SC mayor races offer Dems roadmap to defeating Republicans

COLUMBIA — One was a progressive Democrat who unseated a self-proclaimed Christian conservative in an Upstate South Carolina suburb where, countywide, voters favored Donald Trump over Kamala Harris two-to-one in the 2024 presidential election.

The other was a third-party moderate, who teamed with local Democrats to flip Republicans’ hold over a coastal mill town that had voted reliably Democratic before a recent GOP takeover of the town council.

Lyman Mayor-elect David Petty and Georgetown Mayor-elect Jay Doyle could be seen as dramatically different from each other.

Petty, a marketing consultant and former textiles executive, is a first vice chair in the Spartanburg Democratic Party and an identified progressive member of the suburban town council midway between Greenville and Spartanburg before making the leap to the mayor’s seat.

Doyle is decidedly more conservative, a member of the Forward Party who told The Post and Courier he considered himself ideologically closer to the GOP before joining the moderate-aligned third party begun several years prior by former Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang.

On the ballot, both men weren’t explicitly Democrats. Petty’s race was non-partisan, while Doyle was not considered a Democrat at all. But their victories in this month’s municipal elections are already being touted as a potential roadmap for would-be Democratic challengers to Republican incumbents across South Carolina.

In a press call after the wins, South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Christale Spain and Executive Director Jay Parmley characterized their statewide victories — particularly in Lyman — as a sign political lines might be shifting just one year after Republicans secured their largest statehouse majority in more than a century.

“Lyman elected a young, progressive mayor in a terribly nasty race,” Parmley told reporters. “This is not just, ‘Oh, we got lucky in a couple of places.’ Spartanburg County isn’t known to be a Democratic mecca. But Lyman has a young, progressive mayor … that’s a big deal for us.”

Did the Democratic brand carry the day?

The real key, the candidates said, was the fact neither ran on explicit, Democratic-aligned platforms.

In Lyman, the issue was the rapid, unplanned growth of the region, which Petty placed heavy emphasis upon despite broadsides from incumbent Mayor Glenn Greer — a self-proclaimed Christian conservative — over Petty’s party affiliation. While the state Democratic Party injected money into the region to boost his campaign, the issue of party, said Petty, played little into the dynamic of the race.

“While my opponent was really trying to focus on partisan issues, I didn’t even touch that,” Petty said. “Instead, I was able to focus on the issues that matter to people. Growth, flooding, infrastructure concerns, all of that. And I think what we saw was that people were able to look beyond that, and see it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

A similar scene played out in Georgetown, where Doyle joined forces with local Democrats to run a lockstep campaign against the incumbent Republican town council on cost-of-living issues centered around the loss of two major mills in the city center and substantial increases in local utility rates, as well as the incumbent council’s perceived inability to stem the loss.

“The Republicans were trying to basically gentrify the city,” Doyle said shortly after his win. “They didn’t care if they’re running out the Blacks or the Whites or anybody. I feel like I am working for the middle class. And within that middle class, you have the Black Democrats, but you also have White Republicans. I think I drew votes from both sides.”

What went right?

State and local candidates across the country, not just South Carolina, have had to contend with the unpopularity of the Democratic Party’s national brand.

While neither major political party is popular with the majority of Americans, Democrats’ unfavourability rating is twice as high as Republicans, a trend that — until 2025 — muted the party’s success across the ballot. And since the last election, Democrats in-state have struggled to redefine themselves for success.

Disputes over statehouse Democratic strategy spilled into public view after the 2025 legislative session, with figures like Democrats Kambrell Garvan and Heather Bauer — a battleground Democrat who flipped and held a vulnerable Republican-leaning seat in Columbia — travelling the state to pitch their own vision of the Democratic Party’s future.

In their view, it’s a party that doesn’t just point to alleged Republican failures, but one that provides a viable contrast to Republican policies.

“We’ve always had a saying — ‘don’t get in the way of a good Republican fight,’ right?” Garvan said at a September gathering of Democrats in downtown Columbia. “But that thinking has led us to not put in the kind of fight that I think we should be putting up. I think you run the risk of really fading to the background. Unfortunately, far too often, that’s what has happened in the biggest fights over the past few years.”

What does that look like?

The strategy is simple. “Focus on issues that matter to constituents,” Bauer said in a text message.

Some supporters of that plan admit it’s easier said than done. The lines of many statehouse districts, based on recent voter patterns, have been redrawn to fundamentally favor Republicans, leaving Democrats who run on pure, Democratic platforms at an inherent disadvantage.

At the national level, Lauren Harper Pope — a former top aide to former Columbia mayor and White House adviser Steve Benjamin — has been trying to bolster more-moderate Democrats via her Welcome PAC, a buzzy and at times maligned group that, in some cases, has encouraged Democrats to adopt Republican positions on issues like abortion to compete in battleground districts.

Pope said she believed a similar model could prove successful in her home state of South Carolina, principally for the reason Democrats cannot compete with Republicans on the issues without also competing for the votes of like-minded constituents.

That doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning Democratic principles. Party leaders like Spain, the Democratic Party chair, argued in a recent opinion piece there was no need to cede the spotlight to moderate Republicans running on a similar message, or for candidates to change parties to be competitive. The goal is to compete, and redefine at a local scale what the party is capable of.

“We have to find this balance on the Democratic side to show people that again, there is nuance within the party,” said Pope. “And a lot of the times we do largely agree with voters on things. We just don’t show them.”