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S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster is the 2026 recipient of the Electric Cooperative Public Service Award, the highest honor given by South Carolina’s co-ops.
Photo by Travis Bell
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McMaster thanks Fairfield Electric Cooperative service technician Chris Glenn for his service at the 2017 designation of Linemen Appreciation Day and dedication of a special license plate honoring lineworkers.
Photo by Mic Smith
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McMaster announces the signing of the 2025 Energy Security Act, championed by electric cooperatives as a measure that paves the way for new power generation to meet South Carolina’s growing energy needs.
File photo
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McMaster stands with electric cooperative lineworkers from across the state during the 2025 Co-op Day at the State House.
File photo
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Several worn-out copies of Walter Edgar’s South Carolina: A History bear McMaster’s sticky-note annotations, speaking to the governor’s penchant for studying the state’s past and his unshakeable reverence for his Palmetto State roots.
Photo by Travis Bell
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McMaster worked his way up in state leadership through decades of public service, from serving as South Carolina’s top federal prosecutor, to attorney general, to lieutenant governor and, finally, to the governor’s office.
Photo by Travis Bell
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McMaster stands with South Carolina electric cooperative leaders on the State House steps, sporting an “I Heart My Co-op” sticker, at the 2024 Co-op Day at the State House.
Photo by Travis Bell
Many teenagers want to be rock stars, professional athletes or celebrities when they grow up. Henry McMaster had other plans.
As early as high school, the Columbia native had his sights set on becoming governor. By college, he began planning to seek the job one day.
Growing up in the shadow of the South Carolina Statehouse, McMaster was never far from politics. His father, a revered attorney, served in the state House of Representatives, and the family ran in social circles full of public servants. He developed a deep reverence for South Carolina, its history and the political figures who have shaped its course.
“It seemed like they were doing something that counted,” McMaster says now. “I thought about it a lot.”
Decades later, McMaster, now 78, has made an impact of his own. After following his father’s footsteps to law school and then private practice, McMaster has served as South Carolina’s top federal prosecutor, attorney general, lieutenant governor and now governor—a resume few politicians in state history can boast.
As South Carolina’s 117th and longest-serving governor, McMaster has navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, led the state’s response to several major hurricanes, worked with the Legislature to raise teacher pay and overseen the statewide deployment of broadband internet infrastructure.
The pro-business Republican has also helped usher in an era of explosive economic growth since he took office in 2017, recruiting nearly 100,000 new jobs and $53 billion in capital investment.
Those accomplishments and more help explain why South Carolina’s electric cooperatives recently voted to recognize McMaster with their highest honor, the Electric Cooperative Outstanding Public Service Award.
“His love for the state—and the people in it—pours out of him. He can’t contain it,” says John Frick, senior vice president for public policy at The Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina. “People rally to that passion, and rural South Carolina is better today because of it.”
A closer examination of McMaster’s legacy, bolstered by nearly a dozen interviews with the governor’s current and former colleagues, employees and advisers, reveals more about the lessons and state pride that sparked McMaster’s rise and fuel his service.
Trusting the process
If McMaster’s career has a single origin, it was the time he spent as a boy at his father’s law office in downtown Columbia. There, surrounded by case files and law books, McMaster fell in love with the legal profession.
McMaster’s father, John Gregg McMaster, was the kind of trial attorney other lawyers flocked to the courthouse to watch. Known for his enthusiasm and presence, the elder McMaster enraptured juries all the way until his final trial at age 93.
But to his son, he always insisted he owed his courtroom success to his exhaustive preparation, not the punchy arguments he delivered for the judge and jury.
“You win law cases in your office back at the law firm,” McMaster recalls his father saying. “You don’t win them in the courtroom.”
The lesson has shaped McMaster’s approach to every legal case, policy challenge, ethical dilemma and emergency ever since.
Current and former employees describe the governor’s decision-making process as hands-on and intense. On decisions big and small, McMaster carefully studies the law, quizzes experts and then peppers his advisers with questions and follow-ups until there is nothing left to learn. He often carries a stack of briefing documents, legal pads, news clips and court briefs—research that helps him decide whether to declare an emergency, veto a bill or grant clemency to a death row inmate.
“He reads everything, absorbs everything, saves everything,” says Thomas Limehouse, who worked nine years for McMaster as the top lawyer in the governor’s office.
The process can take days. But it ends with the governor confident he has left no stone unturned.
That confidence is important when making difficult and divisive decisions. Take, for instance, how McMaster withstood criticism from the press and other politicians in the early days of the pandemic. He was one of the last governors in the country to issue a work-or-home order and the first to reopen a few weeks later, in part because of his study of the state constitution’s limits on executive power.
“You’re never going to get away with the easy answer, the politically expedient answer,” says former McMaster spokesman Brian Symmes. “He wanted more. … Nobody is making a more informed decision than him.”
South Carolina exceptionalism
It took a while for McMaster to reach the governor’s office. He suffered setbacks early and often, partly because he was willing to take on longshot runs for the U.S. Senate in 1986 and lieutenant governor in 1990 at a time when it was difficult for Republicans to win statewide elections.
After stints as state GOP chairman and attorney general, he failed to make it out of a crowded Republican primary in his first run for governor in 2010. Eventually, courtesy of his election as lieutenant governor in 2014 and then-Gov. Nikki Haley’s resignation to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2017, McMaster reached the job he wanted from the start.
Talk with McMaster for any length of time, and his infatuation with the state he has now led for the better part of a decade—its people, its history, its natural resources—becomes clear. At some point, he concluded the Palmetto State is the best place on earth, and no one has been able to convince him otherwise.
It comes up at press conferences, at campaign stops, in recruiting pitches to foreign business executives and at high school graduation ceremonies.
“If he could coin the term ‘South Carolina exceptionalism,’ he would,” says longtime chief of staff Trey Walker.
McMaster’s reverence for South Carolina runs as deep as his roots here. Both sides of McMaster’s family have lived in South Carolina for generations. He can trace their exploits in the history books he’s so fond of reading, often in the quiet hours of the morning before his wife, Peggy, or their English bulldogs have risen.
Several worn-out copies of Walter Edgar’s South Carolina: A History, sticky notes poking out of the sides, speak to the governor’s penchant for studying the state’s past, particularly its key role in deciding the American Revolutionary War.
His travels throughout the state to visit relatives, stump for campaigns and work on legal cases have only deepened his encyclopedic knowledge. His employees have grown to expect the detours he makes to stop at historic sites on the way back to the office. McMaster hops out of the vehicle and takes on the role of unofficial tour guide, reciting a place’s significance, chapter and verse.
“He loves the state to its core,” says Bryan Stirling, the U.S. Attorney for South Carolina. “I think that’s the reason he stepped forward several times to serve the state in different capacities.”
It also helps make McMaster an effective governor, observers say. Wanting the best for South Carolina takes precedence over partisan politics, political ambitions or getting the credit, they say.
U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a Columbia Democrat, recalls working closely with McMaster to pull together the state and federal funding to expand broadband access in rural South Carolina, including for many electric cooperative members. As a result, nearly every South Carolinian has access to high-speed internet today.
“He wants what’s best for South Carolina,” Clyburn says.
Looking out for the defenseless
One night a few years back, McMaster ordered his motorcade to a halt on Interstate 26 in Newberry County. The governor got out of his state vehicle and spent the next several minutes trying to corral a cow that had escaped a broken fence and wandered into the median.
Eventually, his security detail fashioned some twine into a lasso and led the bovine out of harm’s way.
It’s the kind of episode that no longer fazes McMaster’s aides and advisers. Over the years, McMaster has fostered dogs, ferried stray cats to the vet for care, rescued wounded birds and helped stranded turtles get to safety.
On official trips and campaign stops, “you never knew when you were going to have to stop and render aid to some critter,” Walker says.
In three decades of working off and on for McMaster, Stirling said he saw the wildlife rescues as part of a larger trend with the governor: “Helping those that can’t really stand up for themselves.”
While serving as attorney general in the 2000s, McMaster led crackdowns on dogfighting rings and crimes against children. Faced with a dangerous backlog of criminal domestic violence cases, McMaster created a pro bono program that allowed private attorneys to prosecute domestic abusers on behalf of the state, gaining valuable trial experience in the process.
The program made a difference. Stirling himself tried some of the cases. Years later, Stirling crossed paths with a woman whose husband he had prosecuted. She told him she would be dead if not for McMaster’s program.
When asked about his tendency to defend the defenseless, McMaster seems puzzled. “That’s what you’re supposed to do,” he says. “I just hate to see an animal or a person hurt.”
Now nearing the end of his tenure in the governor’s office, McMaster stands on a legacy of being a leader who cares deeply for the state and its people. It’s a reputation that has comforted voters who overwhelmingly reelected him twice and have been lifted up by his servant leadership.
As for McMaster, looking back on the job he worked so long to achieve, “It was everything I ever dreamed,” he says.
“I think it’s the best job in the whole world.”