Joe Wilson

COLUMBIA — South Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District seat currently held by longtime U.S. Representative Joe Wilson is up for grabs this year, with six candidates hoping to unseat him.

The June 9 primaries will include four Democrat candidates and three Republicans, including Wilson, who's held the seat serving an area that spans from the Columbia area to Aiken and the Georgia border since 2001. Stated priorities among the candidates are improving infrastructure, expanding benefits for veterans and ensuring the country’s borders are secured.

Here are the candidates competing for a vote in the June 9 Primary:

Republicans

Joe Wilson (Incumbent)

Rep. Wilson, a real estate attorney originally from Charleston, is looking to keep the seat he’s held in Congress for the last 25 years. He was elected to the state Senate in 1984, and in 2001, when his predecessor Floyd Spence died, Wilson was first voted into Congress during a special election.

“I’m soon completing 25 years in the U.S. Congress, and just very, very grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to serve,” said Wilson, a Lexington County resident.

Currently, Wilson is part of several committees. He’s a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the most senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and serves on others devoted to health, employment and labor, and higher education. He chairs the U.S. Helsinki Commission, which is also known as the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Wilson has sponsored a number of policies related to international affairs, armed forces and national security and foreign trade and international finance, among areas.

He pointed to his 31 years as a National Guard veteran, and the military experiences of his four sons — who have served in places including Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt — as helping to guide goals for his future work, if re-elected to Congress.

“I want to work for peace through strength, and I believe that President Donald Trump is the individual who can make a difference to rebuild our military and to work with our allies and to achieve peace through strength,” Wilson said in a phone call.

Hamp Redmond

Hamp Redmond of Lexington calls himself a “meat-eating, church-going, gun-toting Christian.” His background is in construction, and he worked his way up from a carpenter to a contractor in his Swansea-based family business.

“I’m not a politician, so I’m not going to act like a politician when I get to Washington,” Redmond said.

He’s running to unseat Wilson, he said, because the incumbent sends too much money to other countries and doesn’t take care of his constituents and the U.S. overall. Redmond said he’s particularly concerned that there are veterans here without food and shelter.

“I actually want to start some kind of program to build houses for veterans who don’t have a place to live, sort of like Jimmy Carter did,” Redmond said.

Other priorities for Redmond include providing more resources for elderly people, closing the borders, creating jobs and reducing medication costs.

“Prices are too high, period, across the board for all Americans,” Redmond said. “The 50-and-under people are hurting, as well as the old folks.”

He said the country needs a representative in Washington who will finish Trump’s goals for “draining the swamp” and jumpstarting the economy.

Sam Gibbons

Sam Gibbons says it is time to reclaim Congress from monied interests and “return it to the people,” according to his campaign website.

The Citadel graduate and West Columbia resident has focused his campaign on a few key issues: affordability, rule of law, war powers, public service and the Epstein files.

If elected, he said he will work to build the country’s middle class by pursing answers and solutions for the cost of healthcare, rising energy prices and unattainable home ownership.

Other priorities noted on his campaign website include demanding accountability for the conflict with Iran, speaking directly with frontline workers to understand how bureaucracy affects their jobs and working to restore law and order using tools already available to Congress, like the impeachment of civil officers.

Gibbons is a Marine veteran, a former social studies teacher at Dreher High School in Columbia and a current instructor in the Future Soldier Preparatory Course program, where he helps students become eligible for enlistment.

Democrats

Zyon Khalifa

Zyon Khalifa said understanding and connecting with different life situations makes him the best candidate to represent the district.

Khalifa grew up in Aiken and spent part of his youth in foster care and a group home. Sports were a consistent part of his life in grade school, and he went on to run track at the University of South Carolina. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force during the COVID-19 pandemic and graduated from USC in 2023. He is now a lawyer and has worked with organizations including the Alliance for Children’s Rights and ACLU, which he credits for teaching him how to fight for certain problems.

“I grew up where sometimes lights might be shut off. I grew up where we’re cooking Roger Woods on the stove because we’re hungry and that’s all we have,” Khalifa said. “So I understand the actual struggles of everyday families.”

He said he became formally educated to be able to understand a different side of working families.

Khalifa said he believes there are benefits to being a younger public servant, including new ideas, energy and practicality.

His top priorities as a candidate are infrastructure, affordability and opportunity. Specifically, he said he wants to see affordable health care, social security and benefits for veterans.

Infrastructure needs he’s targetingincludes broadband access. And when he thinks about opportunity, Khalifa considers the people who resorted to crime.

“I’ve seen the people who are going to jail, and I’ve seen the people who graduate and struggle and they resort to crime,” Khalifa said. “So my true ideas are that if we want to stop crime, if we want to help the people, if we want to see less government spending over time, the best way to do that is give people opportunities.

Roger Pruitt

Roger Pruitt’s career as a bankruptcy attorney helped influence him to run for Congress. The Irmo resident and Air Force veteran said he sees how the economy is holding people down while the current administration is taking away SNAP, Medicaid and education benefits. He wants to help.

About 57 percent of the people he deals with as an attorney and instructor at S.C. State University have some form of student loan, and about 63 percent have medical debt that’s affecting them.

One of his goals in Congress would be to bring physicians and other medical personnel into the state to serve in are rural areas that are considered health care deserts.

“You can do that in Congress. You can give benefits, education benefits for instance,” Pruitt said.

His idea is that if someone uses student loans to attend medical school, and then goes on to work in an “underappreciated area” such as Barnwell for a period of time, they may be able to get the loans forgiven.

Pruitt, a self-described “common sense” Democrat” and a disabled veteran, said he also wants to lean into helping bring more doctors and medical profession to the VA hospital system.

Other priorities include expanding broadband and revisiting the “excessive” military budget.

Ultimately, Pruitt said he wants to help people through those social benefits that they might potentially lose if a Democrat doesn’t win the seat.

“I want to bring in responsibility, and I want to bring in someone who will work for people, not take advantage of people,” Pruitt said.

David Robinson II

David Robin II says he is running to unite communities, strengthen the economy, modernize infrastructure and defend the democracy and constitution he swore to protect, according to his campaign website.

The disabled U.S. Army combat veteran lives in Columbia and has dedicated himself searching for his missing son and helping other families who’re facing similar situations. In 2021, Robinson’s 24-year-old son Daniel Robinson, a geologist, went missing from a job site in Arizona. Robinson relocated there to search for his son and later established the Daniel Robinson Foundation.

He has written state and federal legislation to give families and law enforcement the tools for finding missing loved ones, his website said. But in addition to that, Robinson said he will use federal investments to expand job training, support veterans, strengthen small businesses and grow clean energy and manufacturing jobs, if elected.

Daniel J. Shrief

Daniel J. Shrief is a U.S. Army veteran who served in a demilitarized zone in Korea for one year. He is also the author of the book “The Modern Writings of Daniel. J. Shrief,” a collection of poems and stories “featuring historical and Biblical connotations.”

Shrief did not respond to an interview request from The Post and Courier and does not have an accessible campaign website, so details about his priorities are limited.

He ran for the seat in the last election, and at that time, international affairs were among his top priorities. Had he been elected, his stated goal was to “get to” Russia and Pyongyang and talk to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.