One significant handicap South Carolina Democrats face at election time is their lack of experience as candidates.
Our typical candidate for local or state office is young and enthusiastic, but he or she has never run before, has a very small team of campaign workers, and little money.
Then, after an exhausting (often unsuccessful) campaign, our candidate has had enough and doesn’t run again. All that experience and team-building is lost, and we start the cycle over again with a new set of raw candidates.
That will assuredly not be the case in the race to unseat Republican incumbent Greg Ford in House District 98. Democrat Sonja Ogletree Satani (Dr. SOS) is making her third run at this seat, and the third time will surely be a charm.
She learned the ropes running against incumbent Chris Murphy in 2024. After Murphy resigned the seat for health reasons, she lost a special election by a mere 21 votes to Ford. Now she will oppose Ford again, but this time with significant advantages that Democrats do not usually have.
She knows how to run a campaign. She has built a large coalition of supporters ready to make phone calls, canvass, contribute, and take on all the chores necessary to win. She has name recognition in the district. The State Party is actively behind her and committed to flipping this seat.
The electorate in HD 98 now knows this seat is winnable, given that only 21 more voters would have sent Dr. SOS to Columbia. Given how motivated Democrats now are because of the total chaos Republicans have brought to governance (from Donald Trump on down), turnout in November should be very high.
In addition, Dr. SOS has detected a change in the mood of District 98 voters. She says they are more wiling to speak out and question Republican policies, given the alarming conditions in the country. They are motivated, having come within 21 votes of victory. They have seen what happens when they sit on the sidelines and watch as school boards are taken over by the likes of Moms for Liberty, or the State Legislature is populated with Republicans whose primary aim is to make life miserable for women and all other Americans who aren’t white Christian men.
In short, Dr. SOS thinks they understand they must be proactive, not simply reactive to Republican outrages.
Dr. SOS offers voters the wide range of experiences and skills she brought to the first two races. She is an Air Force vet. She runs her own consulting business focusing on empowering women in business. She is an expert in organizational development. She is a college professor (at ECPI University), and she holds graduate degrees in Management and Organizational Leadership, Human Resources Management, and Health Care Management.
She also serves as a Board Member and Chair of the Mobilization Committee for the American Red Cross in the Lowcountry. In this crucial role she oversees efforts to activate resources and community support for Red Cross missions. She has been involved as a Red Cross volunteer since her teenage years in Dayton, Ohio.
If she were in Columbia now, she would oppose Republican attempts to make the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol controlled substances as they continue to regulate women’s health care choices. She would oppose the goal of eliminating the state income tax, questioning where the funds will come from to improve South Carolina’s woeful infrastructure and struggling public schools.
Concerning the public schools, she would work to improve conditions for teachers. But she would also encourage teachers to hold their students to much higher standards than is now often the case. She recalls a conversation she had with a young math student who hadn’t learned a particular math skill “because,” she was told, “the teacher didn’t know that skill either and so could not teach it.” That has to change, she says.
In another effort to improve public education, she will be supporting Sylvia Wright in her race against Ellen Weaver for State Superintendent of Education.
Other key issues for Dr. SOS are fostering economic growth, building the state’s infrastructure, adopting sensible gun safety regulations so as to reduce gun violence, and enhancing the economic status of middle class workers.
She intends to make sure that voters know where their polling place will be in November. She says that some voters in the special election were not able to find the location of their polling place, or found it dark and closed once they arrived. In an election with a 21-vote margin, that is inexcusable, and she vows it won’t happen again. She will fight against this sort of hidden voter suppression.
It takes a person of significant resilience and energy to make three runs at a statehouse seat. “I’ve been building my coalition for more than two years,” she says, “and we’re now ready to come together. It makes no sense to stop now.”
She adds, “When I set my mind to do something, I do it full out. I am not one to sit on the sidelines.”.
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Dr. SOS’s campaign website is available at https://sonjaogletreesatani4sc98.org/