The White House News

The historic South Carolina city of Charleston has elected its first Republican mayor since the Reconstruction Era.

William Cogswell, formerly a Republican state lawmaker, defeated incumbent Democratic Mayor John Tecklenburg by about 2 percentage points in Tuesday’s runoff, according to the South Carolina Election Commission. Results posted online by the commission showed a 569-vote margin separating the two candidates.

Cogswell, 48, had secured the most votes in the Nov. 7 general election but not a majority, meaning that he and Tecklenburg headed to Tuesday’s runoff.

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Charleston’s municipal elections are technically nonpartisan. But Tecklenburg is a well-known figure in the state’s Democratic politics, endorsing Joe Biden in South Carolina’s pivotal 2020 presidential primary.

Cogswell, who served three terms as a Republican in the state House and describes himself as a moderate, earned endorsements from others within South Carolina’s GOP political circles, including Sen. Tim Scott.

Charleston last elected a Republican mayor in the 1870s, according to historical records from the city and other municipal areas. Republicans including state GOP Chairman Drew McKissick and U.S. Rep. Russell Fry, who served in the state House with Cogswell, celebrated the GOP win in social media posts and statements.

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“We can confidently say that I’m going to be the next mayor,” Cogswell said Tuesday night, as final results came in. “The people have spoken, and we’re ready for a new direction … a new direction that puts labels aside, so that we can find pragmatic solutions to our problems.”

In a concession speech Tuesday night, Teckleburg called his eight years as mayor “the honor of my life” and asked his supporters to rally around the new mayor.

“I’d like to congratulate our new Mayor-Elect William Cogswell … and I’d like to ask each and every Charlestonian, everybody out there, to give him your support,” Tecklenburg said. “When Mayor Cogswell succeeds, Charleston succeeds, and that’s something we’re all in favor of.”

The City of Charleston has become the second reliably blue area in South Carolina — where Republicans dominate congressional and statewide politics — to choose a Republican mayor in recent years. In 2021, Daniel Rickenmann, a longtime city council member backed by Republicans, was chosen as the mayor of South Carolina’s capital city of Columbia.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is warning residents of the Big Apple that there is nothing they can do to stop migrants sleeping on the streets, as the sanctuary city scrambles to contain an out-of-control crisis.

Adams, who slashed budgets in multiple departments due to the spiraling costs of the migrant crisis said on Tuesday that the goal is not to have people sleeping on the streets, but the “visible signs of this crisis is going to start to show itself.”

Adams said that now over 140,000 migrants have come into the city since last year and “thousands are still coming in each week” and numbers are increasing.

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“Believe it or not, there are migrant and asylum seekers who are saying, ‘We want to sleep on the streets.’ And so people have a right to do so, we need to be clear on that in New York City, because of the city council’s actions people have a right to sleep on the streets that we cannot stop. I want New Yorkers to understand that.”

In terms of how the city will deal with the crisis he said “every day there is a level of maneuvering that we have to do to deal with the flow of migrants and asylum seekers here.” 

“Nothing is off the table,” he added.

“We thought we were headed back south in the numbers. We thought we were going to be dealing with 2,400 – 2000. I was just told that we were up to 3,000, some weeks we go up to 4,000.”

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The remarks are the latest sign from the mayor’s office of a continually worsening crisis for the city, which has repeatedly boasted about its welcoming stance towards immigrants — including those in the country illegally.

The city has repeatedly blamed the federal government for inaction, demanding it provide more funding and a “decompression strategy.” It has caused a rift between the Democratic mayor and the Biden administration, which has pointed to moves to expedite work permits along with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to help cities like New York City.

Separately, the White House has requested an additional $14 billion in emergency funding for border operations, which includes an additional $1.4 billion in grants to help local governments and nonprofits.

Adams has made it clear who he blames for the crisis.

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“DC has abandoned us, and they need to be paying their cost to this national problem,” Adams said this week during a town hall in Brooklyn, according to Politico.

Last week, Adams announced cuts across all government agencies due to the city having spent $1.45 billion in fiscal 2023 on the migrant crisis and nearly $11 billion expected to be spent in 2024 and 2025.

His office said that the New York Police Department will freeze hiring to bring numbers below 30,000 by the end of fiscal year 2025 from over 33,000. There will also be deep cuts to education, including the universal pre-kindergarten program, and sanitation.

The budget cuts drew fury from the city’s teachers and police unions, but Adams has repeatedly said their anger should be directed elsewhere.

“I tell people all the time when they stop me on the subway system, ‘Don’t yell at me, yell at DC,’” Adams said on Monday, according to Politico. “We deserve better as a city.”