Bostic Campaign ‘Surging’ Before Runoff?

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Volunteers at Curtis Bostic campaign headquarters make phone calls Friday

CHARLESTON, S.C.
What a way to celebrate Easter Sunday — out on the campaign trail. Well, it’s better than a Cesar Chavez tribute, I suppose.

The fact that the 1st District runoff will occur on the Tuesday after Easter adds an extra element of uncertainty to the outcome, because many people will be on vacation, which will likely mean an even lower turnout. Slightly more than 50,000 cast ballots in the March 19 GOP primary, about 20,000 of them for Mark Sanford and 7,000 for Curtis Bostic. Exactly how many of the 33,000 who voted for the 14 other candidates will show up Tuesday and — who they will vote for — is a mystery. A Daily Kos report Friday wondered if the race was shifting against Sanford:

Is Curtis Bostic surging at the last possible moment? He and Mark Sanford, his Republican runoff opponent, met on Thursday night for their only debate, and surprisingly, Sanford went on the attack. (So did Bostic, over Sanford’s infamous misdeeds while governor, but you expect the underdog to do that.) Sanford went after Bostic for voting in favor of spending increases while serving on the Charleston County Council, and also criticized his attendance record.
The fact that Stanford wasn’t content to play nice just days before Tuesday’s election is noteworthy in and of itself, but here’s an added twist: Sanford may have seriously stepped in it. Bostic says his absences from the council “were related to his wife’s battle with cancer.” Ouch.

How many voters are even aware of that debate gaffe? Will it make a difference? It’s hard to tell. A head-to-head match-up between Sanford and Bostic, based on a poll taken before the March 19 primary, showed Sanford leading by 13 points.

Since then, however, Bostic has appeared in two debates opposite Sanford, has run a new TV ad, and has sent out campaign mailers that describe him as a “fiscally conservative leader we can trust.” This, in addition to endorsements by Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter and former Rep. Henry Brown, who represented the 1st District for a decade. That’s probably what “surging” looks like, and one South Carolina blog cites a “source within the Democrat Party” as saying that their own polling shows a “very tight race” in the runoff.

UPDATE: Photos illustrating the campaign (click to enlarge):


The full-color mailer the Bostic campaign sent to Republican voters on Friday. Another mailer is scheduled to hit local mailboxes on Monday.

Headlines in the Charleston Post and Courier from Friday, Saturday and Sunday show how the local paper is covering the runoff.

UPDATE II: Linked by Donald Douglas at American Power — thanks! — and you can see the full-page newspaper ad that Mark Sanford’s campaign ran today. For some reason, neither Sanford’s ex-wife nor his fiancée is pictured in the ad.

UPDATE III: Headline at the Summerville (S.C.) Patch:

Social Media Analysis Predicts Bostic Win Tuesday

Hmmm. Wonder how that happened . . .

UPDATE IV: Mark Sanford’s sister is worried and sent an e-mail:

I’ve heard from as far away as Greenville (a huge evangelical church there from which the Bostic Campaign has requested phone calls and additional vans) exactly what the Bostic Campaign is doing. They are working in many evangelical churches, and they have the respective church leaderships organizing vanloads of their parishioners going to the Board of Elections all this week to vote early. They’re keeping the vans through Election Day next Tuesday. In Beaufort, they are working with several large churches — one is the Community Bible Church in Shell Point (a man I know there said he was going to vote for another candidate in the primary, but had been told directly by his pastor to vote for Bostic.) There are lots of others of these very large churches up in Charleston, Mount Pleasant, and North Charleston that they’re working with as well.

UPDATE V: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Meanwhile, the irrepressible Will Folks responds to my description of him as a “narcissistic sociopath.” Small egos are rare in politics.

 


 

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21 comments

  2. All he has to do is show him and his wife with the voice over of: “I’m Curtis Bostic and I’m still married to my wife and didn’t duck out on my responsibilities to cheat on her and the State.”

    And use the picture.

    That should do it.

  4. Thanks for doing this work, Stacy, especially when events fall during holidays you could be spending with your family. My social conservative friends down there appreciate your updates, too.

  5. I never get to vote in the good elections. Sending good vibes though, and a ten spot. Its all I can do.

  7. Sorry Stacy, you are wasting your time, Mark Sanford is the only Conservative in the race and will win in a walk. Put some oil and water in that jalopie before you hit the Interstate out of Charleston.

  8. I am in Greenville…so not voting. However, I can not understand how anyone could claim to be conservative and not support Mark Sanford. He has a extremely strong anti-government track record. Better than any major politician that I am aware of….Ron Paul and Gary Johnsen excluded. He is truly a libertarian ideolougue….not a politician who is portraying ideas that he thinks his district supports.

  9. Yep. Since libertarians as a general rule don’t really believe in borders, its easy to see how Columbia could honestly be described as “the Appalachian Trail”.

  13. Interesting. I can’t understand how anybody could claim to be conservative and support a guy who ditched his job and left the country so he could bone his girlfriend.

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