Copyright Charleston Post and Courier
SPARTANBURG — After three elections, David Britt’s vacant seat is finally filled. Retired businessman and lawyer Paul Abott, a Republican, will serve as the new councilman for Spartanburg County Council District 3, around six months after Britt left the seat he had held for more than three decades. He left it in May to join the state’s public service commission. Abbott will serve the remainder of Britt’s unexpired term that ends Jan. 1, 2029. Abbott won nearly 56 percent of the vote, according to unofficial voting results, beating Democrat Kathryn Harvey and Forward Party candidate Sarah Gonzalez in the Nov. 4 general election. The district covers parts of the city of Spartanburg’s Eastside and stretches east and south to Cowpens and Pacolet. Abbott, from Cowpens, went through three to fill the seat, including a crowded Republican primary, a Republican runoff against an opponent with much more cash and a general election that again saw him at a fundraising disadvantage against his chief opponent. Harvey, the Spartanburg County Democratic Party chair and a former candidate for Congress in 2024, raised more than three times as much money as Abbott at close to $64,000, but was fighting an uphill battle in a conservative district. She ended up winning around 42 percent of the vote. Before Harvey, no Democrat had run for the seat since at least 2008. Gonzalez, a personal trainer and former educator, was new to politics and received just under 2 percent of the vote. Abbot brings some local government experience to the seat, as he was formerly a Copwens town councilman and school board member. He focused his grassroots campaign on local issues such as growth and development, outlining plans to rein in high-density housing while still accepting the inevitable continuation of the area’s population boom. He also signaled he’d largely continue Britt’s friendly stance towards businesses; however, he projected a more moderate stance on tax breaks the county often uses to attract large companies, called fee-in-lieu-of-tax agreements. Britt first won the seat in 1991 and is seen as instrumental in helping Spartanburg County reach its current success as an “industrial mecca,” which he often called the county. BMW's move to the county in the early 1990s, which is in part thanks to Britt, is seen as the county’s turning point towards success. Harvey has now lost two straight elections as a Democrat in the deeply conservative Upstate. Despite her putting up better fights in both races than any Democrats in recent memory, neither amounted to electoral victories, even with her fundraising prowess.
