By Mike McCombs
The Island News
In 1976, a 13-year-old Michael B. Moore unveiled a bust of his great-great-grandfather — Beaufort native, Civil War hero and Reconstruction-era Congressman Robert Smalls — and delivered a speech commemorating the dedication of the artwork in the courtyard of Beaufort’s Tabernacle Baptist Church.
Roughly 48 years later, Moore stood in front of that same bust of Smalls on Thursday, March 7, and officially announced his candidacy for the 1st Congressional District seat currently held by Charleston Republican Nancy Mace.
“This place is a special special place,” Moore said.
Moore said he was motivated to serve on that day in 1976, and now he’s “motivated to try and make a difference for those who are here today.”
An experienced businessman, Moore said the economy isn’t working for everyone anymore. He said when he read that during the COVID-19 pandemic that the top 1 percent in the economy created twice as much wealth as the other 99 percent, “that system feels broken.”
“We need to create a system where more people have a better opportunity to take advantage of their skills,” he said.
He chided Republicans looking to cut Social Security and Medicare, saying these aren’t entitlements but instead earned benefits, “systems these hard-working men and women have been paying into since their first job at 15 or 16 years old.”
He criticized America’s health care system as one focused on maximizing profit instead of taking care of people.
And he laments that women have fewer rights over their own bodies than they did over the past 50 years. He supports the Equal Rights Amendment, pay equity and women’s reproductive freedom.
“The idea of abortion is not something that anyone likes,” Moore said, “but women have the right to make those decisions about their own body, not the government coming between them and their doctors.”
He pointed out his great-great-grandfather was responsible for the law that created the first free compulsory statewide public education in United States and said we had to work harder to be sure all children got a fair shake.
After the cameras were off, Moore was asked what the solution was at the Southern border.
“It’s so politicized, it’s hard to understand really, what’s what,” he said. “People tell me, as a percentage of out total population, immigrant population is not now dramatically higher than it has been over the course of our history. But the issue is much more heightened. I believe it’s a problem, but if we start thinking about the problem just at the border, we’ve almost already lost. It’s a hemispheric problem. I think it involves our foreign policy with those countries and trying to find out ways that we can economic opportunity and political and social stability to those countries, where folks aren’t feeling the need to risk their lives to come to the United States.
“It’s a long-term problem. I am also worried that it’s not actually a serious problem with Republicans because they had a chance to enact a law over the last couple of weeks that would have made a big difference but chose politically not to do that. I think one of the things we’re going to talk about is we’re going to hold Nancy (Mace) and folks on the right accountable for that.”
Moore was proud that he gave a speech on steps of Supreme Court back on October 11, 2023 as the high court was about to hear arguments on the gerrymandering of South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District.
He said that 2024 S.C. was a lot different than the S.C. of 150 years ago. It was a different context, he said, but the same same pernicious tool – gerrymandering – was used to steal a district away from Robert Smalls.
In January 2023, a panel of three federal judges ruled that S.C.-01 is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and that South Carolina’s Republican legislature intentionally removed tens of thousands of Black voters during the redistricting process that followed the 2020 census.
In May, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, and the justices heard oral arguments in October, when Moore spoke. Last summer, the Court rejected Republican attempts to gerrymander state congressional maps in Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina.
Democrat Joe Cunningham flipped the district in 2018, and Mace defeated him in 2020 by a margin of less than two percentage points. The court could hand down a decision any time.
No matter what, however, before facing Mace, Moore would have to surpass a Democratic challenger, Charleston attorney Mac Deford, a Coast Guard veteran and graduate of The Citadel.
Mace also faces opposition from her own party in the form of four challengers:
Mount Pleasant Republican Catherine Templeton, former director of the S.C. Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation and the state’s Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) chief, both under Gov. Nikki Haley; Mace’s former chief-of-staff Dan Hanlon, who worked in the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration and was a staff member of former Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.); Austin Anderson, an Uber driver who calls himself a “gay, anti-establishment Republican;” and U.S. Marines veteran Bill Young.
The S.C. Republican and Democratic primaries will be held on Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
