Vote For Margo Ellis

My Bio

In an era of fake news, cover ups and a lack of clarity about the space between right and wrong it feels important to run for office as a person of integrity who has made mistakes I can admit to and believes we need a renaissance of forgiveness to continue socially evolving in America.

My upbringing was diverse culturally, geographically and theologically empowering me to hope for a balanced approach to rebuilding our values with compassion and a vast middle ground.

I was born in 1978 to mixed race parents just 11 years after Loving vs Virginia, the Supreme Court case that made miscegenation (mixed race marriage and procreation) legal in America.

In theory at the time of my birth all the legislation for every American to be free was in place and my wealthy white grandmother raised me with the understanding that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn’t just create freedom for people of color, but also for women. Before that legislation was passed and follow on bills like the Equal Credit Act of 1974 she was unable to get a bank account without my grandfather’s permission. It was not until Roe vs Wade that she was able to order birth control without grandaddy’s consent.

The sense in my young life was that anything was possible for anyone regardless of gender or color.

In 1999 at 20 years old when I joined the Marine Corps I learned that the fight for gender equity was incomplete when my recruiter explained that I was not permitted my first choice, tanker, because it was an unavailable “female option.”

During my decade long service, however, John McCain successfully lobbied for a program called “Lioness,” attaching women to all male infantry units to honor the dignity of civilian women in Iraq and Afghanistan who needed to be searched as part of military operations.

Sen. McCain conjectured that we were creating more insurgents than we were stopping through the cultural insensitivity of having American military men physically pat down Afghan and Iraqi civilian women during searches.

McCain’s recommendation was an undeniable success ushering in something called the Anbar Awakening in Iraq that inspired insurgents to put down their guns and begin designing a free Iraq.

Prior to deploying to Iraq my mother had moved into my Beaufort home where we both wanted to maintain a connection to the only place at the time where women Marines were made. At the end of my Marine service, I went to DC with hopes of getting a job on Capital Hill to change laws limiting opportunities for women.

In Washington I was successful on all fronts…

My first year in Washington was hard, because I had completed my undergraduate degree on active duty at the satellite campus for Park University located on Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort, so the assumption of hiring managers was that I was underqualified for policy work on the Hill due to my enlisted service and community college education.

A mentor in Washington, where I attended 12 years of private school prior to enlisting in the Marines, was that I needed to get into one of the “usual suspect schools” like Georgetown in order to be taken seriously on The Hill where pedigree matters.

I got into Georgetown and got a job on The Hill working for a cabinet member before I even completed my first class as a legislative liaison for the Department of Veterans Affairs negotiating our $165 billion budget and encouraging lawmakers to acknowledge the contributions of military women.

Many times during this era I was asked by lawmakers if I thought that it was right for a woman to have to do everything I accomplished in Iraq to which I responded with the truth that women have always served, we just never got credit.

Every history book I read agrees that Harriet Tubman was a Union spy.

The Department of Veterans Affairs was created to help the country heal from war, but only men were allowed to receive benefits.

To this day, despite women being legally allowed to serve in combat arms there is not a single maternity ward at any VA hospital in the country.

As a Daughter of the American Revolution who knows my family and our communities history from Antietam to Gettysburg, when I see women in white dresses on battlefields from the 1700’s and 1800’s, I don’t see helpers bringing out lunch to their husbands, sons and brothers, I see women who served in the Spirit of Jael (Judges 4-5) and the shepherd turned King David (1 Samuel 17).

After a few years on the Hill I went on to higher executive positions including a Vice-President at an investment bank and Silicon Valley Consultant, but I moved back into the same home where my mother lost her battle with cancer during the pandemic here in Beaufort, because I could feel a shift in democracy and equity that was hard to make sense of in a big city.

When George Floyd died May 25, 2020 I was living on the 27th floor of a luxury apartment building in Oakland, CA when the riots broke out.

The Oakland Riots of 2020 were a major turning point for me as an American who can trace 6 generations of my American lineage and thought that we had overcome the type of racial unrest that fueled mass violent protest.

I moved back to Beaufort July 2020 assuming that I would find a community with a clear understanding of what was going on in America, offering solutions for how to right the wrongs I saw, but instead I discovered a confused community that has lost our identity and love for our neighbors at an alarming rate.

Learning that there was a double digit unsolved homicide rate in our small town and understanding that the income inequality impacting the country was widening with the same fervor here as everywhere else seemed unreal at first, but as we march towards the 2026 election cycle, I have to admit how I have unwittingly been a part of the problem and what I think we need to do to solve it.

The way I was a part of the problem is that I had no connection to people who weren’t serving in executive positions by 2020, but I bought into the narrative that people of color, especially those descended from slaves understand the pain of underserved communities.

The pain erupting in violence during the riots was a pain that no one in my circle was feeling, so over the last few years I have stepped out of the executive lane and into two unlikely roles for someone with my background, rideshare driving and comedy.

Rideshare driving has been an extraordinary education in the challenges of working people without cars in rural South Carolina communities without public transportation options.

Comedy has given me the opportunity to bring joy, perspective and healing to hurting people searching for a voice that represents them and their unarticulated needs.

For the next year I plan to drive and joke my way across the state and hopefully into the hearts of SC voters who will allow me to be your Senate representative in Washington fighting for the dignity of work and equity in pay.

My Key Issues