Who knows what the election primaries will bring in seven months? Or for that matter, who knows what the general election will bring in just under a year?

A lot can change, but some political professionals sound like they know what will shape the unfolding political season.

While it’s not an original list — fundraising, Sanford, the economy and technology — the coming year is expected to bring its own peculiar twists.

“Every candidate is having a helluva a time raising money right now,” said Wes Donehue, a political strategist for the state Republican Senate Caucus.

Donors both big and small are still giving, but tight times are evident.

“The dinner-party donors, the ones who give $250, they’re hurting the most in this economy, so they’re giving the least,” said Donehue.

Phil Bailey, Donehue’s counterpart as executive director of the state Senate Democratic Caucus, agreed.

“This was the worst quarter for raising money in years,” he said.

Still, statewide Republican consultant Rod Shealy, a Lee Atwater protégé, says the best candidates will still attract donors.

“A good candidate can raise money; that’s what makes them good candidates,” Shealy said.

One politician who doesn’t have to worry about donations seemed to be Gov. Mark Sanford, who still has more than $1.5 million in his campaign coffers. But since Sanford is not currently running for office, he may have to use that money to pay legal fees related an ongoing ethics investigation and potential impeachment hearings.

Sanford will loom large in the upcoming election season, according to Shealy, who said the Democrats in the House and Senate will drag out Sanford’s possible removal from office because “they want to keep him around as a whipping boy” they can tie around the necks of Republican opponents in the coming election year.

While Shealy complimented the Democrats for having a stronger than usual ballot of candidates for state offices, Donehue ran out of breath listing the state offices down ballot who don’t have Democratic candidates, including lieutenant governor, treasurer, comptroller general and attorney general.

Shealy said that should the economy improve and a surge in Obama’s popularity follow, then a candidate like state Sen. Vince Sheheen (D-Kershaw) would benefit from a top-down, coattails effect and “could easily gather the 10 to 20 percent of voters in the middle” and challenge the state’s Republican hegemony.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” said Shealy, who is currently working closely with and advising Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer in his gubernatorial campaign.

On this point, Shealy and Lachlan McIntosh, who is working with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mullins McLeod, agree.

Both politicos are also looking to Internet technology to finally begin paying dividends promised years ago.

Shealy and McIntosh both saw how candidate Obama’s campaign staff was able to capitalize on technology and rally volunteers in North Carolina when that state’s presidential delegates surprisingly came into play late in the presidential election last year. Through the Internet, the campaign was able to create a diffuse telephone bank with volunteers manning phones for longer, better hours from their homes instead of crowding into relatively inefficient call centers.             

Shealy said that the larger the election — in area, not importance — the more effective such tools as Facebook and Twitter can be. Local races, he said, aren’t helped as much as the candidate going door-to-door, the old fashioned way.           

McIntosh said it didn’t make sense for his campaign “to work hard to get a story in the B-section of The State,” where, he said, only 4,000 to 6,000 readers would possibly see it. And that’s especially true since he said 1,400 South Carolinians were already following his candidate online and on Twitter. “It’s just more effective than The State.”          

Donehue, an avowed caffeine and tech junky, is launching his own political software in an effort to capitalize on campaign trends. Called VoterFetch, it will put into one package many of the tech lessons learned, or taught, by the Obama campaign’s experience in winning North Carolina.

Another theme of the upcoming election will be the relative power of the GOP’s Libertarian faction. The leader of the branch for years has been Sanford, but after scandal rocked the governor’s mansion, his face has faded from the front of the movement.

“For the Libertarians to still be a player in South Carolina, [state Sen.] Larry Grooms has to finish a respectable third in the Republican primary in June,” said Bailey.

Donehue disagreed, saying the movement had shifted from messengers to messages. Now, he said, the grassroots movement will back ideas more vociferously and continue to morph into more of a populist movement.

Crystal ball: From Sanford to the economy to health care, there are a growing number of issues likely to figure into upcoming elections. Other issues include how candidates will get their message out, if there will be enough money to run the kind of campaigns their directors think is needed to win and who will be listening. 


Bill Davis is the editor of SC Statehouse Report; he can be reached at editor@statehousereport.com. Let us know what you think: Email news@free-times.com.