South Carolina’s GOP ‘sister senators’ say farewell after reelection bid losses
Originally published by Abraham Kenmore and Seanna Adcox for the 19th
The day after South Carolina’s last Republican “sister senator” lost her reelection bid, she proudly displayed the award that symbolized both why she lost and why she doesn’t regret any of her votes.
Giving her farewell speech at the Senate podium, Sen. Katrina Shealy paused to put on white gloves. Then she picked up the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, given last fall to the five women senators who helped block a near-total ban on abortions in South Carolina and stood together in opposing the six-week ban that ultimately became law last year.
“I stood up for the right thing. I stood up for women. I stood up for children. I stood up for South Carolina,” the Lexington County Republican said Wednesday as the other four “sister senators” — two Republicans, one Democrat and one independent — gathered around her in support.
“Here it is, and it’s beautiful. … Take a look,” she said of the sterling silver and crystal lantern engraved with the senators’ names. “This is what a Senate seat costs, and I’m proud of it!”
The award’s actual worth is somewhere between $35,000 and $40,000. But its value to the “sisters” is immeasurable.
Its future home is uncertain. The award has been in Shealy’s Senate office. But she’ll be packing that up soon.
She’s looking for a new home for the award, maybe at the State Museum or University of South Carolina. The women say they were told it’s too controversial to display anywhere inside the Statehouse, though Senate GOP leaders deny saying that.
“We only have one, and there are five of us,” Shealy told the SC Daily Gazette. “We’d raise the money for a pedestal or something to put it on, under glass, because it’s very expensive.”
Only one of the five women will return to the chamber next year.
Sen. Margie Bright Matthews, a Democrat, has no opposition at all. Sen. Mia McLeod of Columbia, a Democrat-turned-independent, didn’t seek reelection.
It’s the three Republican women who knew bucking an abortion ban would draw challengers and provide fuel for nasty attack ads from the party’s right flank. All were defeated.
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, whose caucus put money into Shealy’s runoff race, argued the GOP women did not lose due to their abortion votes alone.
“If you look at the campaigns of any of those three races, their opponents did a good job of painting them all as squishy and out of touch,” said the Edgefield Republican. “I may disagree with some of that, but I think their opponents did a good job of painting them in that light.”
Freshman Sen. Penry Gustafson of Camden got trounced in the June 11 primary by a 64-percentage-point landslide to Lancaster County councilman Allen Blackmon. Sen. Sandy Senn of Charleston, first elected in 2016, lost to freshman Rep. Matt Leber of Johns Island by a mere 33 votes.
Shealy, the longest-serving female senator and the chamber’s only chairwoman, was seen as the strongest of the three for keeping her seat.
She has by far the chamber’s most winning record: In the last session, 14 of her bills became law, not including the bills she co-sponsored. Two more bills she authored are expected to be signed into law in the coming days. And her long track record fighting for children earned her the nickname among her colleagues as the children’s senator.
That included serving as chief watchdog of the Department of Social Services following the deaths of several children in its care in her first term, which eventually led to the director’s resignation in 2014 and the agency settling a federal lawsuit. More recently, her committee’s scrutiny of the Department of Juvenile Justice, where she once volunteered, led to a “no confidence” vote in the Senate in 2021 of that agency’s director, who resigned later that year.
Last summer, Shealy told the Gazette’s editor she didn’t think her constituents would believe the name-calling and attack ads that she knew were coming.
She turned out to be wrong.