According to the S.C. District Office of the U.S. Small Business Administration, 43% of our state’s workforce is employed by the small business community which makes it the largest employment segment in South Carolina.

Our new Treasury Secretary in Washington claimed recently that the strong economic growth our country has experienced over the past few years was actually misleading and that the private sector “has been in a recession”.

This week author and journalist Carolyn Click joins us to talk about her new book, The Cost of the Vote: George Elmore and the Battle for the Ballot (2025, USC Press). Elmore's story is that of a man who believed, with uncommon boldness, that he and other Black Americans were guaranteed the right to vote. He volunteered to become the plaintiff in the NAACP lawsuit that successfully challenged the all-white Democratic primary in South Carolina in 1946.Carolyn centers her story on Elmore, his family, his neighbors, and the activists and lawyers who filed the suit. Although Elmore's court challenge would prove successful, he and his family paid a steep personal price.

This week we'll be talking with Andrew Waters about his latest book, Backcountry War: The Rise of Francis Marion, Banastre Tarleton, and Thomas Sumter (2024, Westholme Publishing). In it Andrew weaves the history of three key leaders in the American Revolution into in a single narrative, focusing on the events of 1780 in South Carolina that witnessed their collective ascendance from common soldiers to American legends. It was a time when British victories at Charleston and Camden left the Continental Army in tatters and the entire American South vulnerable to British conquest. Yet in those dark hours, Sumter, Marion, and others like them rose in the swamps and hills of the South Carolina wilderness. Their collective efforts led to the stunning American victory at Cowpens and a stalemate at Guilford’s Courthouse the following year that finally convinced British general Charles Cornwallis to abandon the Carolinas for Virginia and eventually to Yorktown where his beleaguered army surrendered.

On this episode of the South Carolina Lede for April 1, 2025: we’re catching you up on the Republican push to reform and lower taxes in the state; we look at what is on tap this week at the Statehouse; Winthrop Poll director Dr. Scott Huffmon joins us to break down his latest poll findings and get our first look at the 2026 race; and more!

On this episode of the South Carolina Lede for March 29, 2025: tort reform is done—in the Senate, for now; we catch up with Sen. Larry Grooms on his subcommittee’s report over the 1.8 billion dollar boondoggle and the recommendation to impeach Treasurer Curtis Loftis; the Table Rock Complex fires continue to burn more than 10,000 acres in the Upstate; and more!