South Carolina’s 5th Comes Into Focus
All eyes are now turned to a Democratic showdown in the Palmetto State
by Daniel Kauder
By now most people have heard of the special elections in Kansas and Georgia, in which Democratic candidates were at the forefront of what is apparently a surging wave of anti-Trump voter engagement. In both Kansas’ 4th and Georgia’s 6th Districts, the Democratic candidate saw unprecedented surges of turnout: James Thompson, the Democrat in Kansas, ultimately lost, but he brought the Republicans’ margin of victory down from 31% in November 2016 to 6.8% in April of this year. Jon Ossoff, the Democrat in Georgia, won the run-off with almost enough votes (48.1%) to win the Congressional seat outright in a district where the Democratic candidate only won 38.3% last November.
The fact that these districts are both traditional Republican strongholds raises the question: Could this be the beginning of a Democratic resurgence? To see if this trend continues, all eyes now turn to the special election in South Carolina’s 5th district, which has a primary on May 2nd. Set against each other are three Democratic candidates, two of whom- Archie Parnell and Alexis Frank- are at the same time polar opposites of one another, and yet, strikingly similar. The third, Les Murphy, is not discussed in this article because of his late entrance into the race.
On the one hand, we have Archie Parnell. With a well-developed media campaign, decades of experience in finance, and a professorial look to boot, Parnell’s primary message is that he can leverage his experience working for Goldman Sachs into helping the middle class get the best financial deal from Congress. On the other hand, we have Alexis Frank — a Millennial with six years of Army service and who sits on the board of a local nonprofit, Frank’s message is that her perspective as an activist political outsider would help move the 5th District in the direction it needs to go.
It would seem as though we have a real showdown being set up for us; old versus young, financier versus veteran. Indeed, one could easily interpret this primary as a real referendum on the state of South Carolina’s Democratic Party.
The difficulty with such a narrative is that in order for it to be legitimate, the players need to be very well defined. Both have staked out some rhetorical territory, but specific and concrete policy proposals were harder to come by, and that makes this ‘showdown’ narrative difficult to square beyond anything other than surface-level differences. To some degree this is to be expected in any race, as many people respond more to a candidate’s broader vision than to a point-by-point explanation of their ten-page policy outline. But at the same time, the people need more than boilerplate platitudes and feel-good lip service. So in the interest of clarification, let’s explore beyond those cover letter differences.
Take, for example, the candidates’ statements on environmental protections. Parnell states that he wants to promote “the expansion of these renewable resources as we continue to decrease our dependency on fossil fuels”; Frank says that she wants to “do everything [she] can to stand up for your environmental protections and your children’s rights to clean air and clean water”.
Neither gets into specific details about how they would go about that or what particular legislation they’ve heard of that they would support or oppose. Parnell’s campaign responded to inquiry on the subject by touting South Carolina’s potential for solar and wind, as well as nuclear and biofuels (especially as a byproduct of their logging industry), while the Frank campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Both Frank and Parnell have declared support for a “living” wage, though both campaigns’ current positions are that what constitutes “living” varies state to state. Frank has stated that she believes there should be a bedrock minimum wage at the federal level onto which states could add based on their cost of living, but as far as The Progressive Times could find, she has not stated what she believes that federal minimum should be. Frank has said that she wants to implement the higher minimum wages on larger businesses first, as their profit margins can survive the increased expense, and gradually expand the wage laws to smaller businesses as that initial surge in working wages hits the local economies.
In an interview with The Progressive Voice, Frank stated that while she believes in a single-payer medical system, the implementation of such a system would take time, and thus the United States should “ease our way into” such a system- though she affirmed her belief that healthcare is a right, not a privilege. For his own part, Parnell’s position does not seem to go quite so far; his website states that Medicare and Social Security should be there for a person if they “paid into it” and “earned it”.
When asked for comment about Parnell’s history as a Goldman Sachs employee for decades, the Parnell campaign responded that his time in the firm was spent earning the nickname of “The Policeman” while in their Tax Department; “he walked the halls and combed the books to insure compliance with complicated tax laws, both US tax laws and foreign tax laws”. Campaign Manager Daniel Barash went on to say,
“Archie wants to bring that knowledge to bear for the families in the SC-05 — by creating good paying jobs in the district and lowering taxes for working families. It doesn’t take a tax expert to know that it’s wrong to give companies that outsource jobs overseas big tax breaks for offshoring trillions of dollars, and Archie will fight to end that.”
Beyond their initial differences in policy, however, was something else- a commonality. Both Parnell and Frank refused to speak ill of one another, and focused exclusively on what they believe the positive impacts of their own public service would be. This is especially heartening given that the Democratic Party is experiencing such a dramatic tug-of-war for its soul elsewhere in the country. It would be admittedly very easy for either one of these two candidates to engage in such sniping, but against the backdrop of intra-party struggle and disunity, the primary for SC-05 is a refreshing island of calm and civility.
