Spartanburg County party chair challenges GOP Rep. Timmons for Upstate seat

Kathryn Harvey, the Democratic nominee for the 4th Congressional District, speaks at a candidate forum in Boiling Springs, South Carolina on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024. (Abraham Kenmore/SC Daily Gazette)

SPARTANBURG — Kathryn Harvey thought that someone should run against Republican U.S. Rep. William Timmons this year.

From her role as the chair of the Spartanburg County Democratic Party she saw Timmons, who represents the Upstate 4th Congressional District, as unusually vulnerable.

In 2022, an alleged affair and his now-ex-wife's divorce filing became a very public scandal. And in Harvey's view, he was not very present in the community.

So, when Harvey, 42, couldn't get other candidates to run against him, she did.

"I've been laying the groundwork for somebody to run in this seat," Harvey said in a recent interview with the SC Daily Gazette in her Spartanburg campaign headquarters. "And honestly, we just didn't get to the finish line with other folks, and it became very apparent we couldn't let this go unchallenged."

The 4th Congressional District, which is contained in Spartanburg and Greenville counties, is by far the most compact of the state's seven U.S. House districts. It also leans solidly Republican, with the Cook Political report , a nonpartisan political analysis publication, giving the GOP a 12-point advantage.

In 2022, the Democrat opposing Timmons withdrew, and Timmons won re-election without opposition in the general election. Two years before that, his Democratic opponent lost by nearly 25 percentage points.

But Harvey thinks there is an opportunity to close that gap.

Harvey was born in Spartanburg to public school teachers. She works in communications for nonprofits and spent years with the organization behind Sesame Street in New York. Then in 2017, she returned to Spartanburg.

Two and a half years ago, she became the local Democratic party chair.

"It's very hard to shift from the inside out if you're not on the inside, and getting to the inside was assuming leadership of a local party that, candidly, coming out of a pandemic was all but hanging on by a thread," she said.

From that position, she has worked to identify places up and down the ballot where Democrats have a shot, including at ousting Timmons.

In June, Timmons scraped out a primary victory over state House Rep. Adam Morgan , exiting chairman of the chamber's uber-conservative Freedom Caucus, by just 3 percentage points. That's despite having the public backing of former President Donald Trump and Gov. Henry McMaster.

The primary support for Morgan, who ran to Timmons' right, does not dissuade Harvey. Turnout in the primary was under 15% in the district. In Harvey's thinking, that leaves many voters who did not back Morgan but still might not want Timmons to win again.

"I fully respect he got primaried harder to the right, but I don't think that precludes those voters from finding their way to the other side, because he is so unfavorable," Harvey said.

The Timmons campaign said they are running hard, and that Harvey has no chance at victory. The campaign has knocked on thousands of doors and handed out thousands of signs, a spokesperson said.

"Let's face it, Kathryn should have run for office in New York City, where they support liberals and their radical policies, not in the Upstate where my fellow South Carolinians expect conservative representation in Congress," said Luke Byars, a senior advisor to the Timmons campaign, in a written statement.

Timmons also criticized Harvey for continuing to campaign in the wake of Tropical Storm Helene. Harvey told the Gazette she paused the campaign for 10 days.

"Kathryn was taking selfie videos and lighting dumpsters on fire during a burn ban while Rep. Timmons was coordinating with FEMA, the governor, emergency responders, the National Guard," Byars said, in an apparent reference to Harvey's television ad which features a flaming dumpster . A spokesperson for Harvey confirmed the flames in the advertisement were digital.

The Timmons campaign says they will prioritize securing the border, lowering costs and ensuring the state has the resources to rebuild after Tropical Storm Helene.

Harvey's priorities are similar, even if her approach is different, with the economy as her key issue.

Harvey says there are many ways the federal government could support families in the Upstate, including returning to the expanded version of Child Tax Credit from the early years of the pandemic along with funding for affordable housing and education.

This is Harvey's first time running for office, but her communications work has overlapped with policy.

For her work with Sesame Street, she addressed global policy issues facing children, and she has worked with South Carolina nonprofits to advocate in the Statehouse.

Ahead of the 2020 census, she was hired to run communications for an innovation lab with the U.S. Census Bureau. When the pandemic hit, she was hired by local organizations to help coordinate the county census count — an effort that required some of the same creative organizing as running for office, she said.

Harvey says she is campaigning hard, knocking on doors, working to turnout occasional voters and raising money.

On Tuesday, she launched her first major television ad buy. That same day, federal campaign disclosures came out for the third quarter of the year, showing Harvey has raised almost $450,000 so far. Nearly half of that was still available as of the end of September.

Timmons, meanwhile, ended September with just over $60,000 on hand, having raised and spent roughly $90,000 for the campaign since the beginning of July.

Timmons is still far ahead on the total raised at $1.3 million, along with almost another million in loans from Timmons himself. The campaign has spent $2.2 million so far, the vast majority of it in the primary.

And Harvey is working to meet voters on the ground.

On the night of Oct. 10, Harvey followed an interview with the Daily Gazette with a candidate forum at a Boiling Springs fire hall before heading to an event hosted by a local healthy living nonprofit.

The forum opened with a staffer for Timmons introducing himself and offering the roughly 40 attendees assistance with Federal Emergency Management Administration applications.

Harvey highlighted that Timmons was not present himself and criticized him for joining 81 other Republicans in the House to oppose a continuing resolution that kept the federal government running days before Tropical Storm Helene slammed into the Upstate.

"We show up in this community for each other in such an incredible way. We need our elected officials showing up for us too," she said.

State Sen. Josh Kimbrell, a conservative Republican, used some of his time to defend Timmons, who, he said, worked with him to get Duke Energy and the National Guard deployed after the storm.

"I do believe if we're going to have a debate, it's gotta be fair," he said.

The next event was not political — more of a fair held on a bike path. Harvey still found a number of supporters to speak with, many of whom seemed to have met her before her run for office.

Nikole O'Quinn, a homemaker who moved to the district from outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, about four years ago, said she has donated to Harvey and attended a few events.

"Even before this race, she was really engaged in the community," she said.

O'Quinn met Harvey three years ago through mutual friends.

"The women's rights thing is really my focus. I'm supporting her mainly for that," said O'Quinn, 45.

David Traxler, a 60-year-old Navy veteran and longtime sheriff deputy, said he leans Republican. His top issues include securing the border. But he knows Harvey's parents and supports her.

"I've heard her and I'm with her," he said.

Erica Brown has served three terms on the nonpartisan Spartanburg City Council. She met Harvey in 2017 through women's groups, and said Harvey is engaged with the community.

Brown, who also serves as director of a free healthcare clinic, has a string of issues she hopes the federal government will address — access to abortion, addressing income inequality, healthcare issues. And she thinks Harvey can work in a bipartisan way to advance them.

"I think we've gotten so far away from bipartisanship," Brown, 46, said. "We need to get back to that. ... She is actually willing to work across the aisle."

For Harvey, her campaign has already achieved something for these supporters.

"I have spent six-plus months making sure people understood who is representing them," she told the Daily Gazette.

Harvey also thinks this year will show a number of races in the Upstate, including down-ballot races, are more competitive for Democrats than previously thought.

"We already won," she said. "We've just built an opportunity for folks to have choice on the ballot — good choice on the ballot."