2017 Special Election Lost 51 – 48
2018 General Election Lost 57 – 42
I have suggested three long shots for Congress, truly interesting sounding Democratic candidates in Georgia (Ossoff), Kansas (Thompson), and Montana (Quist). Archie Parnell (www.archieparnell.com) is an even less likely winning candidate for Congress from South Carolina’s Fifth Congressional District.
Archie Parnell is one of three Democratic candidates for this position. I would prefer to wait to say something until after the primary. However, Parnell is the only one of the three with the resources to make this campaign into a contest. (The other two candidates are a student who is a veteran and an activist on behalf of veterans who does have a compelling personal story.) The calendar for demanding, though. If outsiders are going to support Archie Parnell, it should begin now. The primary is May 2. Arunoff, if necessary, is May 16. The general election is June 20.
Archie Parnell has his own resources and is committing them to the campaign. He has some political experience, and a lot of business experience. He was a managing director of Goldman Sachs for over twenty years, working in Hong Kong. He was a partner in the Coudart Brothers Law Firm for the six years before he joined Goldman Sachs. His political experience was four years working on the staff of the Ways and Means Committee after which he went to work for Exxon-Mobil.
Archie Parnell’s area of expertise and his passion are tax issues. He wants a simpler tax system that would be better for business, lower taxes for the middle class (not just, he says, for the wealthy), and he wants Donald Trump to release his tax returns. Beyond that, he doesn’t say a lot more about his political vision except to emphasize his belief in the rule of law — which in times other than the Trump administration — would be unremarkable.
Archie Parnell is a local who has returned to a town near where he grew up. He has degrees from the University of South Carolina, the University of South Carolina Law School, and a Master of Laws in taxation from Georgetown Law School. He has a definitely not slick video of him and his wife talking about his passionate interest in taxation.
Archie Parnell does not have the kind of fascinating story that Ossoff or Thompson or Quist have. His story might be more likely to interest a Republican audience, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the district he wants to represent.
It may be that Archie Parnell has just the right story for the rural congressional district he comes from and has returned to — a district stretching east and north of Columbia, SC, so far north that the part of the district along the northern border is becoming a suburb of Charlotte, NC. Except for Parnell’s Republican original community of York, many of the offices of this 70% white district are held by socially conservative Democrats who vote Republican in national elections.
Would Archie Parnell be able to get enough votes from minority voters? from conservative white voters? from people in the relatively liberal college town of Rock Hill? Could he win an election? It seems improbable — but a successful campaign could promise whites and blacks, the middle class and the poor that he could help shape the tax system in a way that helps them all.
