South Carolina 2024 Election Results

South Carolina held its general election on November 5, 2024, deciding 170 legislative seats. No chamber changed party control.

Highlights

• South Carolina Republicans took four Democratic Senate seats and reached 34 of 46, a supermajority the state GOP chairman called its first since Reconstruction. The House stayed at 88-36, keeping the supermajority Republicans had won two years earlier. The two-thirds lets Senate Republicans end filibusters and override vetoes without a Democratic vote; the party chairman credited straight-ticket voting and acknowledged that the 2022 map helped in the rural Pee Dee seats.
• All four Senate pickups came at the expense of sitting Democrats, two of them by margins that triggered recounts:
  • Senate District 29: JD Chaplin (R) unseated 22-year Sen. Gerald Malloy (D) of Hartsville; a recount cut the lead from 278 votes to 87 but confirmed the result.
  • Senate District 17: Everett Stubbs (R) beat Sen. Mike Fanning (D) by fewer than 30 votes; Fanning conceded and waived the automatic recount.
  • Senate District 36: Jeff Zell (R) defeated 12-year Sen. Kevin Johnson (D) of Manning.
  • Senate District 39: Tom Fernandez (R) defeated freshman Sen. Vernon Stephens (D) of Bowman.
• Democrats held the two open Senate seats they were defending, with Jeffrey Graham (D) winning Senate District 35 and Rep. Russell Ott (D) moving up to Senate District 26, and Rep. Heather Bauer (D) beat former Rep. Kirkman Finlay (R) by about seven points in a Columbia rematch for House District 75, a rare Democratic bright spot. In the House, Harriet Holman (R), who becomes the state's first Black female Republican legislator, defeated 20-year incumbent Rep. Joseph Jefferson, Jr. (D) in Berkeley County's House District 102, and Democrats offset it when Rep. Jermaine Johnson (D) won the newly drawn House District 52 unopposed, which the SC Daily Gazette called only a technical pickup.
• The one statewide question, a constitutional amendment restating that only citizens may vote, passed with about 86 percent.
• Across the 170 legislative races, 7 seats changed party labels (five Republican pickups, four in the Senate and one in the House, and a Senate seat whose previous holder had already left the Democratic caucus), 5 incumbents were defeated, and 90 seats drew a single candidate, more than half the General Assembly.

Legislature

• House (124 seats): 36 D, 88 R before the election, 36 D, 88 R after; control stayed with Republicans.
• Senate (46 seats): 16 D, 30 R before the election, 12 D, 34 R after; control stayed with Republicans.

Legislative races

Ballot measures