Looking back at last week's primaries

We have had a good five days to digest the results of this past Tuesday's primary elections. A week ago, we piped up with our prognostication on what would happen. How'd we do?

In the Republican races, we called a runoff in the main event between Nikki "Boom Boom" Haley and Henry "Foghorn Leghorn" McMaster, but it wound up being Haley and Gresham "I run the most stupid tv ads in recent memory" Barrett. Haley came close to avoiding a runoff with 48.86%, but since she just missed it, she'll face Barrett. There's been a lot of talk about how Barrett should withdraw for the good of the party, but come on. With all the Haley bombshells that have been dropped, does anyone honestly think Barrett isn't sitting there thinking some other shoe is likely to drop and he waltzes in? He could care less he only pulled 21.75% in the primary. He's thinking the good ship Haley may very well implode before June 22nd.

We called Connor-Ard, Lord-Wilson and Inglis-Gowdy runoffs, although we think those were a given in all the races. We suppose picking Connor-Ard deserves some back-patting as we had seen a lot of people putting Richter in a runoff.

On the Democrat side, we predicted that State Sen. Vince Sheheen would take the gubernatorial race by enough to avoid a runoff. Boy, did he, by garnering 59% of the vote. The shocker was that Jim Rex barely got more votes than Robert Ford (23% to 18%).

We called Frank Holleman as the winner in the Secretary of Education race and he beat Tom Thompson 56% to 44%.

Like most democrats, we've got egg on our face in the US Senate race. We warned Jim DeMint not to sleep on Vic Rawl. We should have warned Rawl not to sleep on the primary. We think Carol Fowler has a lot of chutzpah to come out and ask Greene to withdraw. This entire Greene fiasco is the result of one simple fact, Fowler didn't do her job. The SC Democratic Party doesn't recruit quality candidates, it doesn't provide all its candidates with support worth a damn and it doesn't properly investigate and vet its candidates. That is all on the party chair and that's Carol Fowler. For the record, there's no way Republicans got Greene elected. But there is something to who paid the guys filing fee. Obviously there is something weird going on with that, the guy didn't have $10,400 of his own to throw away. But Greene actually winning the primary? Democrats own that shit. More specifically, Carol Fowler owns it.

We weren't sure how the Florence City Council Seat #1 race would turn out. We thought it would be close. Turns out we were wrong. Teresa Ervin beat Billy D 55% to 45%. While we thought Ervin may pull it out against Billy D, we candidly admit we didn't think it would be by that much. Impressive win for Mrs. Ervin.

On to the last race we predicted: Florence City Council Seat #2. We thought Pat Gibson-Hye had a chance to take this race outright. We were wrong. But she did pull out a run-off between her and resident jackass Ed Robinson. The margin was slim, though. Robinson narrowly avoided getting the necessary margin. In fact, we avoided a Robinson outright win by only 6 votes. It will be very interesting to see if Gibson-Hye can get Scott's voters to turn out and whether Ed and his boys can afford to get their folks out again for the 22nd. If there is a God in heaven, here's to us congratulating Gibson-Hye come the 23rd...