Mark Sanford

Based on Wikipedia: Mark Sanford

In June 2009, the governor of South Carolina vanished. For nearly a week, nobody—not his staff, not his security detail, not even his wife—knew where Mark Sanford had gone. His aides told reporters he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, that famous footpath stretching from Georgia to Maine. It was a plausible enough story. Sanford was known as an outdoorsman, a fiscal hawk who preached frugality and once slept in the same room as his siblings to save on electricity bills.

There was just one problem. He wasn't on the Appalachian Trail at all.

He was in Argentina, visiting his mistress.

The Making of a Fiscal Crusader

Marshall Clement Sanford Junior was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1960, the son of a cardiothoracic surgeon. Despite his family's comfortable financial position, young Mark grew up in an environment of deliberate austerity. The Sanfords had money, but they didn't spend it frivolously. The children shared a bedroom to conserve electricity—a detail that would later seem almost comically on-brand for a politician who made his name fighting government spending with an intensity that bordered on performance art.

Before his senior year of high school, the family relocated to Coosaw Plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina—a sprawling three-thousand-acre property that would become Sanford's political home base. He earned the rank of Eagle Scout, attended Furman University for his undergraduate degree in business, and later completed his Master of Business Administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School.

In 1989, he married Jenny Sullivan. They would have four sons together.

Three years later, Sanford founded a real estate investment company. But business wasn't enough. In 1994, without ever having run for any political office, he jumped straight into a congressional race.

The Congressman Who Said No

Sanford's entry into politics came through an open seat in South Carolina's First Congressional District, centered on Charleston. The incumbent, Arthur Ravenel, had decided to run for governor instead. Sanford finished second in the crowded Republican primary, then won the runoff against Van Hipp Junior, a former official in the George H.W. Bush administration. The general election was a landslide—Sanford captured over sixty-six percent of the vote.

What made Sanford unusual wasn't that he won. It was how he behaved once he got to Washington.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, identified him as the most fiscally conservative member of Congress. This wasn't mere ideology—it was practice. Sanford voted against bills that passed unanimously, including legislation to preserve sites connected to the Underground Railroad, that network of secret routes and safe houses that helped enslaved people escape to freedom before the Civil War. He voted against spending projects even when they would have brought money directly to his own constituents. In 1997, he opposed a defense appropriations bill that included funding for Charleston's harbor.

Most politicians treat federal dollars flowing to their district as a scorecard—proof they're doing their job. Sanford treated them as a temptation to resist.

He called himself a "citizen-legislator," a term meant to evoke the founding generation's ideal of temporary public servants who would serve and then return to private life. True to that vision, he kept a promise to serve only three terms. In 2000, he didn't run for reelection.

Governor Sanford and the Pigs on the House Floor

Retirement from Congress lasted about two years. In 2002, Sanford ran for governor. He defeated the Democratic incumbent, Jim Hodges, by a margin of fifty-three to forty-seven percent. South Carolina's unusual electoral system meant he was paired with a separately elected lieutenant governor, André Bauer, whom he didn't choose and with whom he had no particular alliance. Their combined victory gave Republicans full control of South Carolina's state government for the first time since Reconstruction—that turbulent period following the Civil War when the federal government attempted to integrate formerly enslaved people into Southern political life before ultimately abandoning the effort.

Sanford's governorship was defined by conflict with his own party's legislature.

The South Carolina General Assembly was dominated by Republicans, but that didn't mean they saw eye to eye with their Republican governor. Real power resided with a handful of legislative leaders: Senators Hugh Leatherman and Glenn McConnell, and House Speaker Bobby Harrell. Sanford's vetoes became ritualistic—he would reject spending, and the legislature would override him.

On May 26, 2004, the Republican-led state House overrode one hundred and five of Sanford's one hundred and six budget vetoes. The next day, Sanford staged what might be the most memorable protest in South Carolina political history. He brought live pigs into the House chamber.

The pigs, meant to symbolize "pork projects"—a term for wasteful government spending that benefits specific localities—promptly defecated on the floor of the people's House.

The theatrical gesture captured something essential about Sanford's political style. He was a true believer in fiscal conservatism, but he was also a showman, someone who understood that politics is often as much about symbolism as substance. The pigs didn't change any votes. But people remembered them.

In June 2006, Sanford vetoed the state's entire budget. This wasn't a line-item veto of specific provisions—it was a wholesale rejection of the legislature's spending plan. Had the veto stood, the state government would have shut down on July first. The legislature called a special session the very next day and overrode his veto, restoring their original budget.

The Stimulus Fight

By 2009, Sanford had become a nationally prominent figure in Republican politics, mentioned as a potential presidential candidate. His moment of greatest visibility came through opposition to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the massive federal stimulus package passed in response to the financial crisis that had begun in 2008.

While other governors—including fellow Republicans—eagerly accepted federal money to shore up their struggling state budgets, Sanford announced he might reject South Carolina's share. This was a striking position. South Carolina's unemployment rate stood at nine and a half percent, among the highest in the nation. Critics pointed out that real people in his state were suffering and could use the help.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Republican governor and former action movie star, quipped that if Sanford didn't want his state's stimulus money, California would happily take it.

Sanford became the first governor in America to formally reject a portion of the federal stimulus funds. He proposed a compromise: he would accept the money if the state legislature agreed to use matching funds to pay down South Carolina's debt. It was a characteristic Sanford move—taking a principled stand while leaving himself a way to claim victory regardless of the outcome.

The South Carolina Supreme Court eventually ruled that the governor didn't actually have the authority to reject the funds. Only the legislature could accept or decline them. Sanford's dramatic stand was, in the end, largely symbolic.

The Disappearance

On June 18, 2009, Mark Sanford effectively vanished from public life. His staff told inquiring reporters that the governor was hiking the Appalachian Trail, taking some time away to clear his head and recharge. This explanation satisfied no one.

The State Law Enforcement Division, which provides security for South Carolina governors, didn't know where he was. His wife didn't know where he was. Lieutenant Governor Bauer, constitutionally next in line should anything happen to Sanford, announced that he could not "take lightly" the fact that no one had communicated with him for more than four days and that the governor's own family didn't know his whereabouts.

Sanford's chief of staff tried calling him fifteen times. No answer. Father's Day came and went without the governor calling his four sons.

The mystery generated national headlines. Where was the governor of South Carolina?

On June 24, a reporter from The State newspaper—Columbia's daily paper—intercepted Sanford at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. He was arriving on a flight from Argentina.

Argentina.

Several hours later, with the truth about to emerge through investigative reporting, Sanford held a press conference. He admitted to an extramarital affair. In emotional interviews over the following days, he described his mistress as his "soul mate." He also acknowledged that he had "crossed the lines" with other women during his twenty years of marriage, though he insisted he hadn't gone "as far" with them as he had with the woman in Argentina.

María Belén Chapur

The Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación identified Sanford's mistress as María Belén Chapur, a forty-three-year-old divorced mother of two with a university degree in international relations. Sanford had met her at a dance in Uruguay in 2001. He admitted that their relationship had become romantic in 2008.

The State newspaper had already published excerpts from emails between Sanford and a woman identified only as "Maria." These emails, somehow obtained by reporters, revealed a genuinely passionate correspondence—not the tawdry exchanges one might expect from a political scandal, but something more like actual love letters.

Jenny Sanford, it emerged, had known about her husband's infidelity for approximately five months before the scandal broke. The couple had sought marriage counseling. About two weeks before the governor's famous disappearance, she had requested a trial separation.

In confessing his affair, Sanford mentioned that he had sought counsel from an organization called The Family, a secretive religious fellowship in Washington that had provided spiritual guidance to numerous politicians. He had been a member since his days as a congressman in the mid-1990s.

The Aftermath

Sanford's approval rating collapsed. Polls showed sixty percent of South Carolinians thought he should resign. Only thirty-four percent believed he should remain in office.

In August 2009, two state representatives met with Sanford and warned him directly that the legislature would impeach him if he didn't step down voluntarily. One of them, Nathan Ballentine, had been a Sanford ally. "I told him the writing is on the wall," Ballentine said afterward. Sanford declined to resign.

The impeachment machinery began to grind forward. Two bills of impeachment were prepared with bipartisan support. The State Ethics Commission formally charged Sanford with thirty-seven violations. An ad hoc committee was formed to draft articles of impeachment.

But then something curious happened. The committee voted to remove the vast majority of charges from its investigation, concluding that they didn't warrant "overturning an election." In December 2009, the committee voted six to one against impeachment, stating that the legislature had better things to do.

Instead of removal from office, Sanford received a censure—a formal expression of disapproval that carries no legal consequences. The South Carolina House of Representatives passed the censure resolution by a vote of one hundred and two to eleven in January 2010.

Sanford served out the remainder of his term. He had survived.

The Return

After leaving the governorship in 2011, Sanford's political career appeared finished. He had become a national punchline, his name synonymous with the phrase "hiking the Appalachian Trail"—which entered the American lexicon as a euphemism for having an affair.

But politics, like life, offers second acts to those willing to seek them.

In 2013, a special election was called for South Carolina's First Congressional District—the same seat Sanford had held nearly two decades earlier. Despite the scandal, despite the humiliation, despite everything, he ran again. And he won.

Sanford returned to Congress in 2013 and served until 2019. His second congressional stint ended not with another scandal but with a primary defeat—he lost to a challenger who ran with the endorsement of President Donald Trump, whom Sanford had criticized.

In September 2019, Sanford announced a long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, positioning himself as a fiscal conservative alternative to Trump. He dropped out two months later, having gained little traction.

Jenny and Maria

Mark and Jenny Sanford divorced. She wrote a memoir about the experience and built her own public profile as a political figure in her own right.

As for María Belén Chapur—the woman Sanford called his soul mate, the reason for his vanishing act to Argentina? They got engaged in 2012. The relationship lasted several years before they eventually separated.

Sanford's story resists easy moralizing. He was a genuine fiscal conservative in an era when many Republicans paid only lip service to balanced budgets. He was also a man who abandoned his duties and lied to his staff, his constituents, and his family. He brought pigs into a legislative chamber to make a point about pork-barrel spending, then flew to South America to see his mistress while telling everyone he was hiking.

The Appalachian Trail affair revealed something about American politics that goes beyond hypocrisy. Sanford's career demonstrated both the intense public interest in politicians' private lives and the surprising willingness of voters to forgive—or at least to move on. He lost his marriage and his reputation, but he kept his freedom and eventually reclaimed his seat in Congress.

South Carolina, it seems, was willing to give Mark Sanford another chance. Whether he deserved it is a question each voter had to answer for themselves.

A Note on Legacy

There's a tendency to remember Sanford only for the scandal. But his governorship left other marks on South Carolina, not all of them positive. The Base Load Review Act, which Sanford allowed to become law without his signature, eventually led to what became known as the "Nukegate" scandal—the largest business failure in South Carolina history, involving billions of dollars wasted on nuclear plants that were never completed.

Sanford also opposed faith-based license plates that his state offered to conservative evangelical citizens, despite being a Republican in a heavily religious state. "It is my personal view that the largest proclamation of one's faith ought to be in how one lives his life," he wrote when explaining his decision not to sign that legislation.

Given what we now know about how he was living his life at the time, that statement carries a particular kind of irony.