Sen. Mike Reichenbach, R-Florence, answers reporters' questions Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, during the Senate GOP caucus' preview of the 2026 legislative session, held in Senate chambers at the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina. (Photo by Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)
Attorney General Alan Wilson announced Friday picking state Sen. Mike Reichenbach as his running mate, becoming the first of seven candidates for governor to complete his campaign ticket.
The pair will first campaign together at a meet-and-greet event Monday evening in Florence.
Reichenbach, 54, brings a business background to the ticket and diversity to the governor’s race, both as the field’s lone Black Republican and only person from the Pee Dee.
In picking Reichenbach, Wilson also chose someone with a compelling personal story who’s still relatively new to politics. The car dealership owner was first elected to the Senate in March 2022 to fill the unexpired term of the late Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman following his death at age 90.
Four years after Reichenbach successfully campaigned as a “political outsider” for the seat Leatherman held for 41 years, he’s still been in elected office less than any of the Republicans running for governor. Wilson has been the state’s chief prosecutor since 2010.
While his announcement is a first for the race, it’s been in the works for months.
Reichenbach told the SC Daily Gazette that Wilson approached him last summer about joining his ticket. He didn’t specify when, but that means it was early into Wilson’s own campaign, which he officially launched last June.
Reichenbach said he was honored but needed to think about it. He eventually decided his experiences, particularly as a business owner, could help South Carolinians.
He recounted his early days in business during the Great Recession.
“I know what it’s like to lay awake at night and be unsure if you could make payroll and to have to lay employees off and to have to struggle as a small business,” he said. “I fight for small businesses because I am one.”
The lieutenant governor’s job is considered part-time. The job duties are largely whatever the person in the governor’s office decides.
The role used to include presiding over the Senate and overseeing the Office on Aging. But those responsibilities were taken away by the constitutional change approved by voters in 2012 to take the post off the ballot as a separately elected office.
That change didn’t take effect until the 2018 governor’s race, when Gov. Henry McMaster’s running mate, Pam Evette, became the first lieutenant governor in state history to be elected as part of a joint ticket.
Eight years later, Evette is among the four other Republicans and two Democrats running for governor who have yet to publicly pick their choice for lieutenant governor. The primaries are still five months away.
Reichenbach, a father of two, said he hoped to use the job as a metaphorical megaphone to advocate for issues that are deeply personal for him.
That includes making adoptions easier and more affordable and helping youth in foster care avoid prison time.
Like Wilson, the adopted son of U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, Reichenbach was adopted as a child. During an abortion debate in 2023, he offered the most heartfelt explanation for supporting the six-week ban that took effect later that year.
His mother was 14 in 1971 when she became pregnant by her 15-year-old boyfriend, he said on the Senate floor, adding he’s here because she put him up for adoption.
On Friday, Reichenbach said he wants to take care of all families, not just “the typical Norman Rockwall perfect family.”
“We do have a bond,” Reichenbach said of Wilson. “We both feel passionately that we need to work to make the family unit stronger, but we also need to have a special focus on those that have no or have a little voice — those 3,300 children in foster care, that was me at one point. That could have been him at one point.”
The other Republicans campaigning for the Governor’s Mansion are U.S. Reps. Nancy Mace of Charleston County and Ralph Norman of Rock Hill, and state Sen. Josh Kimbrell of Spartanburg County.
The Democrats are state Rep. Jermaine Johnson of Richland County and attorney Mullins McLeod of Charleston.
