina “deserves a lot better” than the Republican governor it has.

“He’s a career politician — a very bad career politician,” Cunningham said. “He’s been a politician longer than I’ve been alive. He’s wanted his entire life just to have the title of governor but not to do the work.”

The crowd, which had huddled under a small pavilion near Rock Hill’s Boyd Hill Recreation Center to hear Cunningham speak, cheered in response.

Other trips, however, have been more private.

In January, Cunningham traveled to Columbia to meet with Smith, the former Democratic state lawmaker who in 2018 lost the governor’s race to McMaster. That same week, Cunningham also met with Hodges, the last Democrat elected governor in the state.

Cunningham’s social media followers have also gotten a taste of the kind of campaign he might run.

“McMaster won’t expand Medicaid because it would invite a primary opponent. And his political career is much more important to him than 190,000 working South Carolinians having basic health care,” Cunningham wrote on Twitter on March 30, hinting, “If we’re ever going to expand Medicaid, we have to elect a new governor in 2022.”

Cunningham, who tested positive for the coronavirus in 2020, frequently took aim at the governor last year for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March and June of 2020, Cunningham twice called on McMaster to issue a stay-at-home order. Cunningham also urged McMaster to issue a temporary statewide face mask requirement. McMaster did neither of those things. Instead, he issued a “home or work” order and left mask ordinances up to local municipalities.

Cunningham also has voiced opposition to the state’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” bill, one of the strictest pieces of anti-abortion legislation in the country that would essentially stop abortions from being performed once a fetal heartbeat is detected at around six weeks, which is when most women find out they are pregnant.

Earlier this year, a federal court temporarily blocked the legislation from going into effect.

After McMaster delivered his State of the State address in January, Cunningham posted a three-part tweet that read like a miniature speech for a campaign launch.

“South Carolina — We cannot address the challenges of today with the same old politicians with the same old ideas that got us here in the first place. We need new people with new ideas — better ideas — to unleash South Carolina’s full potential,” Cunningham wrote.

He said the state needs “strong leadership” to do three things: Get people vaccinated against COVID-19, deliver pay raises for teachers and create new revenue streams to address crucial issues facing South Carolina.

“It’s a new decade with new challenges and we must demand more from our state and its leaders than we have in the past. From the legislature all the way to the governor’s mansion, let’s provide the accountability we deserve. And insist on a New South that makes us all proud,” Cunningham concluded.

The vision Cunningham espoused in those three tweets echoes the tone Cunningham adopted in Congress.

During his lone two-year term in the U.S. House of Representatives, Cunningham styled himself as a pragmatic politician who sought to put the interests of his coastal district above the political fracas of the day. He ran on a promise to put “Lowcountry Over Party.”

His first act in Congress was a vote against California Democrat Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House. The first bill he introduced sought to ban offshore drilling and seismic testing off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. It passed the House but stalled in the Senate.

During his third month in Washington, he blasted an air horn during a subcommittee meeting to demonstrate how upsetting offshore seismic blast testing can be for endangered right whales.

On some issues, though, Cunningham and McMaster have found common ground. In September 2019, the governor stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Cunningham after the U.S. House passed the congressman’s bill banning the search for oil and gas off the country’s coasts.

Cunningham also pledged to work with President Donald Trump where he could, but ultimately voted to impeach Trump at the end of 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Despite that vote, Trump still signed three Cunningham-sponsored bills into law.

Cunningham highlighted those Trump-backed bills as proof in his 2020 race that he had kept his promise to his constituents, but the effort came up short. He lost to Mace by 5,415 votes, a 1.27 percentage point margin.

Yet, there were outward signs that Cunningham would not be able to leave politics behind so easily. After he delivered his concession speech, his supporters began to chant, “2022! 2022!”

During his farewell speech on the House floor, Cunningham said he would never stop reaching across the aisle.

“By most accounts, I never should have been here in the first place,” Cunningham said in those remarks.

He recalled a moment over the Thanksgiving holiday when he realized that political victories and losses are as transient and vulnerable as a sandcastle his now 3-year-old son had built on Sullivan’s Island.

Eventually, Cunningham said, the tide always comes back in.