Opinion: Voters Challenged to Find Facts in Local Elections
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Three weeks before the primaries — or at least some of them — Anderson County voters find themselves navigating an information environment that has made the straightforward act of assessing a local candidate considerably more difficult than it ought to be.
The social media feeds are loud this year. The cut-and-paste operations are running at full volume. Positions are being lifted without context, connections insinuated without evidence, family members enlisted as proxies in arguments that have nothing to do with them. Some of this is coming from candidates. Most of it is not. All of it is aimed at emotion rather than fact, and it is worth pausing, with three weeks remaining, to look at what the actual record shows.
The actual record, in this case, is the South Carolina Ethics Commission's public reporting database, which requires candidates for county office to disclose their campaign finances. A review of filings for all ten candidates currently in contested county council primaries reveals nothing that would satisfy anyone hunting for a bought-and-paid-for political class.
No candidate has accepted an outside donation from any individual or organization exceeding $1,000. Five of the ten — Chris Sullivan, Samuel Whately, Dave Shalaby, Tommy Dunn, and Cindy Wilson — have reported no outside contributions at all, funding their campaigns entirely through personal funds or commercial loans. Filings are due to be updated next week, and this accounting will be revisited then.
Among the candidates who have accepted donations, the amounts are modest and the sources are named. In District 1, Kelly Koonce has reported $100 from Summit Technology. In District 6, Jimmy Davis has reported $1,000 from Charlene Spelt. In District 7, Collin Alexander has reported $250 from Curtis Donaldson. The most substantial fundraising belongs to District 5 candidate Josh Mann, whose reported contributions total $3,990 — a figure that includes his own money. The full list: Robert T. McCurry, $1,000; Dave Shalaby, $1,000; Paul Constantine, $500; Thomas L. Gilreath, $500; Josh Mann himself, $178.60; William Jones, $150; Elizabeth F. Fant, $100; Aspen Ballard, $100; John Cottrell, $40. One disclosure is conspicuously absent: there is, as of this writing, no Ethics Commission filing on record for District 6 candidate Ryan Cowsert.
These are the numbers. For most candidates, donations of this scale represent the only practical means of paying for yard signs and a modest advertising buy. There is nothing in these filings to suggest that any candidate for Anderson County Council has been captured by a special interest or underwritten by a hidden patron. To imply otherwise, without evidence, is not opposition research. It is demagoguery, and it has become, in this election cycle, something close to the default register of local political discourse.
It was not always so. Reviewing my own coverage of Anderson County politics from the 1980s, one is struck less by the absence of personal ambition or narrow agendas — those have always been present — than by the near-universal public disavowal of what candidates then called "dirty politics." The norm was acknowledged even when it was not honored. What has changed is not the existence of bad-faith political behavior but the disappearance of any social cost for it, and the arrival of platforms that actively reward the practitioners.
Political scientists have a name for what residents of places like Anderson County are watching play out in their school board rooms and county council chambers: affective polarization, which describes not merely the familiar condition of disagreeing with one's neighbors on policy, but the newer, more corrosive one of actively disliking and distrusting them as people. The distinction matters. Disagreement is the ordinary friction of democratic life. Contempt is something else.
The forces that produced this condition are not local in origin, even when their effects land locally. Over the past decade, social media algorithms engineered to reward engagement discovered what political consultants had long suspected — that anger is the emotion most reliably converted into clicks, shares, and donations. Cable networks, having learned that ideological loyalty produces better ratings than neutrality, began constructing programming around the premise that the other side is not merely mistaken but dangerous. The result is an information environment in which the calm, unglamorous work of governing — the sewer contract, the crosswalk repair, the rezoning dispute — competes for attention against a national content industry whose business model depends on making everything feel like an emergency. Predictably, the emergency tends to win.
What was once called dog-whistling — the practice of signaling hostility to one's base while maintaining a public veneer of civility — has given way to something more direct: the open gaslight, the flat denial of documented fact, the systematic misrepresentation of what an opponent has said or done. Candidates who are perfectly civil in person have discovered, or been advised, that a different persona performs better online. The gap between the two is now wide enough to constitute a kind of political duplicity that voters have largely normalized because they encounter it everywhere.
The phenomenon political scientists call negative partisanship has replaced the older habit of voting for something with the newer habit of voting, more urgently, against. When the opposition is framed not as a rival but as an existential threat, anger stops being a reaction and becomes a posture — the default setting for political engagement at every level, from the Senate floor to the county council race. What makes this dynamic so difficult to interrupt is that it is self-reinforcing at every scale: the national rhetoric licenses the local, and the local, in turn, confirms the national.
Underneath all of it, survey after survey finds what researchers have taken to calling the "exhausted majority" — the broad and largely silent portion of the electorate that is not animated by fury, that would prefer its institutions to function, and that has begun to wonder, with some reason, whether the loudest voices in the room have simply crowded out everyone else. In Anderson County, as elsewhere, those voters will be the ones who decide. The question, with three weeks to go, is whether they can hear anything over the noise.
