U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman speaks during a news conference on closed primaries at the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (Photo by Adrian Ashford/SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — A GOP congressman in a five-way race for governor is demanding that legislators close South Carolina’s primaries so that only registered Republicans can decide the party’s winner.
A hearing on two House proposals on primary voting is re-scheduled for next week, after initially being set for Thursday.
U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman, who had arranged a news conference in the Statehouse for immediately after the meeting that didn’t happen, blasted the Legislature’s Republican leaders as not making the issue a priority and promised that if he’s elected governor, he would “use the bully pulpit to get this done.”
Gov. Henry McMaster, who helped build the GOP into South Carolina’s dominant party, made clear he thinks that’s a bad idea. If either bill makes it to his desk, he’d likely veto it, he told reporters a day earlier.
“The question is, does it make it easier for people to vote, does it cause people to want to vote, or does it put obstacles?” the former state GOP chairman said Wednesday at the Governor’s Economic Summit in Columbia. “If these bills, and I believe they do, impose obstacles to the people voting easily and freely, then I would veto them.”
That’s a strong warning from a governor who normally declines to weigh in publicly on a Republican-sponsored bill while it’s in the legislative process. His usual response over the last decade has been that he’ll wait until the final version reaches his desk to review it.
But on Wednesday, he went on for nearly 4 minutes on why a party that grew its base through open primaries shouldn’t prevent people from voting.
Noting that many South Carolina voters consider themselves independent, he asked, “What are they going to do?”
Republicans have tried repeatedly over the last quarter century — as their majorities in both Statehouse chambers increased — to bar anyone not registered as a member of a political party from voting in that party’s primaries. But proposals to do so have never gotten traction.
McMaster’s veto threat suggests the idea won’t succeed this year either.
The argument has long been that Democrats are meddling in Republican contests.
“We can’t have those in the opposite party stopping people from being elected,” Norman, the 5th District congressman since 2017, told reporters in the Statehouse lobby.
But McMaster said allegations that Democrats are deciding the Republican nominees are “not well founded.”
“People suggest that that’s going to happen in just about every election, and so far, since I’ve been involved in it … it never happened,” said McMaster, who was state GOP chairman for a decade before voters twice elected him attorney general, then lieutenant governor and, in 2018 and 2022, governor.
“There may be a few pranksters that go out and do that, but we never have seen any significant amount of votes happening that way,” he said.
In South Carolina, registered voters can vote in either party’s primary. They just can’t vote in both. And they can’t cross parties for primary runoffs. In other words, someone can’t vote in a Democratic Party primary, then vote in the Republican runoff two weeks later. They must stick with a single party for that election cycle.
The bill being pushed by Norman and the hardline House Freedom Caucus he helped launch would require South Carolina voters to officially declare they’re a Republican or Democrat in order to vote in the party’s primaries. Voters who consider themselves independents could not cast a ballot unless a party chooses to allow their participation and tells the state Election Commission that in writing at least 60 days before a primary.
But Norman, a former state House member, clearly doesn’t think the state’s ruling party should do that.
The Rock Hill Republican called it “an 80% issue among Republican voters.”
That refers to results to a question the state Republican Party has repeatedly put on its primary ballot. Both parties can choose to put so-called advisory questions on their ballots, which they use to both attract voters to the polls and make the case to legislators that voters want something. But the results don’t actually carry any legal weight. In South Carolina, voters can’t change state law through a referendum.
As for the repeated closed primary question on the GOP ballot, voters may not realize what it’s really asking. In February 2024, the last time it was on the ballot, voters were asked whether state law should “give people the right to register to vote with the political party of their choice.”
More than 73% of voters said “yes” to the right to get a choice. How many knew they were choosing to close voting options is unknown.
In South Carolina, the primaries are usually the contests that matter. In most races, the winner of the primary wins the seat.
In 2024, the general election was a given for more than half of the Statehouse’s 170 seats; 80 incumbents, plus candidates for six open seats, faced no opposition at all in November; six others featured only third-party challengers, according to an analysis by the SC Daily Gazette.
Last month, two of three special elections for Statehouse seats had no Democrat on the ballot. As is often the case, the Republican primaries decided the winner.
Rep. Jordan Pace of Goose Creek, chairman of the Freedom Caucus that publicly feuds with the House’s majority GOP caucus, said the primary won by now-Rep. Dianne Mitchell is an example of Democratic meddling. Mitchell, a former teacher that the Freedom Caucus backed, narrowly won in a primary runoff by 20 votes.
Mitchell told the SC Daily Gazette that a Democratic activist encouraged Democrats to vote for one of her opponents in the four-way primary two weeks earlier, when she came in second. In South Carolina, a runoff is required if no candidate takes at least 50% plus one vote.
“It’s not my fault they can’t find a candidate to run,” she said of Democrats.
A separate bill with more GOP support would prevent crossover voting while allowing people who didn’t choose a party to participate in either party’s primary.
It would guarantee that “registered members of an opposing party can’t vote in our primaries,” said its main sponsor, Rep. Brandon Newton, R-Lancaster, adding “I would personally never support a system that doesn’t allow independents to vote.”
However, under his proposal, voting in a primary would automatically register an unaffiliated voter with that party, though the voter could apply through the state Election Commission to undo that.
The South Carolina Republican Party has repeatedly endorsed Newton’s bill with unanimous support at committee meetings.
An email blast to the party faithful Thursday with the headline “Protect the Integrity of Republican Primaries” included the number for the bill co-signed by 49 House Republicans without mentioning the other one. On Friday, the state GOP went further with a “CALL TO ACTION!” email that denounced the Freedom Caucus bill and provided the contact information for 13 of its sponsors, asking recipients to apply “grassroots pressure” to pass Newton’s bill.
In the past, some Republican candidates have outright courted Democratic voters. A super PAC backing former Gov. Nikki Haley sent out mailers encouraging Democrats to vote for Haley instead of President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential primary, according to copies of the mailers obtained by NBC News.
But Trump still trounced Haley in her home state, winning 59.8% of the vote to her 39.5%.
For their part, state Democratic leaders have said they want Democrats voting in their primaries, not GOP contests.
“The idea that Democrats can strategically swoop in, outsmart thousands of Republican primary voters, and engineer a reasonable GOP nominee is not a strategy; it’s a fantasy,” state Democratic Party Chairwoman Christale Spain wrote in a November opinion piece in The Post and Courier re-posted on the state party’s website.
“If Republicans want to nominate less extreme candidates to be more palatable to most South Carolina voters, that’s their job, not ours,” Spain said.
Only 14 other U.S. states have an open primary system like South Carolina’s. Five states let voters cross party lines but automatically register them with the party whose primary they vote in, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Eight states open party primaries to unaffiliated voters but not members of the opposite party.
Only eight states have totally closed primaries that require voters to be registered with a party to vote in its primary: Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wyoming.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated with the state Republican Party’s follow-up email to the party faithful Friday.
