Grace hosts a special edition of Frogmore Stew, along with Katelyn and TJ, comparing and contrasting the concerns of voters and candidates in South Carolina. Topics discussed include infrastructure, taxation, reproductive rights, gun reform, and affordable housing. This episode features diverse opinions from various political backgrounds, highlighting both common and differing priorities. Key voices include voters Trish, Suzanne, Kim, and Michelle, and candidates Bran Fowler, Shawna Johnson, Micah Caskey, Krista Hassel, and Harold Gettings.

00:00 Introduction to Frogmore Stew Special Edition

01:47 Voter Perspectives: Trish from the Upstate

02:56 Voter Perspectives: Suzanne from the Low Country

04:01 Candidate Insights: Bran Fowler and Shawna Johnson

06:07 The Intersection of Local and National Politics

07:54 Voter Perspectives: Kim from Hollywood, SC

10:09 Voter Perspectives: Michelle from Beaufort

12:28 Candidate Insights: Micah Caskey on Infrastructure

14:01 Debate on Development and Infrastructure

17:17 Candidate Insights: Krista Hassel and Harold Gettings

23:04 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Copyright 2024 Grace Cowan

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Hi, it's Grace, and this is a special edition of Frogmore Stew.

So this project has been really super fascinating and I think today we have a really interesting thing that we're going to do where we take voters. From throughout the state, we ask them all the same question. And then we also have candidates throughout the state. We ask them all the same question and we are going to compare and contrast. I will say that this was not a scientific process. We are in no way data scientists over here at Frogmore Stew, but we did do a big effort to ensure that we found. People of all political stripes, both on the candidate side and on the voter side. And I think our listeners will find it very interesting. I know I did. What do you guys think?

It was one of the most interesting things I did all year, talking to people all over the state. I learned so much. It reminded me how much we have in common. It's just a matter of how we get there.

And I think for me too, it was the commonality of issues, people in the upstate and people in the low country and the Midlands all kind of focusing on the same things in general as far as life goes every day. We're all worried about the same stuff.

So what do you think the biggest issue is in your district? What should the legislature be focused on? Our first interview was with a woman named Trish that lives in the upstate.

I would for the tax. Code to be changed the federal tax code. I really want a flat tax. I want it's 10 percent if you make 10, 000 a year. It's 10 percent if you make 100, 000 a year. So that is the same percentage, but it's obviously more money. If you make more money, I don't agree with taxing. People more when they make more money, because I think it just punishes people for being successful.

And I think it takes away the incentive to do better for yourself. Obviously, that's a federal issue, but I don't know what the legislature's priorities are. I think they should be roads and infrastructure because our roads, particularly in this area, are absolutely terrible. I also think education It needs to be something that they, on a state level, that they really look at. And I come from an interesting background because I taught in public school for 12 years and then but my girls always attended private school and they went all the way through and graduated. So I have a dual perspective on that. We do have good public schools in some areas and I don't think they need more money. I think they need to spend the money they have more wisely.

And now let's hear the same question from Suzanne, who is

don't know if I can pick one, honestly, they've already passed the six-week abortion ban. So I would love some more progressive voters in there to reverse that. I would love to have legislators that would not curtail medical decisions for trans kids. I would love some criminal reform, gun reform, the fact that you can have open carry without a permit. There's all these things that I would love to have more progressive legislators in.

So their issues vary pretty much. Trish talked first and foremost about the tax code from a federal perspective, but clearly financial concerns are top of mind. And then she went into Rose infrastructure education. Whereas Suzanne in the low country who talked about body liberty, autonomy for women to the trans community and gun reform that describes how people vote. The first candidate we are going to hear from is Bran Fowler. He is running for State House in the Upstate.

Greenville is an incredibly fast-growing town and community, and because of that, a lot of people want to live here. We have to make sure that our infrastructure stays caught up with that, whether that means we've got power lines that are buried and we have systems that are capable of handling what was a significant storm when it came through Greenville, but it's not like it was a Category 5 hurricane coming ashore.

And we've got to be able to deal with that better. And then this morning, taking my son to his preschool, maybe a mile and a quarter from my house, and I think it took me close to 30 minutes. Yeah, it's unacceptable. And people are moving here because we have great quality of life. Because we have great jobs, but if we can't meet those needs, we will not have good quality of life here and people will not live here. That's not a situation we want to be in.

Okay, so now let's hear from Shawna Johnson, who's also running in the upstate.

I think we should prioritize women's access to reproductive health care. Right now, our legislators are not listening to the experts. My opponent, Bruce Bannister, is an attorney, and I say, I don't go into Bruce Bannister's office and tell him how to practice law. Why should he and any other come into medical providers offices and tell them what is best for their patients? That needs to end, full stop.

So these are two candidates, both running in the upstate. They're both running on the Democrat ticket. Bran Fowler is staying right down the middle in infrastructure, power lines, traffic. Kind of matches up what Trish said, infrastructure. That was true on traffic. from everybody throughout the state and Shauna Johnson talking about reproductive health care. But I don't know how that goes over with conservative women. And Trish didn't even mention it.

I wonder how much Trish is going to be able to listen to what these candidates in the upstate are saying and see if there's any alignment between the two or if that national politics. Has just got them to a place where there's no listening. In a world of so much information, 20 text messages a day, asking for money, all of that, it's easy to just shut down and put a wall up against the information you don't want to hear.

The saying used to be all politics is local. And when I talked to a lot of people, I would ask them that and they would say no, now all politics is local. When you apply your life to state politics, you're like my state's doing okay. But on a federal level, how do I feel about these two presidential candidates? And then it comes down to personality and your traditional party beliefs that I think from the state party, because it's so much harder to find out what's going on a day-to-day basis, as opposed to some of these really big issues.

The abortion ban and gun reform, two issues that have gotten a lot of attention coming out of our state house and state Senate. So the one thing that they revert to is what is difficult in my daily life and how does that apply to our state legislature and

Rhodes comes up a lot. I often rely on nonprofits to educate me on what's happening in the state, like here locally in Charleston, some of the best local transportation emails that I can find are from Charleston Moves. They have incredible information around what the city council is doing to keep us all updated on how transportation could in fact change. But you have to actively search for that information. Those issues that are happening in the state that are also happening at the national level. That is what we tend to see in mainstream media.

So let's hear from two more voters. Same question. The next one is Kim and she is a voter in, I think her early forties and lives in Hollywood, South Carolina.

I'm really worried about how women are being policed, not just their bodies, but even their rights. And it makes me nervous in that with all of the ways that we have progressed as a society, we could go back. And it's pretty easy to go back, and it may even be easier than it was before because now we're all so connected via the internet. A few keystrokes and shit can go back to 1932, right? So that's something that I hope remains on the forefront of conversation because although our government is predominantly run by men who are married and men who I presume have sex with women, they don't seem to like them much.

Okay. So I loved my interview with her because she cussed through the whole thing. She was. fabulous. So she lives in a very rural community. She drives into Charleston every day for work on the same traffic. roads that a lot of people in the low country drive on, and she has a lot of development going on around her. And yet that was her number one issue. It made me wonder how many women in this election who typically identify as moderates or center right, if that is their number one issue.

I think it is. When you hear things like the Attorney General in Texas is suing the federal government to have access to private medical records of women to see whether or not they've gone out of the state to get an abortion. That is terrifying, and we're not that far from that in South Carolina. I think when women hear those types of things, it is one of the number one issues that we're all voting on.

One thing I will say, though, is that I think a lot of people who are center right or right leaning, a lot of them do not see these laws as being an attack on women. That doesn't even break the surface with them. Let's hear from our last voter for today. This is Michelle. She is in her early fifties and she lives in Buford.

I think for our area, one of the biggest issues is affordable housing and infrastructure. Just how fast these areas can grow and how Slow they are to develop the infrastructure to accommodate that. And part of it is government moves so slow and to be able to move as fast as growth is next to impossible, but it makes it a really tough place to live while you wait for that infrastructure to be met with the demand or putting moratoriums on development and the whole mix and affordable housing that's in there, I feel like those are all some really big issues that really aren't being addressed the way that they should be.

This was a common theme. Infrastructure has not kept up with growth. Michelle is traditionally a more than center right voter. Of all of the people that we talked to, when you ask them questions like this, you could not tell where They came out on voting issues. Even sometimes people that talked about the abortion ban, you couldn't really tell a hundred percent where their party allegiance lies, even people that tend to lean conservative. They see what is a critical need of what our government in the state should be focused on, which is affordable housing. And that is that, across the board, that is part of infrastructure and everybody in this. state recognize that we have outpriced by the influx of people coming in. We've outpriced the workers from a home perspective.

And because we've done that, the workers that work in the hotels and the restaurants and the schools and the police stations, Cannot live in the communities that they work in. And so that has then created an even bigger infrastructure problem, which is our roads. Very few had really specific plans identified as to how you fix it. There were a couple of legislators who were incumbents that brought that up and said, The legislators previous to us kicked the can down the road for so many years. So now we're dealing with a problem that's massive instead of having incrementally dealt with it over time. And one of those was Micah Caskey and he's in Columbia.

If I could change anything, it wouldn't really even be legislatively. It would be something in the executive realm that would get our roads fixed in a more timely way. I can't tell you the number of frustrations I have where we make the appropriation as a legislative body, but for whatever reason, results are slow to come by.

Do you feel like we can get to a point where we're keeping up with it?

Are we willing to make the investments necessary for that to happen on a timeline that we all find acceptable? I think so. I think we've done that in the legislature in my time there, but there is a lag from investment to completion. That's what we're seeing now. But to be sure, there are more investments to be made. Our airports are losing ground right now to our neighbors to the north and to the west. Obviously, the port is a huge benefit to the state overall, but we struggle to optimize its usage.

He's saying, I'm in the legislature and we're focused on it. It just takes a long time and where reality sits. is that these projects are funded. There's a lot of red tape to make them happen. There's a lot of complicated outside issues that don't always allow them to happen as quickly as possible. However, you have to show Some sort of benefit before you come back and ask for money. And I don't think that solution is a Democrat or Republican issue. I think it's a commonsense solution.

We're all living here. We all need good roads. It doesn't matter what your political affiliation is. I need to get to work on time. TJ, you want to jump in here?

For me, it would be a matter of making the people who are building the developments, who are buying a land and making the millions and millions of dollars selling all these overpriced homes. Let them pay for the roads necessary to handle the added traffic. Let them pay for the school that needs to be in that community because they built 200 homes with all those kids and all those cars. They did this out at Park West and Mount Pleasant years ago and part of the way they got that developed was by saying, you put in the roads. You build three schools. They did it. It continues to develop. Why they don't do that going forward, I know. Their buddies are all developers. When it comes to who passes the laws and stuff. And they don't want to tax those guys. They're already building us houses. What else can we ask them to do?

We ask them to build the roads, extend the sewer, add to the water. and build a school. But for a taxpayer to continue to have to suffer due to bad infrastructure, unless I'm willing to give up more money so a developer can cut down all the trees and make millions building houses that we have no way of supporting? That makes no sense to me. I think we have to look at the people making the money to get some of this development done quickly. The state can't afford to keep up,

but T. J. You live on John's Island. Yes,

I do. Lots

of development encroaching, and that has been a rural area for a very long time. And to me, John's Island is sacred ground. There's no great way to put roads on John's Island.

Then you don't do more development. If we can't put the roads and new schools and everything we need to support new development, then we don't give people the right to go in and develop. We just leave it like it is. And again, who benefits from all this development? The people who build the houses. Who has to pay for everything that goes with that? Taxpayers, who can't afford to buy those houses. The way we're doing it is totally self-serving to the people who have the money to develop the property. It's a total penalty for anybody outside of that bubble.

We really have to start looking at making it cost effective for us to allow them to cut down the trees and buy up the farms. Because they're going to walk in here today. Somebody will go to one of these farmers, these black communities, they'll go in and say, Look, here's the deal. We'll give you blue million dollars if you'll sell us this piece of property. What are we going to do? We can't get people to work the farm anymore. There's nobody around here to do it. And the traffic sucks. So I, yeah, I'll sell it. Go ahead, buy it. Oh, let's put another thousand homes back here. You got the permits go who wins. We don't just the developers, just the people who have the money, make more money and the rest of us fund it for them.

Okay. So that was like from Barbie. Yes, exactly. The Barbie, that was your Barbie moment. All right. So let's hear our last candidate for the day. Krista Hassel in the

Calhoun, like Orangeburg area. I think that probably the biggest issue in our area is we don't want to see overgrowth. People like their lifestyle. They like the area. They don't want to see urban sprawl. We don't want to see big industrial. We like our mom-and-pop stores. We do have some challenges in some of our areas where affordable housing is a concern, but again, most of the residents here do not want to see that urban sprawl like we've seen many other places in the South Carolina area.

It seems as though Charleston is coming this way, and Columbia is coming this way had an interesting conversation with our building inspector in Orangeburg County area, and we are slated for about 4800 homes. That had been approved and probably the next three years. That's scary to a lot of us because our infrastructure and our essential services just are not up to par. It's not a situation if you build it, they will come. We need to make sure that our essential services are where they need to be to support that type of growth. So

Krista is a Republican. She is running in District 93, the state house. When you hear her talk about things like infrastructure, roads, protecting rural communities, mom and pop shop. I think what she says across the board, regardless of what party you align yourself with, it makes sense. Sounds like what everybody in the middle probably agree with.

I agreed with her. I thought we were both saying a lot of the same thing. She just said it in a much more concise way.

I agree. I think based on what you just said, TJ, to hear her speak, it's the same thing. And I really loved her point about the fact that we love mom and pop shops here in South Carolina. It's part of the reason South Carolina feels like home to me. When you see constant development and these housing units are being built. that go up that have no personality. It just looks like Northern Virginia, and not that Northern Virginia is a bad place, but it just, it is what it is. It's boring. And South Carolina has never felt that way. We

do have another person from that district, Harold Gettings, and he's with the Workers Party.

Looking at the infrastructure issue, I can tell you as an Uber Eats driver, our roads are terrible. It gets really expensive having to get my car realigned every time I need an oil change because I'm running through all the potholes. If you're a potential employer looking to bring in new jobs to this area, where's your incentive to do so when your workforce is uneducated and the roads are terrible to be bringing things in and out of the area? It's again, just a situation set up for failure as somebody who's lived this particular experience of my entire life in rural South Carolina. I think it's time somebody gave a voice to that.

So here's the fascinating thing. Harold Gettings. Workers party, which could not be further left and Krista Hassel, Republican conservative party, could not be further right.

Basically said the same thing. But what I love about him is that he has day to day experience with what's going on. He's an Uber driver. He's on the roads all the time. He deals with the traffic. He deals with the potholes. It costs him money to do his job because he is. He gets flat tires and all kinds of things because of the infrastructure. And it's a direct correlation to his ability to support himself. He's running because he cares so much about getting things done for the quote unquote, everyday person. If you

looked on paper at these two candidates, they could not be further apart on the things that over the last couple of years, our legislature has focused on abortion gun control. But when you ask them about things like infrastructure, they all say the same thing.

But when it comes to playing the political game that they have to play to retain their control and their power, they can't talk that way. They have to focus on those things that are being talked about on the national level to stay in the running. For their seat Harold doesn't give a damn about running for his party,

he sure does not. So

It's really sad that the two of them can sit in the same room in Columbia and feel the same way about an issue, but can't be seen agreeing on that issue. Because it's not the political way to do things. I think the quicker we can get beyond politics and get down to legislating for day-to-day life, the quicker we can get some of this stuff taken care of.

Again, I think that we tend to focus on the rhetoric of the now, which is what the media And what the leaders of the two parties tell us we need to be focused on. But I think where we also have to be able to bring down the temperature is by pushing up these other issues and solving them. Because it's very clear that we all think very similarly on how to fix these other issues.

And we also know that when we vote for whomever we vote for, they are going to have to follow what their party says. Just look at the sister senators. We can no longer vote for a politician. We now, it feels have to vote for the party. And that's why I think that Harold is so fascinating. Because he's in a party that's not Republican or Democrat. And so he can vote however the hell he wants. I think we'll just leave it at that. That's all the second helping of meal prep for today.

And hosted by Grace Cowan. Editing and IT support by Eric Johnson. Produced by T. J. Phillips with the Podcast Solutions Network.