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United States senator Lindsey Graham‘s longtime press aide is mounting a campaign for congress – hoping to win the seat his former boss held from 1995-2003.
Kevin Bishop of Easley, South Carolina announced his candidacy for the Palmetto State’s third congressional district on Monday. This seat has been held since January 2011 by seven-term GOP congressman Jeff Duncan. Two months ago, though, Duncan announced he would not seek an eighth term in office – thus sparing himself the indignities of what was shaping up to be a bruising GOP primary campaign following revelations of his affair with a Washington, D.C. lobbyist.
Bishop – who worked for Graham for 27 years prior to stepping down last month – is the third candidate to enter this race. Also running are Air National Guard lieutenant colonel/ nurse practitioner Sheri Biggs and state representative Stewart Jones of Greenwood, S.C. Biggs has already launched television ads in support of her candidacy.
Curiously, Bishop’s announcement was made on Graham’s Instagram account – prompting confusion as to whether Graham had been hacked.
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“Unethical? Or incompetent?” one Republican strategist mused. “Not sure if it was intentional – or a truly boneheaded play.”
According to his announcement on Graham’s Instagram page, Bishop’s basis for running appears to be the fact that there has never been a resident of Pickens County elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
“I knew my old boss and friend Lindsey Graham grew up in Pickens County and moved away to serve in the U.S. Air Force,” Bishop wrote. “When he came back, he established his residence in Seneca and Oconee County. All his House and Senate bios list Seneca and Oconee County as home.”
“I searched and searched,” Bishop continued. “Congressional boundary lines have come and gone through the decades. Heck, whole towns (Parnassus, South Carolina) have changed as well. After a lot of digging – and even enlisting the Pickens County Historical Society to help – it turns out there is a reason I did not find anything.”
The reason?
You know what … this guy lost me when he got to the part about “enlisting the Pickens County Historical Society.” Seriously, I stopped caring at that point.
(Click to View)
Bishop also lost me when he launched his campaign off of somebody else’s platform … which is major L.D.E, in my estimation.
Actually, he lost me well before that when he, I dunno … worked for a warmongering megalomaniac for nearly three decades.
Nonetheless, the “Pickens Pride” candidate continued pouring it on …
“Pickens County is 156 years old,” Bishop wrote. “It is the most conservative county in the state and has been my home for the past 25 years. It’s where Julie and I bought a house, joined a church, raised four wonderful children, and cheered on my Clemson Tigers. Pickens County is the kind of place where ‘God, Family, Country’ still hold meaning. I will proudly carry those Pickens County values and beliefs from Easley to the halls of Congress.”
Third district values? Hmmm …
South Carolina’s “fightin’ third” runs along the Georgia and North Carolina borders in the northwestern portion of the state. It includes all of ten counties – Abbeville, Anderson, Edgefield, Greenwood, Laurens, McCormick, Oconee, Pickens (obviously), and Saluda – and parts of Anderson and Greenville counties. In 2022, this district had a partisan voting index rating of +21 Republican – making it the most staunchly GOP congressional district in the Palmetto State.
For those of you keeping score at home, former president Donald Trump received 69 percent of the vote within this district against incumbent president Joe Biden four years ago. Trump also pummeled former S.C. governor Nikki Haley in the district during last month’s presidential primary election, drawing 67.48 percent of the vote compared to Haley’s 31.84 percent.
Will any other candidates jump in this race? The filing period for partisan primary elections began last Friday and closes at 12:00 p.m. EDT on April 1, 2024. Primaries will be held on June 11, 2024, and if no candidate receives a majority of ballots in a given race, runoff elections will be held two weeks later – on June 25, 2024.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina and before that he was a bass guitarist and dive bar bouncer. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and seven (soon to be eight) children.
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7 comments
Without question Stewart Jones is the only acceptable choice, from those named.
That’s a negative
LOL! The entire district is a dying backwater these days except for Anderson and Clemson, and the fact this district gave us Lindsay Graham to begin with in and lately the massive hypocrite Jeff Duncan makes me question of the logic of a lot of people.
Folks failed to mention that all of Newberry got re-districted into the 3rd from the 5th inexplicably a couple years ago, I think Will must be using outdated maps?
Didn’t Lindsey get roundly booed at the Trump rally in Pickens last summer? And he got booed off the stage at Trump’s primary victory party not long ago. Why doesn’t anybody get the message that Lindsey Graham is toast?
If only that were true – but he keeps getting elected time and time again. and he was getting booed before his last election, but still got it done. So no, sadly, there is NOT a message that Graham is toast. That’s because SC republicans did not believe in primarying their incumbents until very, very recently.
A big fake smile and a thumbs-up must be code for something. I don’t know what it is, but it seems to be a common display by politicians, and I have yet to like anyone that I’ve seen doing it. I know two of the turds running for this office do it. I’ll have to check on Sheri Biggs, but I may have developed my new litmus test.
Another closeted homosexual pedophile?