At the end of January 2026, William Timmons stood in front of a chamber of commerce conference in Spartanburg and told the room he was almost finished with the job.

"I'm doing this one more term and then I'm coming home, and I'm very excited to be done with it."

That's the congressman for South Carolina's 4th District — Greenville, Spartanburg, and most of their suburbs — telling a business crowd he's excited to be done representing them. The quote was first reported by The Post and Courier and picked up by the SC Daily Gazette a few days later.

Here's the part that stings. A lot of the people in that district have been trying to get a few minutes of his time for years, and they can't. They have tried billboards. They have tried petitions. They have tried holding the meeting without him and leaving a chair empty. They built an entire website about it.

He still won't come.

The billboard

In March 2025, a group called Patriots for Responsible Governance paid for a digital billboard in Greenville, near the Bon Secours Wellness Arena. The message was one word: AWOL. Absent without leave.

The billboard's complaint, as WSPA reported, was that Timmons had not held an in-person town hall in more than three years. That was seventeen months ago. He has not held one since.

Neither Timmons nor the group behind the billboard responded to the station's requests for comment. A Greenville City Council member, Russell Stall, who had nothing to do with the group, told WSPA what he thought about it anyway:

"Our biggest responsibility and our biggest privilege is listening to the voice of the people. I am very concerned that we are not seeing that here."

The empty chair

The billboard pointed people to a website asking Timmons, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and Sen. Tim Scott to come answer questions on March 15, 2025.

None of the three showed up. Over 500 people came anyway. Indivisible Upstate SC held what it called the People's Empty Chair Town Hall in Greenville, and constituents spent the evening talking to each other about what was happening to them — because the people they elected wouldn't be in the room. The website that organized it, WhereIsWilliamTimmons.com, is still up.

The next month, Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn drove into somebody else's district and did the job. On April 22, 2025, Clyburn held an in-person forum at Wofford College in Spartanburg — not his district — and took more than 15 questions from people worried about Social Security cuts and everything else coming out of Washington. People drove in from across the Upstate because they weren't getting answers at home.

What Timmons said about the people asking

Asked about it, Timmons didn't say he was too busy. He said the whole idea was fake.

"These so-called 'town halls' orchestrated by the SCDP are nothing more than staged political pep rallies for their left-wing agenda."

And:

"I am focused on delivering President Trump's America First agenda, not performative gatherings."

Those were his words to WSPA on April 24, 2025. Note what the sentence actually does. It doesn't answer a single question anyone was asking. It reclassifies the people asking as props.

He wasn't alone in that. When The Post and Courier surveyed the state's delegation in March 2025, Graham's office called the requests the work of "left-wing activist funded organizations" and said the protesters "aren't looking for dialogue, they are looking for social media fame." Scott's office said it was "unfortunate the media is amplifying far-left activists."

But there was one thing that set Timmons apart. The paper reached out to all eight of South Carolina's congressional Republicans. Seven answered. Reporter Caitlin Byrd wrote it plainly:

"Only one, U.S. Rep. William Timmons, R-Greenville, did not respond to emailed questions."

Joe Wilson answered — he talked up the huge in-person town halls he held during the Affordable Care Act fight, then explained that he now prefers tele-town halls. Sheri Biggs's office answered, pointing to an open house she'd held. Four of the six House Republicans at least pledged to hold town halls sometime, without naming a date.

Timmons's office didn't even send the email back.

Then he did one — by phone

To be fair about it: five days after that WSPA story, on April 29, 2025, Timmons hosted a telephone town hall. It came, as the station put it, after much demand.

A tele-town hall is not nothing. It is also not the same thing, and everybody involved knows it. On a phone town hall, staff choose which callers get through, nobody sees the room, there is no follow-up question, and there is no video of the congressman being asked something he doesn't want to answer. It's the format members reach for when the in-person one has become uncomfortable. Arkansas's French Hill made the exact same substitution while a 90-year-old constituent stood outside his office every Thursday for a year. Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, who once bragged about holding 105 town halls, stopped holding open ones too.

What his own voters wanted to ask about

This isn't about hurt feelings. There are specific, expensive things happening to people in the 4th District that its congressman has never had to stand in a room and defend.

Because of the budget bill he voted for, an estimated 31,494 people in SC-04 are projected to lose health coverage by 2034 — 28,400 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 3,094 losing Medicaid — according to a district-by-district analysis by the Joint Economic Committee's minority staff.

And 27,765 households in his district — about 8.7% of all households in SC-04 — use SNAP to buy groceries, according to USDA data. That includes 15,127 households with kids in them and 11,941 with somebody over 60.

Statewide, South Carolina is projected to end up with 230,000 more uninsured residents over the next decade, and its hospitals stand to receive $2.4 billion less a year in federal Medicaid money once the cuts fully kick in.

Those are the questions the empty chair was for.

Even a Republican challenger noticed

When Greenville businessman David Atchley launched a primary challenge in February 2026, he didn't run at Timmons from the right the way state Rep. Adam Morgan had in 2024. He ran at him for being unreachable. Atchley called the congressman disconnected from his constituents and accused him of not being accessible.

Timmons's team's first move was to question whether Atchley even lived in South Carolina — a spokesperson said he "needs to explain why he lives in Charlotte." After the SC Daily Gazette checked Atchley's property records, voter registration, and driver's license, all of which pointed to a Greenville condo, the campaign softened the line and said it was still looking into it.

Timmons won the June 9 primary anyway, with Trump's endorsement in hand. The Post and Courier's headline said the rest: in final run, William Timmons wins Republican primary.

The part that should bother you

A member of Congress who plans to run again has at least one reason to face a hostile room: he needs those people in November.

Timmons has now told everyone he's leaving. He said he's "very excited to be done with it." He has one more term to serve, and then he goes home to Greenville — where his neighbors will still be living with the coverage losses, the grocery bills, and the hospital math he voted for and never once stood in front of them to explain.

People in the Upstate have been asking him for an in-person town hall since before that billboard went up in March 2025, and the billboard said it had already been going on for three years by then. He has about two and a half years left. His constituents already built the website.

Source

Adrian Ashford, "SC congressman says he's 'coming home' after next term. GOP challenger says he's not waiting." — SC Daily Gazette, February 4, 2026. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.