A state senator from the Grand Strand is the first to officially enter the wide-open 2026 race to be South Carolina’s top prosecutor.
Republican Sen. Stephen Goldfinch, 42, announced his campaign for state attorney general Monday night at an event venue in Murrells Inlet, as he seeks the office to be vacated by Republican Alan Wilson.
The field could get crowded, as several other Republicans are considering a run.
The attorney general’s race is open for the first time in 16 years, as Wilson, first elected in 2010, makes a bid for governor.
While the 2024 election gave Republicans control of the White House and Congress, Goldfinch is billing himself as a candidate who is willing to fight against a Democratic administration if the party in power in Washington, D.C., were to again shift.
“A state has a right to step in and sue the federal government when they think they’re overstepping their bounds,” he told the SC Daily Gazette. “An attorney general can be very influential in that way.”
Wilson, former chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association, has led and signed onto numerous lawsuits over his tenure challenging the Obama and Biden administrations. Goldfinch said South Carolinians should expect such challenges to Democrat-led initiatives to continue under his leadership if he were elected.
Goldfinch, a native of Conway, holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Citadel and a law degree from the Charleston School of Law. The business owner-turned-lawyer was first elected to the state House in 2012. Four years later, voters from Georgetown and Horry counties elected him to the Senate.
The Murrels Inlet father of two is also a captain in the South Carolina Army National Guard and deployed in 2023 to Africa alongside the husband of former Gov. Nikki Haley.
The Charleston-based 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade was assisting U.S. Africa Command based in Djibouti, a small country on the continent’s northeast coast opposite Yemen. Goldfinch sustained a non-combat related injury while there.
Beyond his combat deployment, Goldfinch said working in the Judge Advocate General’s (or JAG) Corps for the National Guard has given him experience as a prosecutor, investigating hundreds of cases.
And over the last two legislative sessions, Goldfinch took a leading role in a Statehouse investigation of the state’s financial officers, including a so-far unsuccessful push to remove Republican state Treasurer Curtis Loftis from office for his role in a $1.8 billion accounting error, which turned out to involve little actual money.
In recent years, Goldfinch has vocally pushed back on coastal environmental regulations he believes infringe on personal property rights.
“My whole adult life I’ve been fighting bureaucrats and agencies, anything that restricts the rights and freedoms of South Carolina citizens,” he told the Gazette. “I’m sick of bureaucracy; sick of them making decisions that ruin lives and put dampers on business.”
If elected attorney general, Goldfinch said he’d have the ability to keep pushing for changes in other ways, to include issuing legal opinions on regulations and how he thinks state agencies should be interpreting the law. Such opinions from the state attorney general are nonbinding, meaning they are the office’s interpretation of state law and how a case might be decided. But they carry no legal weight in court.
Goldfinch said he also will expand upon programs started by Wilson to crack down both on child pornography and sex trafficking. He said he thinks there’s room to work more closely with local law enforcement to go after human traffickers operating in the state.
And Goldfinch pointed to his time in the Statehouse and the relationships he’s built as an asset when it comes to advocating for law enforcement in the state.
Other potential candidates
Goldfinch will likely face at least one solicitor — maybe two — in the GOP primary. Other potential opponents include the governor’s son.
David Pascoe, the chief prosecutor for Calhoun, Dorchester and Orangeburg counties, continues to mull a run for attorney general. The longtime Democrat announced in April he is switching to the Republican Party. Pascoe told the Gazette on Monday he plans to make a final decision in the next eight weeks on whether or not to enter the race.
South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democrat as the state’s chief prosecutor in 35 years. The last Democrat in the office, Travis Medlock, did not seek re-election in 1994 as he made an unsuccessful bid for governor.
David Stumbo, the solicitor for Abbeville, Greenwood, Laurens and Newberry counties, also confirmed he is considering a run. He said he will continue to weigh his decision throughout the summer and expects to have a final decision by the first week of September.
Stumbo referred to himself as “an in-the-trenches crime fighter” who has spent the last 13 years as a solicitor. Before that he was an assistant attorney general.
“It is critical that we have a proven, conservative prosecutor as our state’s chief prosecutor,” he told the SC Daily Gazette.
Henry McMaster Jr., the governor’s son, also said he may run for the job his father held from 2003 to 2011.
With a newborn at home, McMaster Jr. said he’s still a few months away from making a final decision. However, if elected, he said, he will “uphold the rule of law in South Carolina, protect our conservative values, and champion President Trump’s agenda in our state.”
Should his son choose to run, McMaster told reporters he’d endorse him.
“Well, I know him pretty well,” McMaster said jokingly when asked about the possibility at a news conference several weeks ago.
“I think he’d make a great attorney general,” McMaster added.
The state attorney general’s salary is $208,000 after the Legislature made the job more financially appealing.
Prior to the last statewide elections, the attorney general was among six statewide officers receiving a salary of $92,007, unchanged from 1994. A 2022 law tasked a legislative panel with resetting the salaries of all constitutional officers except the governor and lieutenant governor. At the time, 33 employees in Wilson’s office had higher paychecks than him.
The 2022 law did not change the governor’s salary, which remains $106,078, while the lieutenant governor is still paid $46,545.
Jessica Holdman writes about the economy, workforce and higher education. Before joining the SC Daily Gazette, she was a business reporter for The Post and Courier.
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
