Horry County GOP censures SC Republican Party leader, sign of post-Trump disarray
Save for a staunch dedication to former President Donald Trump, there’s not much Horry County Republicans agree on these days.
But Monday night, following a lengthy and often raucous meeting of the Horry County GOP on the campus of the Horry Georgetown Technical College, the local party voted to censure South Carolina GOP leader Drew McKissick, a significant rebuke of a key party leader as the Republican Party navigates a post-Trump political landscape.
The vote to censure McKissick — which follows comments the state party chairman made about the Greenville County Republican Party last week — is also significant for South Caroilna, as the GOP here works to solidify its dedication to Trump after emerging from a messy leadership election in which McKissick beat back a challenge from pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood. The South Carolina GOP was remarkably successful in 2020 — flipping a Democratic congressional seat, shoring up majorities in the state legislature and securing victories for Sen. Lindsey Graham and Trump — but Trump’s loss nationally has fueled factions in the party that blame one another for not being pro-Trump enough or not being conservative enough.
That was exemplified in the race for state party chair in which Wood, who worked as one of Trump’s lawyers litigating the outcome of the November 2020 election and who has pushed conspiracy theories about the election, child sex trafficking and QAnon, accused McKissick of secretly working against Trump and other “nefarious activities” involving other lawmakers.
McKissick beat Wood handily in May, but not before Wood had garnered significant support in Horry and Greenville Counties as well as in other parts of the state.
The messiness of the chairman’s race has since colored GOP politics in Horry and Greenville counties — both of which underwent a formal reorganization and elected new leaders in April — and led to McKissick’s censure Monday. In Greenville County, according to documents and other descriptions of events from party leaders, party members affiliated with the pro-Trump group MySCGOP raised concerns about how the leadership election for the Greenville GOP was conducted.
During party reorganization, party members in each voting precinct in each county meet to elect local leaders, who then gather at a county-wide convention to elect county leaders, who then gather at a state convention to elect state leaders. Eventually, state leaders will participate in a national convention where national Republican Party leadership will be elected.
But in Greenville County this year, which has long been a home to pro-Trump conservatism — party members affiliated with MySCGOP challenged the local elections citing voting irregularities. MySCGOP, which had put up a slate of candidates to run for leadership positions in the county, lost those contests, and called for an audit of the election results, according to a report authored by county GOP officials that was produced earlier this month. The party leaders who beat the MySCGOP put the audit report together, determined that irregularities did occur in the reorganization process and subsequently resigned from their positions.
“Continual lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, intimidation, threats, bullying, disenfranchisement, and character assassination, as promised by the leadership of mySCGOP and the Greenville Tea Party do not advance anything positive, much less promote any level of political discourse or change,” the three new Greenville County leaders wrote in a letter and Facebook post announcing their resignations. “The tone of the leadership of these entities is clearly destructive to the tenets of the Republican Party, and we will not be a part of it.”
In response to the Greenville County leadership’s resignations, McKissick wrote in an email to other state party leaders that the MySCGOP group was to blame for the disarray in the local party.
“This group is led by people who have no personal morality or decency and have harangued, berated and intimidated everyone who disagrees with them until they just want to quit and be left alone for fear for themselves or their jobs,” McKissick wrote in a July 9 email, which The Sun News obtained a copy of. “In short, the goal of this group is either to gain control of the party themselves, or destroy it in the process.”
The day prior, McKissick made comments to The Post & Courier newspaper about the resignations of the Greenville leaders that rankled other Republicans in the state. In those comments, McKissick suggested that even if the Greenville County GOP elects new leaders, the local party could be isolated from the rest of the state due to infighting and the influence of the MySCGOP group.
“It will fall into a state of disrepair, become a complete dumpster fire and essentially be a leper colony for the next year and a half,” McKissick told The Post & Courier.
In his email to state leaders, McKissick said that rather than support the official Greenville County Republican Party, the South Carolina party would instead support “auxiliary” groups to advance conservative electoral causes in the region.
“The State Party is working with concerned Republicans in Greenville to create a new auxiliary organization that we will help build and promote to focus on being a positive, productive force for our Party in that area,” McKissick wrote. “Greenville is far too important an area for our state-wide ticket for us not to help them take on such a project. We will put the full force of the state party behind these promotional efforts.”
But McKissick’s moves in Greenville angered Horry County’s new leadership deeply. Similar to Greenville, a group of conservative activists here sought to win party positions at both the voting precinct and county level in order to oust current leadership who they described as ineffective and misguided. Unlike Greenville, the slate of challengers — Chairman Roger Slagle, Vice Chairman Jeremy Halpin and State Executive Committeewoman Tracy “Beanz” Diaz — won handily.
According to Slagle and Diaz, they and others in the Horry County GOP viewed McKissick’s dismissal of the official Greenville Republican Party and support of the auxiliary groups as “authoritarian” and worried that if McKissick could make such a move in Greenville County, he could make a similar one in Horry County.
“I think any time the people in elected positions make statements which are violating rules and/or not just calling people out, but basically calling them names like lepers and (saying) it’s going to be a dumpster fire, then yes I think there is a concern that he may do very similar things in other counties,” Slagle said Monday.
Diaz, ahead of the vote to censure McKissick, was more blunt.
McKissick, she said, “has completely divided the GOP at this point into camps. That is not a leader, I’m sorry.”
McKissick’s comments to the press, she added, were “disgusting.”
“He’s effectively, as an authoritarian, neutering a state executive party in a county in our state and appointing an auxiliary club in its place. That’s not okay, end of story. It’s just not,” Diaz said.
After more than hour of debate, 44 Horry County GOP members voted for a resolution that censured McKissick for his comments and actions in Greenville. It was the second censure Horry County Republicans have handed down so far this year, the first coming after U.S. Rep. Tom Rice, R-Myrtle Beach, joined nine other Republicans in a vote to impeach Trump for his conduct ahead of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.
Some Horry County GOP members said they supported the censure because they saw it as the right, ethical thing to do. Others supported the censure because they wanted to send a message that McKissick and other state party leaders needed to take new, pro-Trump, pro-MAGA members seriously.
“It’s like Rudy Giuliani and the broken window theory. The little things matter, because when you let the little things build up they become very big things, people become emboldened that they can get away with rule breaking and making decisions when it’s supposed to be a democratic process,” said party member Janelle Lavoie. “And (McKissick) ignored that.”
Conservative activist Chad Caton, who played an instrumental role in the new party leadership winning power during the reorganization process, echoed the concern that if Horry County Republicans didn’t stand up for those in Greenville, state leaders could take similar actions here.
“Greenville is our backyard, South Carolina is our backyard. We have to stand for something. Drew McKissick isn’t just Greenville’s state leader, he’s our state leader, too,” Caton said. “I felt that we needed to stand in solidarity with something that didn’t make sense.”
In response to the censure, McKissick wrote in a statement that he was not surprised by the push-back in Horry County, which backed Wood over him during the state chairman’s race several months ago. He tied those upset with him to Wood and the QAnon conspiracy theory, saying some in the party care more about “online fame” than electing Republicans to office.
“They have made it abundantly clear that their goal is to take over the Party for their own personal agendas, online fame and crazy conspiracy theories and we are not going to let that happen,” McKissick said. “Given that I’ve been endorsed by almost every single member of our State Committee, President Trump and elected officials all across our state, I think it’s safe to say that the rest of the Party agrees with me.”
This story was originally published July 13, 2021 at 4:36 PM.
