Democrats take Greenville County, S.C., a longtime conservative fortress
By Joshua Chaffin and Valerie Bauerlein | Photography by Jesse Barber for WSJ
GREENVILLE, S.C. -- South Carolina's Greenville County is the spiritual home of the modern Republican Party, the cornerstone of the GOP's Southern Wall and the wellspring of every conservative wave of the past half-century -- from the Moral Majority to MAGA.
So it was striking that Trey Walker, a Republican stalwart who has worked in Greenville County campaigns since the 1980s, believed his party's historic drubbing there last week was deserved.
"Quite frankly, I think we got the ass-kicking we needed," said Walker, the longtime chief of staff for South Carolina's Republican Gov. Henry McMaster. Democrat Annie Andrews won the Senate seat that Lindsey Graham held for more than two decades, carrying not only the state but, astonishingly, Greenville County itself.
With the most GOP votes in the state, Greenville County has long been a conservative fortress able to shift national battles. It is where George W. Bush built the firewall that salvaged his 2000 presidential bid after a shellacking by John McCain in the New Hampshire primary. The Tea Party ascended from there, as did MAGA in 2016, when President Trump won his first primary. In 2024, Trump won Greenville County by 22 percentage points.
As in many elections, Andrews's Senate victory coincided with a dash of chance. Graham might have coasted to another term had he not died in July. Instead, the choice for conservative voters was his untested and admittedly hesitant sister, Darline. Her anointment by Trump as the Republican candidate offended many South Carolinians who prize their independence.
The election outcome displayed the changing fabric of a county that has become an emblem of the New South and a magnet for transplants, including conservative retirees from blue states. To them, Andrews, a center-left pediatrician, didn't appear a radical.
The race also turned on local fractures within the Republican Party that, in better political times, might have been manageable. Beneath their long monopoly in power, Greenville County Republicans have been hobbled by skirmishes between MAGA and old-guard members.
As the postelection dust settles, the 59-year-old Walker believes that the coalition of Christian conservatives, country-club Republicans and defense hawks that served the party for nearly 50 years will have to be rebuilt, a painful yet cathartic prospect.
"It used to be voters knew a Republican is for faith, family and small government," Walker said. "Now, what's a Republican anymore?"
In heaven
Tucked up against the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Greenville is the biggest city in the northwestern third of South Carolina. Its rivers powered textile mills that generated fortunes until they began to suffer from foreign competition in the 1970s and 1980s. Nafta is still a dirty word here.
Two events revived Greenville. In the 1990s, BMW built a plant in nearby Spartanburg that is its largest in the world, creating jobs there and at local suppliers. In 2002, Greenville's longtime mayor, Knox White, removed a highway overpass to reveal the waterfall from the Reedy River that flows through downtown and make way for a park. It is now the jewel of a resurrected city, where pedestrians stroll the tree-lined Main Street and fill its restaurants. Fancy shops sell gluten-free dog treats and flavored vinegars.
Urbanists visit Greenville to study its success. Others come to see Bob Jones University, the school that relocated to the Bible Belt city in 1947 and moved to the forefront of Republican Party initiatives to draw more conservative Christians.
In 1980, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke at the campus, and ever since, GOP contenders have made appearances, seeking the blessing of Christian voters. Trump was the only Republican candidate not to visit ahead of the 2016 primary and still hasn't gone.
The relationship between conservative Christians and Trump has been "a complicated back and forth," Randy Page, 59, a Bob Jones University alumnus and longtime player in South Carolina politics, acknowledged.
During the election season, Page asked Bob Jones students to respond to White House messaging. Young men said they felt betrayed by the Iran war, according to Page, and the young women were disgusted by what they saw as Trump's vulgarity. In particular, some referenced a campaign event in Michigan where the president invited rapper Nicki Minaj to the stage and made a crass remark about her body.
On Saturday, Page discussed the election outcome with his longtime friend and colleague, Steve Pettit, 70, a former Bob Jones University president, in the offices of the Palmetto Family Council, a socially conservative advocacy group that Pettit now leads.
"To me, what happened on Tuesday was really a response to the president," said Pettit. "He said the next day, 'I wasn't on the ballot.' "
"Yes, he was," Page insisted.
It was one point on which he and Stacey Mars, the chair of the Greenville County Democratic Party, agreed. "I don't think he realized just how upset and angry people are," she said of Trump. "They sent a message."
Some of Greenville County's newest voters are the retirees in their 50s and 60s who left blue states for better weather, lower taxes and more conservative politics, according to Haro Setian, 48, a real-estate salesman who has met many of them. "They have money. The kids are out of the house," Setian said, and they often make all-cash home purchases.
In theory, these transplants -- political refugees, Pettit called them -- should have flocked to Darline Graham. Presumably, many didn't. Setian surmised that having moved from deeply progressive locales, they weren't likely to confuse Andrews, the Democratic mother of three, with a Democratic socialist. Back home, he speculated, many of these newcomers would have regarded her as a moderate Republican.
Setian came to Greenville from the Boston area 30 years ago to attend Bob Jones University before transferring to nearby Clemson University. He, too, found Andrews a reasonable gamble after tiring of what he saw as Trump's picayune obsession with issues such as refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool or renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
"I was pretty much straight-ticket Republican," Setian said. "I went straight Democrat this time."
Fault lines
There are those who say the Republican fortress still stands, and that only an accident of fate allowed it to be breached.
"I fully believe that South Carolina would have been the only red wall for that blue wave except for Lindsey Graham's passing and President Trump personally punching holes through our red wall by selecting our nominee," said Nathan Leupp, 46, a Bob Jones alumnus and former chair of the Greenville County Republican Party.
Graham's death also upended the schedule. He had won the party's June primary. Then, after his passing, another had to be held in early August -- and then a special runoff two weeks later in which Darline Graham prevailed over Rep. Ralph Norman. The delays meant South Carolina Republicans didn't have the summer to come together, as is their custom. Graham entered the general election without funds, and then ran a weak campaign. The local party was in disarray, and its turnout effort was anemic.
Much of that stemmed from internecine fighting in Greenville County's Republican organization, in large part over loyalty to Trump. The rift started with a MAGA coup that ousted so-called RINOs -- establishment party members derided as Republicans in name only -- and then-chairman Leupp. The state party later excommunicated the county party, and MAGA-aligned party leaders clashed with the social and fiscal ideological hard-liners of the Freedom Caucus.
By contrast, Andrews ran a disciplined race focused on the cost of living while sidestepping the culture-war issues that have bedeviled other Democrats. She outraised Graham -- $24 million to $2 million -- and had the backing of an energized state party.
Trump made three visits to South Carolina to bolster Graham during her campaign. "Any time a Republican president is coming to South Carolina during a general election, it means one thing," said Page, of the Palmetto Family Council. "You're losing."
By early September, Page sensed Andrews might win when he began seeing her yard signs in his neighborhood and noticed his wife responding favorably to her campaign ads. "It was jolting," he recalled.
He was struck by an ad showing Andrews in an actual swamp, blasting Graham as a tool of drug companies, insiders and other creatures of the Washington, D.C., swamp that Trump had promised to drain. "It literally was taking some of the very words that Republicans have used in their lexicon over the years" to instead attack Graham, Page said.
Andrews also benefited from an unexpected partnership of two former governors and erstwhile foes.
In mid-October, David Beasley, the former Republican South Carolina governor, got a text from Jim Hodges, the Democrat who defeated him in 1998. After leaving office, Beasley pivoted to philanthropic service, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 as head of the United Nations World Food Program.
Beasley, 69, had written an op-ed over the summer urging fellow Republicans to defy Trump's demand to redraw South Carolina's congressional maps. He also expressed outrage when Trump referred to Andrews as "Annie Trannie" and falsely described her record. Hodges wanted Beasley to go one step further and suggested they make a joint endorsement.
"I said, 'I'm about to walk into a restaurant and have a couple of glasses of wine,' " Beasley recalled replying to the text.