Upstate, coast assured GOP sweep

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Republicans on the top and bottom, Democrats squeezed in between.

GOP U.S. Senate candidate Jim DeMint rode a tide of votes from the state's old Upcountry and Lowcountry to thwart Democrat Inez Tenenbaum's bid for the seat of retiring Democrat Ernest F. Hollings.

Using South Carolina's county version of America's red and blue states, DeMint won with 53.8 percent of the votes while carrying 26 of 46 counties with the bulk of South Carolina's more than 4 million residents.

That will send DeMint to Washington to join fellow Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, marking the first time the state has had two Republican senators since the 1870s.

President Bush's 58 percent showing over John Kerry marked the 10th GOP victory in the last 11 presidential elections in South Carolina in the last 40 years.

"Democrats are where we were 30 years ago," said Neal Thigpen, a Francis Marion political science professor and Republican activist.

'02 repeat

Tuesday's map is almost identical to that of 2002 when Graham won the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond.

From Anderson to York, DeMint topped Tenenbaum by 126,969 votes and added another 41,385 from Horry to Beaufort.

Richland, traditionally Democratic and the state's second-largest county, gave Tenenbaum a 30,799-vote margin.

But just to the east in Lexington, a third smaller but more Republican than Richland is Democratic, handed DeMint a 28,562-vote advantage, largely canceling out its bigger neighbor.

Tenenbaum won 19 other counties, most of them small and economically depressed in the Pee Dee or even smaller black majority counties in the Lowcountry, just in from the coast, without enough votes to affect the outcome except in the closest of elections.

South Carolina Democrats, who saw Tenenbaum's quest for the open seat as the basis for a future comeback, are trying to figure out where to go from here.

"I'm not able to answer what happened and why and what to do about it," state Democratic Party Chairman Joe Erwin said Wednesday.

"We don't know what our root problems are," the Greenville advertising executive said.

"You can say there are demographic indicators and those tell us one thing, but I want to know more about the psychographic indicators, what is it in voters, say in Greenville, that is causing them to go so solidly for Republicans election after election?"

Erwin said that for now it's Republicans who have the answers.

Total makeover

Kevin Geddings, a Democratic consultant who ran Jim Hodges' upset of Republican Gov. David Beasley, said it may not be that simple.

"The biggest challenge facing the state Democratic Party is the increasingly marginalized national Democratic Party," said Geddings, who now operates from Charlotte.

Nationally, the party needs a complete restructuring, he said.

"If the national party can't welcome and nominate conservative and moderate Democrats like Jim Hodges, Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman, they will continue to be marginalized as a political entity," Geddings said.

Success has its challenges, said Katon Dawson, state Republican Party chairman.

With the governor, lieutenant governor, five of the seven remaining statewide officers, the House and Senate, two U.S. senators and four of six U.S. House members in his party, Dawson said the GOP now must guard against planting the seeds of a Democratic resurgence.

"When you get this big, you risk the chance of fracturing into an ultra-conservative Republican Party and a moderate conservative Republican Party. The challenge is to keep it from fracturing," Dawson said.

Republican success in nationalizing the race and Bush's ability to pad his 2000 showing played a big role in pulling DeMint along, he said.

Swept by tide

Frank Holleman III, the Greenville lawyer who managed Tenenbaum's campaign, blamed a national tide that engulfed the region, not an entrenched Republican statewide majority.

"In the last week of the campaign, we had a barrage of advertising and mail that succeeded in nationalizing the campaign and making it about Bush's coattails," breaking what he said was then a deadlocked race.

"That succeeded in capturing undecided voters and moving soft voters to the Republican side," Holleman said, negating issues "that cut in our favor."

Thigpen said the ads financed by the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee effectively linked DeMint with Bush in voters' minds and broke what had been a close contest a week out.

Both sides went all out. You can buy a lot of mailing, phone lines and TV ads with the approximately $20 million spent on the fall campaign by the candidates, their party committees and assorted interest groups of the left, right and center.

Democrats' lone bright spot was in Columbia where Rep. Joel Lourie defeated Ken Wingate for the seat of retiring Republican Sen. Warren Geise.

Wingate's loss, despite support from Gov. Mark Sanford, in the state's most expensive legislative race cut the GOP Senate margin to 26-20 from 27-19.

Dan Hoover covers politics and can be reached at 298-4883.