As a potential presidential candidate, Scott brings a lot to the table.
South Carolina GOP senator Tim Scott sure looks and sounds like a man who is interested in running for president.
Back when Scott won his Senate reelection bid last November, he said in his victory speech: “The day I drove my grandfather to vote for me for the first time, there was also another race on the ballot. My grandfather voted for the first man of color to be re-elected as president of the United States. I wish he had lived long enough to see perhaps another man of color elected president of the United States . . . this time, let it be a Republican.”
Later this month, after launching a listening tour in his home state of South Carolina, Scott will travel to Des Moines, Iowa, to speak at the Polk County GOP’s annual Lincoln Dinner. His remarks are expected to focus on “the importance of faith in America.” Keep in mind, in 2016, 64 percent of Iowa GOP caucus participants described themselves as born-again Christians.
Late last year, Scott’s longtime chief of staff, Jennifer DeCasper, departed his Senate office to advise a new Scott-aligned super PAC, Opportunity Matters Fund Action. Keep in mind, there are two distinct but affiliated groups, Opportunity Matters Fund and Opportunity Matters Fund Action.
Opportunity Matters Fund is particularly well funded, raising $37 million last cycle and spending $26 million, while Opportunity Matters Fund Action spent $3.3 million. In late 2020, billionaire Larry Ellison donated $5 million to the Opportunity Matters Fund, while Steve Wynn donated $1 million, and last year the group received $2.5 million from Benjamin Navarro, CEO of Sherman Financial Group. It is safe to say that Scott has a particularly warm relationship with some major GOP donors.
Because it is not officially affiliated with Scott, the Opportunity Matters Fund can make videos like the one below, featuring Chris Wallace, Katie Pavlich, and Kevin McCarthy singing the praises of Scott after he delivered the GOP response to President Biden’s 2021 joint address to Congress:
Scott has won himself a lot of fans over the years. Our Alexandra DeSanctis called him the Republican Party’s “joyful warrior.” Former NR fellow Cameron Hilditch raved about his address to the 2020 Republican National Convention:
Perhaps the most interesting line in the speech, however, came when Scott was speaking about the man who mentored him. “He taught me that having an income could change my lifestyle, but creating a profit could change my community.” How many conservative politicians make this rhetorical connection between capitalism and community, between profit and social solidarity?
Scott tends to bring out the worst and most repellent in his Democratic critics. After he gave the response to Biden’s 2021 address, “Uncle Tim” trended on Twitter. In the aftermath, Conrad Black wrote, “Scott has demonstrated that he has the ability, as no one else does (as an African American), to reduce the entire Democratic campaign to a shambles of gaslit name-calling and cringeworthy apologia. They demonstrated that they had no response to Scott’s claims, and the response they attempted was so feeble and false that not even the big-media Democratic propaganda machine could keep it up for more than a few hours. Senator Scott exposed the Democrats in their ghastly moral infirmity.” One Texas Democrat had to resign after calling him an “Oreo.”
But every now and then, a prominent Democrat gives Scott his due. Back in May 2021, New Jersey senator Cory Booker praised Scott while appearing on Joy Reid’s program on MSNBC.
“I’m working principally with Tim Scott and a handful of others,” Booker began. “I’ve had moments in this negotiation that have given me solace and strength as I’ve watched Tim Scott share his stories about his own encounters with police even as a United States senator. He is not caving to the politics of this. He is sincere. We may have disagreements on parts of the bill, but I’m telling you as a black man, Tim Scott is sincere in wanting to see us address those problems.”
Those negotiations did not bear fruit last cycle, much to Scott’s frustration. “After months of making progress, I am deeply disappointed that Democrats have once again squandered a crucial opportunity to implement meaningful reform to make our neighborhoods safer and mend the tenuous relationship between law enforcement and communities of color,” he said in September 2021. But Scott and Booker are still talking, and looking for common ground.
As a potential presidential candidate, Scott brings a lot to the table. He’s a terrific orator, excellent at retail politics, and is likely to be the lone African-American candidate in the field. He’s got just enough experience in both state government and Congress — 14 years as a county council member, two years as a state house member, two years as a U.S. House member, and now ten years in the U.S. Senate — while not seeming like an old-timer or a clubby insider. He has a near-perfect life story for a GOP presidential primary, rising from poverty and boasting “our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.” Scott even says his turnaround from a wayward path early in life was helped by a mentor who operated a Chick-fil-A.
Plus, Scott owned and managed an Allstate Insurance office in Charleston, so we know we’re in good hands. (Back in 2010, he was offering advice on how to avoid collisions with deer.)
One aspect of Scott’s life that may elicit some curiosity in a presidential race: He is a 57-year-old bachelor with no children.
Scott would also be one more non-Trump option in a growing field that is likely to feature the woman who nominated Scott to the U.S. Senate, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, and perhaps other likely candidates such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former vice president Mike Pence, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. There’s a lot for a conservative to like in all those candidates, but a GOP field that consists of one Trump and many non-Trump options deep into the primary is likely to result in the third straight Trump nomination.
Like Haley, Scott would likely begin the primary as a strong competitor in the South Carolina primary, but a status like that creates more pressure to win your home state; recall Marco Rubio dropping out of the 2016 primary after losing Florida to Donald Trump. There’s no official rule that a presidential candidate must drop out after losing his home-state primary, but it’s an almost insurmountable sign of weakness. And as Phil Klein observed, having two big-name local Republicans in the South Carolina primary could leave Trump with the largest plurality.
(Obligatory disclosure: My parents are Scott constituents, active in GOP clubs down in their neck of the woods, and big fans of Scott, and apparently the feeling is mutual.)