In nationally watched SC congressional race, the battle unfolds house by house
The flag was there on the day Congressman Joe Cunningham moved into the neighborhood, waving in the front yard next door.
It was a double-sided dark blue banner, a small garden flag measuring over a foot wide and some 18 inches long. Beneath an image of a rippling American flag was a singular name printed in all-caps: TRUMP.
The president’s 2020 reelection slogan, “Keep America Great,” fluttered in the breeze.
Cunningham, who is one of 30 U.S. House Democrats representing congressional districts Donald Trump won in 2016, almost missed it. It was October 2019, and he was almost halfway through his two-year term.
He only saw the pro-Trump flag after he had already introduced himself to his neighbor and asked them if it would be OK if he put up a swing up for his son, Boone, on one of their tree branches that hangs over Cunningham’s backyard.
He spotted it as he walked back to his house in this quiet James Island subdivision where neighbors wave to each other even if they’ve never met.
“Well, OK. Whatever,” Cunningham remembers thinking at the time. “We’re in South Carolina, so it’s not really that big of a surprise or anything. I know a lot of people who support Trump.”
Then, he added, “And some of them are supporting me in this race.”
As Cunningham enters the final stretch of his reelection fight in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, the intensifying fight has been unfolding all around him.
He’s one of the most vulnerable Democrats seeking reelection in the U.S. House, facing Republican challenger Nancy Mace, a state lawmaker who shattered gender barriers in 1999 when she became the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, South Carolina’s military college in Charleston.
Political watchers say it’s Cunningham’s race to lose and have shifted the race in his favor, citing the incumbent’s early and agreeable messaging in a conservative district that has shown signs of turning purple.
But in Cunningham’s own neighborhood, the signs say a win is no sure bet for him.
In the last month, Cunningham’s neighborhood has transformed into a visible political battleground. Competing yard signs show neighbors are picking sides. Some political placards that once stood in front of houses have in recent days moved closer to more prominent spots near the street, including one sign that proclaims, “100% American. 0% Socialist.”
“It’s throughout the neighborhood, too,” Cunningham, 38, said. “It’s a working-class neighborhood. You’ve got Trump supporters. You’ve got (Joe) Biden supporters. It’s just a mix.”
In another part of the neighborhood, the political debate spilled out into the street this spring. Calls were made to the police, and it ended with a bucket of white paint.
But the flag next door, which has been up since 2016, is emblematic of the challenge Cunningham faces this November in one of the top U.S. House races in the nation.
He’s a Democrat asking voters in a conservative district to look past his political label. It worked in 2018, when he narrowly became the first Democrat to represent South Carolina’s coastal 1st Congressional District in nearly 40 years.
This time, it’s unclear how his “Lowcountry Over Party” message will hold up during a major presidential election year.
Mace, Cunningham’s Republican challenger, has also been trying to appeal to the independent nature of the district, a place where she has deep personal ties.
She lives on Daniel Island and grew up in nearby Goose Creek. She also just wrapped her first full term in the state legislature, where she represented parts of Mount Pleasant, Daniel Island, the Cainhoy peninsula, Hanahan and Goose Creek. All of them are in play in the 1st Congressional District race.
Despite working as a coalitions director and field director for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Mace’s congressional campaign website makes no mention of the president.
Only recently have Mace’s general election campaign materials begun featuring a photo of Mace standing next to Trump, reminding voters that the president endorsed her in the contest.
Other high-profile Republicans are backing Mace, too, including Vice President Mike Pence and former S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley, who has become a powerhouse 2020 campaign surrogate for Republicans around the country this cycle and is also a new 1st District voter, having moved to Kiawah Island in May.
“People are looking for an independent voice,” Mace, 42, said Friday after a day of door-knocking in Charleston County. “I’m not a follower. I’m not a lapdog in my party, and most of all, I’m not a Nancy Pelosi clone. That message resonates with people here.”
Political watchers say the outcome of the race, however, will fall largely on Cunningham and whether he can hold onto the support he gained from disaffected GOP voters in 2018 while also expanding his appeal among Democrats and independents.
That’s challenging in a district where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by some 13 percentage points in 2016. In 2018, Cunningham only narrowly punched his ticket to Congress after securing 3,982 more votes than Republican Katie Arrington.
This year, Republicans see an opening here with Trump back on the ballot.
“It’s sort of a double-edged sword for Cunningham,” said Jordan Ragusa, a College of Charleston political scientist whose research focuses on the U.S. Congress. “On the one hand, as the incumbent, it’s his job to not only represent his base, but also to represent the entire district. At the same time, however, that is a minefield that is often difficult to navigate.”
In Cunningham’s own neighborhood, the political minefield quickly comes into focus house by house, one yard sign at a time.
‘I felt compelled to state where I’m at’
On Cunningham’s street, more than 15 political lawn signs can be found, including four that bear his name and three that are supporting Mace.
One of the signs for Cunningham belongs to accounting manager Shannon Robinson.
This year, for the first time, Robinson decided she would put political signs in her yard. Robinson, 40, grew up on Folly Beach and said she voted for Cunningham in 2018 largely for his stance to ban offshore drilling. Imagining Folly Beach with oil riggers, she said, would break her heart and soul.
Though she had already planned to support Cunningham again this year, Robinson said she wanted to be more vocal about her beliefs as a Democrat in a ruby red state.
She put up a pair of signs declaring her support for both Cunningham and Democrat Jaime Harrison, who is running against Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham.
This year, she said, feels different.
“I felt compelled to state where I’m at. I know my neighbor across the street well, and she’s had that Trump flag up for four years,” Robinson said, noting they tend to get along and at one point were in a walking group.
Politics came up only once, Robinson said, but they agreed to disagree and never talked about it again.
“That aside, I was ready to put out a sign, and I know who my other neighbor is,” Robinson said, nodding to Cunningham’s house, “and I wanted to show some support.”
The neighborhood itself is a microcosm of how South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District has been trending blue in recent elections, especially in Charleston County.
Charleston County, which is the largest in the 1st Congressional district, was responsible for Cunningham’s narrow win in 2018.
He lost everywhere else in this district that includes parts of Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester, Colleton and Beaufort counties. Almost overnight, the reliably Republican congressional district made up of retirees, newcomers, suburbanites and military veterans was recast as a 2020 battleground race.
“I think one of the things to me is clear when we talk about the shift from red to blue is that it makes it sound very binary and very absolute, and I don’t think it is,” said Brady Quirk-Garvan, the former chair of the Charleston County Democratic Party.
“But James Island is the definition of the shift. It’s been shifting and trending Democratic over the last 10 years,” he said.
Over the summer, Democrat Spencer Wetmore won a state House seat here by 20 percentage points. It was a special election to fill House District 115, which was vacated by former Republican Rep. Peter McCoy, of Charleston, after he accepted a job as U.S. attorney for the state.
It was a seat that Trump won in 2016 and that McCoy won in 2018 by just 3 percentage points.
Of the congressional district, Quirk-Garvan predicted, “It’s an at-best purple district. To continue that shift, it’s about finding Democrats who can show voters it’s OK to vote for the candidate even if you don’t love the label.”
Meanwhile, Mace is seeing some late-breaking momentum. With a newfound cash advantage, her campaign plans to double all of their TV and radio ad buys as Mace makes her closing pitch to voters in the final week of the race.
Her campaign raised a staggering $2.5 million the third quarter, marking the first time in the race that she out-raised Cunningham. And during the first two weeks of October, Mace’s campaign raised just over $518,000, according to reports to the Federal Election Commission. Cunningham’s campaign took in about $314,000 during the same period.
Mace is a working single mother of two children who is determined to win back the suburban women who were turned off by the GOP’s pitch in 2018. While Mace has sought to nationalize the race (she tries to capture GOP dislike for Pelosi by urging voters to “Send a new Nancy to Congress”), she is also trying to localize her pitch.
After easily winning a four-way GOP primary in June, Mace declared she would bring back the independent-thinking, fiscally conservative and conservation-minded representation this district has come to expect.
She invoked past leaders like Tim Scott, who held the seat before moving to the U.S. Senate, and even former S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, who briefly mounted a GOP presidential run against Trump last year.
After 2018 laid bare a fractured local GOP, Republicans this year aren’t taking any chances with this race.
After Mace secured the nomination, the National Republican Congressional Committee put her in its coveted 2020 Young Guns program, which is meant to highlight rising stars in the party as they compete in the most competitive congressional seats in the election cycle.
The South Carolina Republican Party also began discussing plans for a “1st District reclamation project” just one month after Cunningham’s shocking win in 2018. By the following summer, it was up and running, making it the earliest start to a victory program in state party history, according to party Chairman Drew McKissick.
“It’s quite simply the largest and most sophisticated grassroots operation the Lowcountry has ever seen,” said Mark Knoop, the Victory 2020 director for the S.C. GOP.
But in a district where Trump may be losing ground, it’s unclear if support from the president and his allies will help boost Mace in the final stretch or whether it will hinder her odds.
Splitting the ticket
Raymond Doniphan beams at the handmade sign he nailed to the tree in his front yard a few streets away from Cunningham’s home.
On a piece of white siding that he says he either found in his storage shed or purchased from Lowe’s, Doniphan spelled out “The Donald” in large black stickers. Then he nailed it to the tree.
Doniphan is 86, a retired mechanic. He grew up on Folly Beach and has lived in this neighborhood for 63 years or, as he put it, “long enough to see the street names change.”
He identifies as a Republican and can count on one hand the number of times he’s voted for a Democrat. This year, he proudly cast his vote early by mail for Trump.
“Donald Trump, I like him because he has done a lot for the country even though they say he hasn’t. He’s a tough guy and I like that,” Doniphan said. “He’s an outsider. He tells it like it is, and the Republicans up there can’t take it. My whole life I’ve been saying a good, smart businessman can do that job, and then we finally got one.”
But in the race for Congress, Doniphan said he voted for Cunningham over Mace. That makes Doniphan a rare voter this year.
According to a recent analysis from Pew Research Center on split-ticket voting, just 4% of registered voters say they plan to vote for Trump and their respective Democratic House candidate. The same percentage holds true for registered voters who plan to vote for Biden and their Republican House candidate.
When asked how he could vote for both Trump and Cunningham, Doniphan laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“I know, I know,” he said as he stood in his yard. “But I like Cunningham. I just think he’s a good family man. Honestly, I don’t think he lies. I know they all have a hard time telling the truth, but I just don’t think he lies.”
Cunningham treads lightly when it comes to Trump, saying repeatedly on the campaign trail that he tries to work with the president where he can. He has receipts: President Trump signed three Cunningham-sponsored bills into law.
David Wasserman, who analyzes U.S. House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said Cunningham’s ability to get on the airwaves before Mace over the summer helped the freshman Democrat set the tone in the race, allowing him to cast himself as a non-politician who appeals to voters like Doniphan.
“This is a pretty strong word-of-mouth district,” Wasserman said. “Cunningham is able to defy the political lean of the district with personal appeal and and charisma. Mace has run a much more textbook Republican campaign, arguing that Joe Cunningham serves Nancy Pelosi.”
Cunningham is quick to note he voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House in 2019, but Mace reminds voters that he cast a vote to impeach Trump.
In a pair of debates, Mace sought to debunk Cunningham’s bipartisan persona, pointing out that he doesn’t have robust Republican support for several of his bills in Congress. Even his signature 2018 campaign promise to ban offshore drilling off South Carolina’s coast only passed in the U.S. House.
Cunningham, meanwhile, has rejected being tied to more liberal wings of his party. He’s a member of two centrist Capitol Hill contingents — the Blue Dog Coalition and the Problem Solvers’ Caucus — and voted against a liberal push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15.
His frustration with being cast as a liberal member spilled out during his first debate with Mace, when he told her, “Look, if you’re so hell-bent on running against Nancy Pelosi, I would suggest you buy yourself a plane ticket to California. But so long as you’re in the Lowcountry and you’re in the 1st Congressional District, you need to run against me.”
For voters like Rita Lamar, a partisan push from any candidate is a non-starter. She refused to put out any signs this year.
The 41-year-old real estate agent has lived in Cunningham’s neighborhood for the last seven years, and this year she did not vote straight-ticket.
It was a departure for her, after some 20-plus years of casting her ballots as a conservative. Now, Lamar doesn’t know how to describe herself politically.
“In my mind, I’m a bit of an orphan right now,” she said. “The things that were important to the GOP have adjusted. In my opinion, I think we’ve lost some of the empathy we need. In order to lead effectively, you have to have it.”
Two main issues guided her vote this year: The handling of the pandemic and health care.
She doesn’t want to see the Affordable Care Act thrown out because she depends on it, even though she said it’s far from perfect. For the first time, Lamar doesn’t know where she belongs, but she said she likes not having the political label.
“I’m voting for the issues, not the people. If the people are consistent on the issues, then they’ve got my vote,” she said. Lamar voted early this year for Cunningham, her first time ever voting for a Democrat.
The ‘silent majority’
Marie Perry, who lives a few streets away from Lamar, has put away her signs and flags.
Her yard was once a clear political statement, complete with a towering flagpole bearing the U.S. flag, a Trump flag and a pro-police “Thin Blue Line” flag. Her brother is a police officer in Louisville, Kentucky.
“It think this is the worst it’s ever been in my opinion,” Perry, 35, said of clashing political attitudes in the neighborhood this year, shaking her head.
Her eyes stopped on the roadway, where a political spray-painting incident occurred in June.
Perry said her family always put political signs out in years past. This year, though, a neighbor expressed concerns to her about the homemade lawn signs and flags supporting Trump’s reelection, saying those messages could negatively impact their family’s AirBnB business.
One day, the words “USA” and “Trump” were found spray-painted on the road, and neighbors called the police. An incident report filed with the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the story.
Perry said she ultimately ended up covering up the words with white paint.
Perry also said she cast her ballot early for Trump and Mace.
“I cannot stand Nancy Pelosi at all, and I feel like (Cunningham) always sides with her or backs her on a lot of things,” Perry said.
She also didn’t like that Cunningham voted to impeach Trump. But when it came to issues, Perry said abortion is the driving issue for her as someone who identifies as being pro-life.
“I have friends who are voting opposite, who have different beliefs, but it’s everybody’s freedom of choice,” she said. “And at the end of the day, we all have to live here.”
Recent polling suggests Trump could be losing ground, even in GOP strongholds like this one.
In the most recent New York Times/Siena College Research Institute poll, the margin between Trump and Biden in the 1st District is shrinking — 47% supporting Trump to 44% for Biden. Another 6% of voters said they were undecided or refused to say. An internal poll from the Mace campaign found the same split in the presidential race.
“(Trump’s) margin may get cut in half this time, or maybe more, because Biden is doing so well with those suburbanites and seniors,” Wasserman said, “And those are two voting blocs that make up a large share of the votes in the 1st District.”
David Shokes, who lives around the corner from Doniphan and his handmade Trump tree sign, doesn’t buy it.
Like Perry, Shokes has no political yard signs out this year. He hints at being part of Trump’s “silent majority,” a theory that a majority of American voters support the Trump presidency, but remain silent about their views for fear of backlash.
“There’s a lot of Trump supporters in this neighborhood, but we just don’t put signs out,” he said.
Shokes is 55 and self-employed. The Air Force veteran said he is excited to vote for Trump and Mace on Election Day.
“I don’t care if I have to walk through a plague or wait in a mile-long of people. I always vote in-person,” he said.
Shokes identifies as being “a bit of a libertarian,” but he said he tried to keep an open mind this year. When Biden refused to campaign in-person during the coronavirus, he saw it as a weakness.
When Cunningham voted to impeach Trump, he said, there was no coming back from it.
“When he voted against a pay increase for Congress, my ears kind of perked up. I thought, OK, he’s keeping his promises to put Lowcountry before party and all that. But then, at the same time, he turned around and voted for the impeachment,” Shokes said, shaking his head. “He lost my vote. That was the nail in the coffin.”
Back on Cunningham’s street, the Trump flag still waves in the yard next door. Cunningham’s next-door neighbor declined to be interviewed for this story, but, over the month of October, they joined their neighbors in picking a visible side in the congressional race.
Three signs joined the pro-Trump flag in their front yard last week.
All of them were for Mace.
This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 1:06 PM with the headline "In nationally watched SC congressional race, the battle unfolds house by house."
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to accurately describe the details of the spray-painting incident on a street in Joe Cunningham’s neighborhood.
