Katie Arrington can still see the headlights coming at her. She can still recall the face of the woman driving the wrong way that night in June, a split second before impact. Just 10 days earlier, she had won a stunning primary victory over Rep. Mark Sanford, who had never lost an election and had been one of the few Republican critics of President Trump. She did it by embracing Trump’s agenda and by old-fashioned hard work. But that night, on a quiet stretch of highway between Charleston and Hilton Head Island, she found herself in a fight for her life.
The high-speed, head-on crash killed the driver of the other car, whom police later determined was legally intoxicated. It left Arrington and her friend who was driving with serious injuries. Doctors later said that had the ambulance arrived at the Charleston hospital just minutes later, Arrington would have bled to death. As it was, she spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from abdominal bleeding, fractures in a vertebra and in her feet, two broken ribs, a damaged artery in her leg, and internal injuries that required several surgeries. Friends say she recovered with the characteristic toughness and determination that she has exhibited all her life—and that is now on display on the campaign trail in her effort to become the first Republican woman elected to Congress from South Carolina.
Her rehabilitation was just one more struggle for Arrington to overcome, and she says the tragedy stoked within her a renewed sense of urgency: “Time is precious. Every life matters. Every life has a finite amount of time on this planet to get something done. God gave me a rally call—‘Get ’er done’—and that’s my intent.”
If Republicans have any chance to hang on to the House in November’s elections, they will need a strong showing from female candidates like Arrington who are defending Republican seats. This year, a record 235 women won House primaries, according to Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics. Although about three-quarters of those are Democrats, Republicans are fielding a number of compelling female House candidates in races where there are no incumbents, including Maria Elvira Salazar, a former Telemundo host running against Donna Shalala in Miami; Young Kim, a Korean-American former state assemblywoman running for Ed Royce’s seat outside of Los Angeles; and Arrington, a first-term state legislator running in South Carolina’s coastal 1st Congressional District.
If you’re guessing that Arrington, 47, is some soft-spoken, demure Southern belle accustomed to high-society Charleston, you couldn’t be more wrong. She grew up in Virginia and upstate New York. Her mother expected her to make a difference in the world, and at an early age she drew encouragement from an unlikely source when President Jimmy Carter replied to a letter she had written and told her if she saw something wrong, to stand up and fix it. She dropped out of college at age 20, married an army man, and had a son who was born with a serious cranial birth defect that required costly medical treatment. She started a home daycare at an army base and took a night-shift job at Denny’s to pay the bills. With debts mounting, the family also relied on food stamps. Arrington and her husband eventually divorced. She moved to the Charleston area, remarried, and began working for defense contractors. She’s endured some bumpy times but has also shown resilience and perseverance.
“I do not have a college degree. I have been on public assistance,” she explains in an interview. “If you looked at everything, [you’d say], ‘She should be a Democrat.’ And I’m an ultraconservative Republican. I think every person out there today that’s waiting in line to pay for their food with an EBT card, they yearn for the day they don’t have to have that. We’ve just got to make sure we give them equal opportunity.”
In the primary, she beat Sanford in part by hewing closely to Trump. In a debate, she said, “Our job is to support our president.” She told a newspaper reporter: “I guess I’m just like Trump. I’m very upfront, honest, and I learn.” Trump rewarded her loyalty with an election-day endorsement on Twitter, while taking a dig at Sanford’s infamous extramarital affair with an Argentine soulmate when he was governor: “Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA. . . . He is MIA and nothing but trouble. He is better off in Argentina. I fully endorse Katie Arrington.”
In the general election, Arrington’s opponent, construction lawyer Joe Cunningham, is laboring to implement one of the few possible strategies for Democratic victory in a district Trump carried by 12 points and Sanford won by 22 in 2016. He’s attempting to play the role of the earnest and moderate uniter willing to reach across the aisle to devise common-sense solutions, regardless of party—while linking Arrington to Trump’s incivility and to his most controversial policies. In coastal South Carolina, Trump’s support of offshore oil drilling is unpopular. Arrington has said she supports Trump’s energy policy but firmly opposes any plans to drill off the South Carolina coast. Some small-town Republican leaders have crossed over to endorse Cunningham because of the issue. He has even cut a commercial of himself swimming in the ocean while warning of the dangers of oil leaks to the state’s beaches. He’s also said he won’t support Nancy Pelosi for speaker of the House.
Cunningham, 36, is trying to sink Arrington by highlighting some of her older supportive statements about Trump as well as fresher statements he calls divisive, such as her comments to a radio show this month that the election is a “fight of good and evil.” The local media are abetting his framing of the race. This month, a male columnist for the local Charleston Post and Courier, a voice of genteel conventional wisdom, said he found Arrington “shrill” and suggested she’d do better to be less combative and “just keep her mouth shut.” That view might not be seen as quite so overtly sexist here as it would be elsewhere in the country, but keeping quiet because powerful men think she should isn’t Arrington’s style.
In a mid-October lunch meeting of the East Cooper Republican Club, held in a hotel ballroom in the Charleston suburb of Mount Pleasant, Arrington delivers a pointed 10-minute stump speech exhorting Republicans to vote. Wandering between tables, she eschews the microphone—“I’m pretty loud. Y’all know that, right?” At 4’11” she’s barely taller than some of the seated guests who are feasting on chicken fajitas and rice. “There will be no blue wave in this town! Are we clear?” she says. She runs through a litany of issues like protecting freedom, lowering taxes, creating jobs, protecting gun rights, and building a wall, and warns of the stakes in this election: “If we don’t keep my seat red, you will get Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House and Maxine [Waters] running finance.” The crowd boos.
She says she’s been a victim of lies and smears, such as a “whisper campaign” from political opponents who questioned if she was telling the truth when she identified herself as a breast cancer survivor in a political ad this fall. “The reporter from the Post and Courier came out in the parking lot and said, ‘So you haven’t brought up breast cancer before. Did you have it?’ I said, ‘Would you like to go in the restroom and look at the scar?’ I’m done playing these games.”
In an interview later, she says she recognizes Washington is a rough-and-tumble place. Is she tough enough to handle it?
“Oh, please. Please. If I can take on a car going head-on, beat breast cancer and not even blink an eye, take care of a wounded warrior, help a mother and grandmother pass out of this lifetime,” she says, her voice trailing off. “Congress is hard. But I’m harder. I’m tougher. I have literally been preparing for this my entire life.”
