Republican Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster became governor of South Carolina earlier this year after Nikki Haley left to serve as Donald Trump’s UN ambassador. However, McMaster will still need to win next year’s primary if he wants to keep his new job, and he picked up a credible opponent this week. Ex-state Department of Health and Environmental Control chief Catherine Templeton, who made a name for herself with conservatives by fighting unions across the country, declared that she would run on Tuesday.
Templeton originally planned to kick off her bid in January for what she assumed would be the race to succeed the termed-out Haley, but after McMaster became governor, she postponed her announcement. In the end, though, she decided to go for it, hours after GOP Sen. Tim Scott said it was very unlikely he would join the contest.
Scott told The Post and Courier that he could “best serve the people of South Carolina in the office that I was elected to, and if something changes, there will be a clear indication.” Scott later elaborated that this "clear indication" present itself in the form of “an audible voice from God.” Scott is high-profile enough that he may be able to enter the race late if he changes his mind, but it doesn’t sound like he’s inclined to. Still, we’ll be listening, too.
There’s also a third candidate in the race, Yancey McGill, a party-switching former Democratic state senator who briefly served as lieutenant governor in 2014 and announced he would run last year. McMaster’s promotion doesn’t appear to have altered McGill’s plans, though he doesn’t seem like a major foe. However, he could still have an impact even if he only takes a small share of the vote, because South Carolina requires primary candidates to win a majority in order to avoid a runoff.
And it won’t be easy for Templeton (or McGill) to convince a majority of primary voters that, now that McMaster is governor, they should go ahead and fire him. Still, an unfolding corruption investigation involving McMaster’s longtime allies could make things interesting.
The State recently reported that agents from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division raided the offices of a powerful Republican consulting firm called Richard Quinn & Associates a few weeks ago. No charges have been filed against owner Richard Quinn or anyone else from his group. But last month, an influential GOP state senator, John Courson, was indicted for allegedly using contributions from the Quinn group for his personal use.
If things could get worse, it could hurt McMaster at the ballot box. McMaster is very close to Quinn, keeping the firm on as consultants throughout all this. And they go back a long way: RQ&A helped McMaster salvage his 2000 re-election campaign as South Carolina Republican Party chair. The party was in bad financial shape, but just before the vote, RQ&A and another firm contributed a total of $85,000 to the GOP’s coffers. The party then released letters showing it had plenty of money in the bank, and McMaster won another term. But just days before the vote, the money was all wired back in secret—information that didn’t come out until long after the election.
If RQ&A earns some more ugly headlines, Templeton will have a much easier time portraying McMaster as a part of a corrupt establishment that needs to go—and that could make for a competitive primary where, just a couple of months ago, we weren’t expecting one at all.