A New SC Dream Team: The Political Machine the Establishment Never Saw Coming
- Javar Juarez
- 3 hours ago
- 14 min read
A CUBN ELECTION FEATURE
By Javar Juarez | Columbia Urban Broadcast Network (CUBN) | June 13, 2026
Columbia, S.C. — There are moments in history that arrive without announcement — moments when the weight of everything that has been denied, delayed, and dismantled finally reaches a tipping point, and the people, in their quiet and determined fury, decide that enough is enough.
Tuesday, June 9, 2026, was one of those moments.
On that night, in a primary election that the national press largely ignored and the Democratic establishment didn't fund, a slate of Black constitutional officer candidates swept the Democratic nominations for the five highest offices on the South Carolina ballot.
Not just won — swept.
Not with the blessing of the party machine.
Not with Jim Clyburn on the phone calling in favors.
Not with Carol Fowler's Rolodex or Jaime Harrison's email list.
They won with something the establishment has never been able to purchase, manufacture, or control: the trust of the people.
This is the story of that slate. This is the story of what happened in South Carolina on June 9th, 2026. And this is the story of why it matters far beyond the borders of this state.
What History Demands We Remember
To understand what occurred on Tuesday night, you must first understand what this state has been.
South Carolina is not simply a Southern state with a complicated racial history. It is the ground zero of American racial contradiction — the state that gave the nation the firing on Fort Sumter and also gave the nation Robert Brown Elliott, the brilliant Black congressman who delivered one of the most devastating speeches in the history of American legislative debate, dismantling the arguments of white supremacist lawmakers on the floor of the United States House of Representatives in 1874.
It gave the nation Joseph Rainey, the first Black man to serve in the United States House of Representatives, who sat in the very seat that had been occupied by the man who co-authored the Confederate Constitution.
That era of Black political power — Reconstruction — was not an accident. It was a movement. It was organized. It was principled. And it was ultimately destroyed, not by the will of the people, but by the violence and betrayal of those who feared what a truly representative democracy would mean for their grip on power.
What you witnessed Tuesday night was the first stirring of something that has been dormant in this state for 150 years.
For the first time since Reconstruction, a Black man has secured the Democratic nomination for Governor of South Carolina.
His name is Dr. Jermaine Johnson.
And he did not come alone.
The Slate That the Establishment Tried to Stop
Friday morning, June 12, 2026, the South Carolina State Election Commission formally certified the results of the Democratic Primary at 1122 Lady Street in Columbia. The candidates stood together — five of them — to mark not just a procedural milestone, but a declaration.
Dr. Jermaine Johnson — Democratic nominee for Governor of South Carolina. Jason Belton — Democratic nominee for Secretary of State. Sylvia Wright — Democratic nominee for State Superintendent of Education. Vincent Coe — Democratic nominee for State Treasurer. Tiffany Boozer — Democratic nominee for Comptroller General.
Each of them outspent. Each of them was systematically underserved by the party infrastructure that should have been their foundation. Each of them was victorious.
Jason Belton raised six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars — statewide. He won.
"The people spoke louder than money. The people spoke louder than special interest groups, and the grassroots showed the status quo that the people are ready for real candidates that can move the missing voters out of this state."
The governor's race saw Johnson's opponents each spend upwards of three million dollars. Johnson's campaign ran on a fraction of that. He received 59.7 percent of the vote. No runoff. Not a plurality — a mandate.
Let those numbers speak. Because they say something that no consultant's memo has ever said. They say that when you talk to people where they are, when you show up in the communities where candidates have never been seen before, when your message is not designed for a donor dinner but for the woman choosing between the light bill and groceries — people respond.
They come to the polls. They carry their neighbors with them.
"What we saw in this primary election is that people just needed something to believe in. Make no mistake about it — hope is on the ballot this November. Change is on the ballot. Better education is on the ballot. A new SC is on the ballot."
This is what people's power looks like when it is applied with discipline and clarity of purpose.
The Machine That Tried to Stop It
We must be honest about what happened in the months leading up to Tuesday's primary.
In March of 2026, the people who have controlled the South Carolina Democratic Party for thirty years — not through winning, but through access, through donor relationships, through the phone calls that happen in rooms most voters will never enter — had a plan.
Their plan was to push Dr. Johnson out of the race and replace him with Billy Webster — Webster founded Advance America, one of the nation’s largest payday lending companies. Consumer advocates and anti-poverty organizations have long criticized the industry for trapping borrowers in cycles of debt, while supporters argue it provides access to short-term credit. For many in communities affected by payday lending, Webster came to symbolize an industry they believe profited from financial desperation.
They had the money. They had the endorsements. They had the editorial boards, the donor phone trees, and the institutional machinery that thirty years of transactional politics had built.
What they did not have was the people.
And the people, it turns out, had been paying attention.
The redistricting fight over South Carolina's Sixth Congressional District — the fight to silence Black voters by dismantling the majority-minority seat that took decades of legal struggle and political sacrifice to build — that fight did something the establishment didn't anticipate.
It woke people up. It brought activists off the sidelines.
It reminded an entire generation of voters exactly what the stakes are when power decides it no longer needs accountability.
Luke Rankin, the freshman House member from District 14 who introduced the redistricting bill, did not survive the primary. He lost his re-election bid to Rick Shealy.
The people sent a message, and they sent it with their votes.
The Voices From the Stage
Most South Carolinians could not tell you what a Comptroller General does. They could not explain the difference between that office and the State Treasurer.
They could not tell you how the Superintendent of Education shapes what their child is taught, what their child's school is funded to provide, or why the person sitting in that seat matters more to their family's daily life than almost any other elected official in this state. That is not their failure. That is the failure of a political culture that has kept people deliberately uninformed — because an uninformed electorate is easier to manage.
The Comptroller General is the state's chief fiscal officer — the person responsible for maintaining the financial integrity of every dollar that flows through South Carolina's government. The office Tiffany Boozer is now running to lead was at the center of one of the most damaging financial scandals in South Carolina's recent history. A $3.5 billion accounting restatement error. A resignation under legislative scrutiny. Billions of dollars mismanaged, and the people in charge looking for someone else to blame.
Boozer is a Certified Public Accountant who has spent her career inside the very office she is now seeking to lead. She knows the systems. She knows where the failures live.
And she made clear on Friday that the people standing behind her are not placeholders — they are practitioners:
"Every person that you have elected — every person up here — is well qualified to do the job. And in my case as Comptroller General, that is not the case on the other side."
She then addressed the narrative she knew was coming — the one her opponents are already preparing to use — and she refused to let it land as a weapon:
"You're going to hear the narrative over and over again reminding you that we are Black. But I want you to know — that's not a weakness. That is our superpower. Because history has taught us the essence of servanthood. Something that South Carolina's leaders have forgotten." "We are not just representatives for Black voters of South Carolina. We are there to represent all of South Carolina. And your vote shows that that's exactly where we are."
She is not running for a symbolic seat. She is running to restore accountability to an office that has too often lacked it.
EDUCATION
The State Superintendent of Education sets the vision, the policy, and the priorities for every public school in South Carolina.
Ellen Weaver — the current superintendent, MAGA-aligned, backed by the same political apparatus that has governed this state into the bottom of every national education ranking — has had four years. Four years to move the needle on a crisis that everyone in this state can feel but that most voters cannot fully name.
South Carolina's education system has consistently ranked in the bottom ten nationally for the past decade — 43rd in the nation as recently as 2023. Meanwhile, Weaver's administration has championed a voucher program already ruled unconstitutional in 2024 under Article 11, Section 4 of the state constitution — redirecting public dollars away from the public schools that serve the overwhelming majority of South Carolina's children.
Sylvia Wright has spent two years traveling this state. Not for photo opportunities. For conversations — in the classrooms, in the communities, in the places where parents know something is wrong but cannot get anyone in authority to pick up the phone.
She did not mince words: "I want to highlight her record. The record of poor governance, the mismanagement of funding, the wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars — all of the things that have caused public education to continue to remain at the bottom."
And on the path forward, she was equally clear: "When I say fully fund public education, I'm not talking about just throwing money at it. I'm talking about having conversations with the people who are doing the work, finding out what the needs are, providing those supports — and then checking on it. Accountability and oversight are missing. That is what I plan to provide."
Wright is not running against an abstraction. She is running against a four-year record. And the voters gave her the mandate to make that case in November.
TREASURER
The State Treasurer manages South Carolina's public funds — billions of dollars in investments, debt management, and financial oversight that directly affect whether this state's money is working for its people or being squandered by the people entrusted to protect it.
The office Vincent Coe is seeking has been under active scrutiny. A nearly year-long investigation by South Carolina's inspector general found mismanagement in the office of the state's top banker — loan negotiations that exposed the Election Commission to a 213.84% compounding late fee, created what the inspector general called "an endless debt cycle," and ultimately cost taxpayers nearly $140,000 in avoidable interest. The current treasurer denied fault. The inspector general's report told a different story.
Coe did not arrive at this race with talking points. He arrived with a question — the only one that matters: "Ask yourselves a simple question: Am I better off today than I was four years ago? Eight years ago? If the answer is no — you have a whole slate of folks up here ready to make that change."
He then turned toward the people the party has most consistently left behind:
"I'm just encouraging all of the young folks to make sure that you are asking us those tough questions and help us get to where we need to go." "We need your fresh ideas. We need all of that to help us get to the next level. And your voices matter and we're listening and we're tuned in."
In a state sitting on billions of dollars while working-class families choose between medicine and rent — that is not a small thing to say. It is a promise. And the people who showed up on June 9th are going to hold it.
The Man Who Came With a Movement
Dr. Johnson's remarks were not the words of a man who stumbled into a nomination.
They were the words of a man who has been in rooms that most politicians never enter — who drove his own car through districts his opponents spent money to advertise in but never visited, who once put the CEO of a hospital system in his car and drove him through lower Richland County so the executive could see with his own eyes why 28 people had died not from illness, but from the distance between where something happened and the nearest hospital.
That emergency medical center is being built now. Because Dr. Johnson does not take no for an answer.
He spoke about mental health access — something every South Carolinian he surveyed said they wanted more of. He spoke about infrastructure — roads and bridges that rank among the worst in the entire country. He spoke about the $1.8 billion in state funds lost under Republican stewardship. He spoke about seventeen counties in South Carolina with no OB-GYN — a crisis made actively worse by a six-week abortion ban that has gutted rural obstetric care and pushed maternal health into collapse.
And he issued a challenge to the Republican supermajority that has controlled every lever of state government for the first time in 150 years:
“If you want to pass a law today, you could. You have the House. The Senate. The Governor's Mansion. The Treasurer. The Comptroller General. Education. Agriculture. Nearly every congressional seat. You have all the power anyone could wish for. So what is your excuse? Why are we 40th in education? Why is our homicide rate higher than California's? Why are our roads and bridges the worst in the country? Why do we have 17 counties without an OB-GYN?”
The answer, he said, is status quo. And all the New SC has to do is tell the truth.
On flipping Republican voters, he was equally direct: he described a former Republican who stopped him in his own driveway that morning, telling him that he had come back to the Democratic Party because Johnson had the courage to stand up and do what was right for people. He described a phone full of messages from Republican voters who crossed over just to cast a ballot for him.
This is not a fluke. This is coalition-building. Person by person. Community by community. Driveway by driveway.
What the Establishment Must Now Decide
The Democratic establishment has a choice to make, and they should make it with full clarity about what is at stake.
This slate — organized under the strategic vision of Brandon Upson — has done what thirty years of establishment management has failed to do. Dr. Johnson said it himself:
"This movement transcends all political ideologies. If you're tired of what you've seen for the past 30 years of the supermajority in the House, the supermajority in the Senate, the same type of leaders in the governor's mansion — I invite you to join the New SC. Because the New SC is going to represent all people. Of all nationalities. Of all sexualities, embraces, and creeds. This is a movement for all people."
He was not speaking theoretically. Republican voters crossed party lines to cast a ballot for him in the Democratic primary. Independents who had walked away from the process entirely came back to the table. Communities that had never seen a statewide candidate knock on their door opened it anyway — because someone finally showed up.
The establishment now has two options.
The first: fall in line behind this slate the way this slate's voters fell in line behind the Democratic Party — with energy, with resources, with institutional support, and with the humility to recognize that the people have issued a verdict.
The second is the option they have always chosen. Retreat to the donor lists. The consultant fees. The strategic ambiguity. The performance of support without the substance of it. Do what they have always done best.
Raise money to lose.
There is still no hate crimes bill in South Carolina. There is still a supermajority that has governed without accountability for a generation. There are still seventeen counties without an OB-GYN. There are still roads and bridges that shame this state. There are still 500,000 South Carolinians who would have healthcare access today if Medicaid were expanded.
The people have spoken.
The establishment has not yet answered.
Every party leader, every major donor, every so-called power broker who watched Tuesday night from a distance now has to decide: are you going to get behind this movement? Or are you going to make the people carry you again?
Epilogue
I covered this primary. I was in those rooms. I watched what happened when Dr. Johnson walked into communities where no candidate had ever shown up before. I watched the faces of people who had been told for decades that their vote didn't matter — and then watched those same people stand in line and cast it anyway.
What happened on June 9th, 2026, in South Carolina was not a primary result.
It was a resurrection.
And the people who made it happen were not anointed by the party. They were not selected by a committee. They were not handed a path by the people who control the money. They built something — out of conversation, out of community, out of the kind of faith that has always been the engine of Black political organizing in this country — and they won.
The New SC is not a slogan.
It is a statement of intent.
And if the establishment wants to be part of what comes next, they are going to have to earn that seat at the table.
Because the people of South Carolina are no longer waiting to be invited.
Javar Juarez is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Urban Broadcast Network (CUBN), an independent investigative news outlet based in Columbia, South Carolina, and a member of the South Carolina Press Association. He is also President of the Capital City Chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.