Midlands high school students get 1st questions for candidates to replace Graham

Students at a Midlands high school will be the first to question the people running to replace the late Lindsey Graham as South Carolina’s next U.S. senator.

Lexington’s River Bluff High School is hosting the first in a series of candidate “stump stops” on Saturday as Palmetto State Republicans are rushing to a special primary for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat on Aug. 11.

The high school’s Center for Law and Global Policy will be hosting GOP candidates for the Saturday event, with the first candidate speaking at 11:30 a.m.

S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson, who is also the party’s nominee for governor, will moderate the event.

“The forums I participated in where so helpful to people when deciding who to support for governor, and they were helpful for me in getting ideas out there,” Wilson said in an interview with The State.

He said he wanted candidates in the truncated Senate race to have the same opportunity “to drill down on the issues, but also an opportunity to give the candidates a chance to talk for more than the 40 to 45 seconds you have to give an answer [in the governor candidate debates],” Wilson said.

Each of the candidates will speak for approximately six minutes, then answer a question from students from the Law Center, said Woods Wooten, communications director for the Wilson campaign, who helped organize the event. The stump speeches will be followed by a meet-and-greet where members of the public can talk to candidates one-on-one.

By the time filing for the race closed Tuesday, a dozen candidates were seeking to replace Graham, who died July 11, as the Republican candidate in November’s election. The contenders include the late senator’s sister, Darline Graham — appointed by Gov. Henry McMaster to serve out the rest of her brother’s term — as well as U.S. Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman and the former governor and congressman Mark Sanford.

Candidates have until Thursday to commit to the debate, Wooten said.

It won’t be the first time candidates for public office have made their pitch in an appearance at River Bluff. The center has hosted election debates in the past, and has already lined up forums this fall for candidates for both Lexington 1 school board and the 2nd congressional district, said Michael Burgess, the lead teacher at the Law Center.

“The event itself is under the state GOP, but it’s not like our congressional debate,” Burgess said. “For that, we plan everything. Here, we’ll have some students to act as greeters and then each candidate will speak and take a question from one of our students.”

Wooten is himself a 2019 River Bluff graduate who reached out to his former teacher to see if the campaign could use the school’s facilities on short notice. Two more stump events have been announced for Aug. 6 in Charleston and Aug. 8 in Florence as the candidates have barely two weeks to reach GOP primary voters.

“It’s a very compressed timeline,” Wooten said. “We had such a short timeline, we wanted to get as many as possible in before the primary.”

Law Center students taking part in Saturday’s event came into school this week even before fall classes start in order to formulate their questions for the candidates.

“The students are writing the questions, and we’re not going to be sending them to anybody,” Burgess said. “They’re not going to be seen by Wilson or the GOP ahead of time.”

Wilson said he was formulating his own questions for the stump event.

“I want to know about their judicial philosophy, how they approach lifetime appointments for judges, the positions of the president, national security, border security, the war on drugs, and the most important thing the senator will take on, affordability for families,” he said.

The winner of the Republican nomination will go on to the Nov. 3 general election to face Democrat Annie Andrews, Libertarian Kasie Whitener and Constitution Party nominee Mark Hackett.

Midlands high school students get 1st questions for candidates to replace Graham

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