By admin 
Alan Wilson’s victory over Pamela Evette on Tuesday was so decisive the race was called less than a half hour after polls closed.
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Wilson won in 43 out of 46 counties in the Tuesday Republican runoff for the nomination for governor. He won counties where Evette finished first in the primary when seven people were on the ballot.
The attorney general ran up the score in Greenville County, where Evette lives, by receiving nearly 22,000 more votes than the lieutenant governor. In his home of Lexington County he received 77% of the vote. His vote margins were large Anderson, Charleston, Spartanburg and Richland counties.
The attorney general will now face Democratic nominee for governor state Rep. Jermaine Johnson in the race to succeed Gov. Henry McMaster, who is in his 10th year in the office.
Wilson’s win was fueled by a disciplined campaign that built a coalition of voters and led to the President of the United States to hedge his endorsement bet.
Wilson received more than two-thirds of the vote, garnering 218,321 votes. Evette received 100,123 votes, according to unofficial results from the South Carolina Election Commission.
It seemed Wilson was cruising to victory before runoff day. After his second place finish in the June 9 primary, Wilson endorsements from elected officials around the state began to come in.
Polling during the two-week runoff period showed he was pulling ahead of Evette and more and more elected officials jumped onto the bandwagon.
He handily led among those who cast their ballots during the two days of early voting, before President Donald Trump announced his dual endorsement in the race. Wilson received 40,658 early votes. Evette received 22,174, according to data from the South Carolina Election Commission.
sponsored by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Wilson had 90% of support among those 18-40 years old, and 78% support among 41-64 year olds. He also had 68% support among those 65 and older.
Polling before the runoff showed voters would support Wilson over Evette, despite Evette finishing in first place in the June 9 primary. It was Wilson who received support from state Sen. Josh Kimbrell, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace and U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman, who also ran for governor. Businessman Rom Reddy did not endorse in the runoff.
Wilson also made sure to reach out to those who voted for other candidates on the night of the primary, which was an invitation of goodwill to his previous competitors and their supporters.
The move worked as Opinion Diagnostics found Wilson led among Norman supporters by 63 points, Reddy supporters by 54 points and Mace supporters by 50 points.
“The majority of Republican primary voters chose someone other than (Evette),” Opinion Diagnostics pollsters Brian Wynne and Patrick Sebastian wrote in a memo on the runoff race. “Those voters — who supported Norman, Reddy and Mace — wanted something different, and they are now rallying overwhelmingly behind Wilson.”
The day after the primary, Wilson’s team quickly added staff from other campaigns that weren’t successful during the June 9 election, including Hank Dillard from the Norman campaign and Dylan Nolan from the Reddy campaign.
“This is your home, if you want it. Not only did they come here, man, they kicked open the door, they started sleeping here full-time. It’s like a frat house.” Wilson jokingly said of the supporters of other campaigns who ended up backing him. “I want to thank the supporters from all of those camps who gave me a chance to represent you these last two weeks.”
Wilson’s work before primary paid off in runoff
Wilson formally kicked off his campaign June 23, 2025, but had been touring the state for several months prior as he assembled a campaign apparatus. Wilson’s campaign staff, which has grown to more than 20 people, also appeared to run the steadiest race not overreacting to developments, sticking to its course and avoiding gaffes.
South Carolina GOP strategist Rob Godfrey pointed to how Wilson’s campaign in April released an ad about the attorney general’s military service before more and more campaign ads began to hit the airwaves.
“The attorney general and his team ran a disciplined and fundamentally sound campaign, defining Alan Wilson as a candidate of high character,” Godfrey wrote. ”They made few mistakes. They reminded voters why they had already elected him attorney general and, by focusing on policy rather than personality, gave them a reason to take a chance on him as their next governor.”
Wilson won despite being outspent on broadcast television channels in the state’s four main media markets.
According to a review of FCC records, Evette’s campaign and groups supporting her campaign spent at least $1.3 million in the two-week runoff period.
Wilson’s campaign and groups supporting him, spent at least $1.2 million.
One of those groups supporting Wilson was the U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s Truth and Courage PAC, which bought about $250,000 in broadcast time in the Greenville television market.
Wilson had a built-in advantage over Evette at the start of the campaign. Not many people may have known the lieutenant governor before the race. The attorney general is a much more high-profile position.
“The lieutenant governorship just really doesn’t give you anything, you can’t get out and do a whole heck of a lot, because you work for somebody,” longtime South Carolina strategist Warren Tompkins said. “But attorney general now is … a high-profile job. You’re in the news a lot. Most often it’s good news, as opposed to bad news. You’re doing and dealing with high-profile things across the board, and you touch a lot of different segments of society through that role.”
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Evette’s campaign before primary didn’t pay off in runoff
Much of Evette’s campaign was centered around her loyalty to Trump. It was often repeated in her messaging of standing with Trump when he made his first visit to South Carolina during his 2024 presidential campaign and never appearing to waver. She received the Trump endorsement May 29, about a week-and-a-half before the primary. But she was only able to modestly grow from the 29% of the vote she received in the June 9 election.
“I think that she was relying upon and focusing so much for the Trump endorsement that she was wanting the Trump endorsement more than she was wanting the South Carolina voter endorsement,” South Carolina Republican Dave Wilson said.
Evette skipped three televised debates, which received criticism from other campaigns. She said it was better for her to interact directly with voters and not through 45-second soundbites.
“If you’re not going to show up for the job interview, do you really want the job?” Dave Wilson said.
She called S.C. State University students a woke mob when they protested an invitation to have her speak at the school’s commencement ceremony. It was a move that may have led to an initial bump in polling, but it also was at the expense of a school that has history of student protests especially during the Civil Rights movement.
Evette in an interview Tuesday afternoon, hours before the votes were being tallied, said she wouldn’t have done anything differently in how she ran her campaign, which was her first race where she was alone and not McMaster’s running mate.
“I think we’ve had a great campaign. I mean I always get my feel from boots on the ground. I don’t know how you poll well in a runoff, because turnout is not what it is in a normal election,” Evette said. “I think my team has run a great, a great game.”
Supporting the nominee
Going forward, the GOP says it wants to come together after a bruising nomination race that started several months before campaigns formally launched.
Evette shared her support for Wilson in November’s election.
“In just a few months, there’s going to be a general election, and the choice in that general election is going to be between conservative principles and the Democratic Party that wants the exact opposite for South Carolina,” Evette said.
Similar to how he reached out to supporters of state Kimbrell, Mace, Norman and Reddy, Wilson reached out to Evette’s supporters in his victory speech Tuesday.
“To all of the Evette supporters out there, you fought hard for your candidate, you fought hard for her, and you’re to be commended,” Wilson said. “I would ask that you give me the opportunity to fight for you as we go into the general election.”
Will that unity be on display early on?
The South Carolina Republican Party has a unity barbecue planned for Saturday. Those who appeared on the state party’s debate stage had to agree to attend the BBQ. It’s unclear how many of the gubernatorial candidates will attend.
Evette said Tuesday she does not plan to attend the SC GOP’s Unity BBQ on Saturday, no matter if she won or lost the runoff. Evette and her husband, David, have planned a vacation over a long weekend.
“My husband’s amazing, and he just thinks I’ve been working so hard that we needed to get away and see a couple of our dearest friends and not talk politics for a hot second,” Evette said in an interview.
However, Evette’s campaign had harsh words for the state party during the primary race, and the ire still exists.
She said she doesn’t believe the state party was impartial during the race, and she’s not sure if the party can coalesce around the nominee after the bruising race.
“I think it’s really sad that we have a state party chairman that never once called me and said, ‘Hey, I heard you’re throwing your hat in the ring. Best of luck,’” Evette said.
State GOP Chairman Drew McKissick on Tuesday pushed back against Evette’s assertions and said he has no problems with any candidates who ran.
“The state party has been, in everything that we have done, totally impartial in this race and treated all the candidates equally and respectfully, and we can’t do any more than that, McKissick said.
“I don’t have anything in my mind that needs to be corrected,” he added. “If somebody has a problem with me, they haven’t brought it to me.”
He said the party gave every candidate the opportunity to appear in statewide televised debates. Evette chose to skip two of the debates sponsored by the party because her campaign objected to the cost of tickets.
“I think that primary voters noticed, and at the end of the day, it’s Republicans making decisions about who they want to be their spokesman, who they want to represent them on the ballot and represent their positions, and they’ve spoken. That process has worked for us for over 40 years now, and it has developed as a result stronger campaigns, stronger nominees that were then able to carry our message into the fall and defeat Democrats,” McKissick said.
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Sun News reporter Maria Elena Scott contributed from Myrtle Beach.