In 2022 I found out exactly what kind of person Annie Andrews is. She will say or do anything to get power.
That year I was a junior staffer on Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s campaign, mostly on the digital side. Andrews, back then, was loud about the positions she’s now running from: she opposed a South Carolina bill that would have restricted gender-affirming procedures on minors, and she defended abortion access well past the point most Americans support.
She lost that race to Nancy Mace by about 14 points.
Campaigns routinely send staff to an opponent’s events to see what’s said. A few of us, including the then-Dorchester GOP chairman who was also on staff, went to one of her press conferences. We stood there silently and recorded. That’s the job. Someone from her side recognized him, walked up, and flipped us off. We laughed for a second. That was it. The rest of the time we stood quietly and filmed.
Andrews took a photo of us and posted that Nancy Mace had sent men to mock a woman sharing a heartbreaking story of fetal loss. She didn’t post it once. She kept posting the picture, over and over, to keep the outrage going. She didn’t care that we had been silent almost the entire time, or that the only reaction was to someone flipping us off.
What she claimed wasn’t true. The facts didn’t matter. The narrative did.
For weeks after that, my friends and I—early-20s junior staffers—were attacked online, doxxed, and hit with death threats from accounts all over the country. It was the nastiest thing I’ve seen aimed at people that junior on a campaign, and she kept feeding it.
Now she’s back, selling herself as a moderate and walking away from the positions she defended in 2022.
Same person.
She used a handful of kids with phones to manufacture outrage, then kept the pile-on going, and she’ll say whatever she thinks will get her power this time too.
Today John is Chairman of the Berkeley County GOP.
CJ, author of this story, is Chairman of the Dorchester County GOP.
