SPEAKING FREELY ABOUT JESSICA BRIGHT, CANDIDATE FOR DORCHESTER COUNTY COUNCIL DISTRICT 3

At some point after encouraging others to run for office, one decides to take the plunge for oneself.  That is precisely what Jessica Bright has done.

From September of 2021 through April of 2024, Bright was the Executive Director of Emerge South Carolina, the state branch of a national organization.

Emerge’s mission has been to recruit and train Democratic women to enter elective politics.  According to its website, Emerge offers a six-month, 70-hour training program in public speaking, fundraising, messaging, strategizing, and other skills necessary to run a successful campaign.

Now Bright will put this experience to use as she challenges incumbent Republican Rita May Ranck for the District 3 seat on the Dorchester County Council.

Diving into hyper-local politics is new for Bright.  Her previous political experience has been at the national level.  She volunteered for Hillary Clinton on the 2016 Presidential campaign and was a Clinton delegate from South Carolina at the national convention.

That experience exposed her to the ideas of Bernie Sanders, who was challenging Clinton for the nomination.  She was particularly impressed with his views on equitable pay and health care rights.  As a result, she signed up to be state director for the Sanders presidential campaign in South Carolina for parts of 2019 and 2020, and she was his state director in Ohio for parts of 2020. 

Her focus is now the County Council, she says, “because local government is making the decisions we can feel and see.”  She points to the recent confusion over a boil-water advisory for parts of Dorchester and Berkeley Counties as an example of the importance of clear and swift County decision-making in a crisis.  In this case, citizens were not well served.

As a member of the Council, one of her highest priorities will be rural health care.  Bright grew up in Walterboro where, she says, “I saw people alive on Friday who were dead on Sunday.”  She would bring to the County Council a Bachelor of Science degree in Health Science from Clemson and a graduate degree from MUSC in Health Informatics.    As a result of this education and its real-world application, she understands how technology can be used to bring health care to rural areas.

She would like to see more walkable neighborhoods in Dorchester County.  This would improve health if citizens were encouraged to walk more and ride less.

She will also focus on whether our local schools are adequately preparing all graduates to enter the workforce.  She knows that this is not now the case.  Bright doesn’t want the jobs new industries will bring to the community to go mostly to workers from out of state.  She believes these jobs should be filled with local graduates. 

To that end, she will encourage the formation of public-private partnerships so that local graduates can make a rapid transition into the workforce.

Add Bright to the growing list of local leaders who are concerned about the siting of data centers in Dorchester County, specifically in Ridgeville.  She will work to make sure that the cost of such data centers is borne by the operators.  “They don’t get to push the bill for this onto the taxpayers,” she says.

During the run-up to the 2020 election, Bright worked as director of the voter protection hotline for Fair Fight, an arm of the South Carolina Democratic Party.  As a result of this experience, she fears that voter ID requirements will be misused by poll directors to lock out eligible voters.  She is also concerned that polling locations are changed so often (especially for primaries and special elections) that voters don’t know where to go to vote. 

She encountered both of these problems in her hotline work.  As a member of the County Council, she promises to pay close attention to such efforts to suppress the vote.

While Sanders has been an important influence on her own political beliefs, Bright will not be running as a “progressive” Democrat, given how confusing and incorrect such short-hand descriptors have become.  “I will be running on specific issues,” she says, “and I will not be defined by a label.”

Indeed, clear positions on issues will be her opponent’s great weakness.  Ranke has developed no policy profile in her one term on the Council.  She is a reliable back bench Republican vote.  Her main function seems to be appearing in group photos at County events.

If Ranke has the courage to debate Bright, the choice to voters will be clear and Democrats will be able to play a more prominent role in local decision-making, where Republicans hold close to monopoly control.

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