Commission projects House wins for Republicans Crawford, Lowe

The S. C. Election Commission was projecting Wednesday night that Republican incumbents Kris Crawford and Phillip Lowe are the winners in the S.C. House District 63 and 60 races, respectively.

The commission gave Crawford 10,925 votes to 5,830 for Democratic challenger Barry Wingard.

The House District 60 race was closer. The commission projected Lowe with 8,313 votes to Democratic challenger Zackery Cooper’s 5,906. District 60 also includes a small portion of Sumter County.

“I’m very honored to be returned to office by the citizens of District 63,” Crawford said. “I worked very hard my first term and will continue to work hard in the upcoming term. We have some difficult problems to face in the state and I’m looking forward to getting to the job of working on them for the people come January.”

“I’m disappointed because I felt like I was the better candidate with the better ideas,” Wingard said. “I hope that Rep. Crawford will change some of his ideas about education, but the people spoke and decided he was the person they wanted, so I wish him the best.

“I gave it my best shot. I’ve received lots of phone calls and e-mails from people who are disappointed, along with me, that we didn’t win. It was my first shot at running for office and I learned a lot of things,” he said. “And if I do it again, I might do few things differently. It was a tough district without somebody with an R behind their name to do anything.”

Lowe was at the Florence election headquarters when contacted. He said ballots still were being counted there.

“I’ve had more calls telling me I lost than congratulating me. I’m over here at the public library right now and it looks like I’ve got a 2,400-vote lead,” he said. “We’re having a real slow time of it counting paper ballots, but I don’t really have concern that there will be enough to affect the election.

“Zackery was a perfect gentleman. I think we had a fair and issue driven-race, and I thank him for that.”

Lowe said he also has talked to Bobby Harrell, speaker of the S.C. House.

“I’ll be going up and meeting with him tomorrow and we’ll probably have some general discussions about the state elections,” he said. “We may even discuss the North Carolina-style of early voting because of all the problems we’ve had with such a large turnout.”

But Cooper wasn’t ready to concede about 9 p.m. He also was at the former Florence County Library on South Irby Street, which serves as election central for the county.

“We’re still down here counting ballots,” he said. “I don’t know, the machine is malfunctioning so that we can only count two or three ballots at a time and we haven’t come up with a total. It’s not over until it’s over.”