Just say no.

A long profile of SC Rep. Anton Gunn in The American Prospect wonders if the GOP's internal bitch fights over who's the most conservative, their seemingly endless mismanagement of the state, and the slow but steady trickle of knowledge workers who move here in spite of the state's 1950's economic development policies, is causing the political landscape to change:

There's a sense among some state Democrats that this could be the year when they begin to make some gains. After all, South Carolina Republicans have made all sorts of negative headlines lately. Some, like Rep. Joe Wilson and Sen. Jim DeMint (known for his obstruction of Obama's nominees and his visit to the coup government in Honduras), are still popular with their conservative base. Others, like embattled Gov. Mark Sanford, have embarrassed their party to the point of impeachment. Sanford is protected only by the fact that his would-be replacement, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, has embarrassments of his own, ranging from multiple traffic offenses to a vicious rant against people who receive public assistance.

A plurality of voters say the state is headed in the wrong direction, and Republicans seem to have lost sight of the compromise that had allowed them to govern the state for most of the last two decades. In the 1990s, South Carolina Republicans managed to temper fire-breathing conservatives who wanted to keep the Confederate flag on the state's Capitol with more moderate, business--oriented figures, like the late Gov. Carroll Campbell Jr., who want the low-wage, anti-union state to remain controversy-free and attractive to employers. "As long as the Republicans continue to mismanage -- which they will -- there are always going to be opportunities in the South," Kilgore says. In Gunn's view, issues such as poverty (15.1 percent of South Carolinians lived below the poverty line in 2007) and the economic crisis have lessened people's appetite for hyper-partisan bickering. "They're sick and tired of being laughed at by the entire nation," he says. "They're sick and tired of being ranked at the top of everything bad and at the bottom of everything good." The number of Democrats in the state is on the rise, partly due to transplants from more progressive areas of the country. Though the state doesn't track voter registration by party, a 2008 survey found 34 percent identified as Democratic and 33.5 percent identified as Republican.