No Republican in over 40 years has captured the presidency without first winning the South Carolina primary.
Charleston, S.C. — Jennifer Moretti moved to South Carolina’s Lowcountry in 2020 to escape Covid lockdowns in her home state of Rhode Island. She’s a Republican looking for a president who will be a good steward of the nation’s economy and will keep inflation in check.
Mike Keller is a father of four in the deep-red upstate region of South Carolina who is looking for a conservative leader with a good team of advisors and strong Christian values.
Chuck Winn is a Vietnam-era Navy veteran who lives in the Charleston area who wants to support a strong leader for president, but is also hesitant about electing a “hothead.”
These are among the types of South Carolina voters that Ron DeSantis and other Republican presidential candidates need to win over if they want to wrest control of their party back from Donald Trump, the mercurial former president who continues to dominate state and national polls despite a laundry list of controversies.
While it typically does not receive the same media attention as Iowa and New Hampshire – the first Republican caucus and primary states, respectively – the Palmetto State, third on the GOP calendar, is at least as critical, and maybe more so. South Carolina is bigger and more diverse. And it includes a wide swath of Republicans; moderates and fiscal conservatives like Moretti dominate the Lowcountry, evangelicals and social conservatives like Keller dominate the fast-growing upstate region, and there are active-duty military members and veterans all over.
No Republican in over 40 years has captured the presidency without first having won the South Carolina primary, which has a history of breaking ties if Iowa and New Hampshire voters split.
“I think it’s critical,” said Jordan Ragusa, a College of Charleston political science professor and author of the book First in the South: Why South Carolina’s Presidential Primary Matters.
Complicating things even more, two of the top 2024 contenders – Nikki Haley and Tim Scott – are from South Carolina and remain popular in the state. They are likely competing for many of the same votes, and their presence in the race removes the likelihood that a candidate other than Trump will receive an endorsement from one of the state’s most prominent kingmakers. Trump already has the backing of Senator Lindsey Graham and Governor Henry McMaster.
Though polling so far is slim, nine months out Trump appears to have a solid lead in the state. He had a 25-point lead over DeSantis (43 percent to 18 percent) in a late-May National Research Inc. poll, with Scott and Haley in third and fourth with 12 percent and 10 percent respectively. The poll was released before DeSantis officially joined the race.
“I believe that whoever is going to be the Republican nominee has to win here,” said state senator Josh Kimbrell from the deep-red upstate region, who has endorsed DeSantis, the Florida governor. “I believe that DeSantis can win here. I think DeSantis has a much bigger chance of winning here than he does in New Hampshire or even Iowa.”
Picking up Moderate and Evangelical Voters
DeSantis visited South Carolina for the first time as a candidate on Friday, the end of a four-day swing through the first three GOP nominating states. He previously visited the state in April.
His stops so far hinted at his potential strategy. DeSantis started his Friday tour in Beaufort County, a Lowcountry community with a strong military presence. He then cut a path northwest toward Lexington, near the capital of Columbia, and ended with a rally with about 1,000 people in Greenville, a Republican stronghold in the fast-growing upstate.
Ragusa noted that all three of those are in counties where Trump barely eked out wins against Florida Senator Marco Rubio in the 2016 primary. His stops in April – in Charleston, Dorchester, and Spartanburg counties – were also in areas where Trump encountered some skepticism in 2016 (Rubio won Charleston County and Richland County, which includes Columbia).
“I could see DeSantis kind of picking off the economic and moderate wing in the Lowcountry and sort-of midlands, and also appealing to evangelicals in the upstate,” Ragusa said. “Evangelicals were kind of skeptical and still remain skeptical of Donald Trump in a lot of polling that I’ve seen.”
At his Lowcountry stop behind a restaurant in Beaufort County, DeSantis promised to put the military on a “better path” and highlighted his status as a Navy veteran. “The satisfaction that comes with wearing the cloth of your country and serving beside other fellow patriots, and by serving a cause greater than yourself, well, that’s satisfaction money just can’t buy,” he said.
In evangelical-heavy Greenville, DeSantis campaigned with Riley Gaines, the All-American college swimmer who competed against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and has become an outspoken opponent of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports.
DeSantis is painting himself as a more disciplined and electable Trump-style pugilist. He’s also trying to outflank the former president from the right, both fiscally and socially.
“I think most people think Trump is more conservative than he is,” said Kimbrell, the state senator backing DeSantis.
South Carolina has a wide swath of Republicans – social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and national security conservatives – and DeSantis should be acceptable to most of them, he said.
“In my opinion, Donald Trump cannot win the presidency if he wins the nomination,” Kimbrell said. “The only one who can win the nomination who’s not named Donald Trump who I think can win the presidency is DeSantis.”
Moretti, the Rhode Island transplant, attended DeSantis’s Lowcountry rally with her husband, Nick, on Friday. She called DeSantis “brilliant,” and said he could win her vote.
“I feel like there’s a very small faction of people in this country right now that are trying to take things off the rails, and I think we need someone very strong to get things back in order, Moretti said. “We need normal again.”
Keller, the evangelical Christian father of four from Greenville, attended DeSantis’s rally Friday night. Though he’s open to supporting Trump again, he said he’s leaning toward backing DeSantis. “I love what he’s done all of his career,” he said.
Keller noted that Trump could be vulnerable upstate. While people in the region generally support his policies, many evangelicals are turned off by his often-troubling behavior.
“That’s an issue with many in the evangelical crowd,” he said. “They have a hard time with Trump and they sort of hold their nose and they pray for him because they love what he’s done.”
Playing the Veteran Card
DeSantis could also benefit in South Carolina from his status as a Navy veteran who served as an officer and a lawyer in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps, worked at Guantanamo Bay, and deployed as an adviser with a Navy SEAL team in Iraq. South Carolina has one of the largest concentrations of active-duty military members and veterans in the country.
“I think that will be a positive,” DuBose Kapeluck, chair of the political science department at the Citadel, said of DeSantis’s military service. “If I were DeSantis, I would certainly play that up.”
South Carolina vets who spoke to National Review said that could factor into their 2024 votes.
Dwight Decker, a Navy veteran who owns Black Force mixed martial arts gym near Charleston, said he’s leaning toward DeSantis, in part because of his military service.
“He’s been deployed. He’s been in the sandbox,” Decker said. That status as a veteran, he said, “carries a lot of weight with me, because they know what we’ve been through, they know what we’ve faced. They know, just because the war is supposedly over, it’s not for us.”
Brad Mallett, an Air Force veteran, is the owner of Coastal Coffee Roasters in Summerville, a bedroom community near Charleston. He hosted a meet-and-greet with DeSantis in April, though he said he isn’t backing any candidate yet.
Mallett said that a candidate’s military service could be part of his calculus for choosing whom to vote for. Military members have a unique perspective on the world, he said, and just signing up says something about them.
“It’s not necessarily if they served, it’s how they treat the military,” Mallett said of political candidates, adding that he’s looking for a president who will “use the military wisely, and also represent the United States of America in a way that it needs to be represented.”
Chuck Winn, a Vietnam-era Navy vet and Coastal Carolina Coffee customer, met DeSantis in April, and is considering supporting him. He likes that he’s a veteran, but he said he’s a little turned off by some of DeSantis’s harder-edged policies and political positions.
Winn said he won’t support Trump, because he’s a “hothead” and not “very presidential.” He’s also no fan of President Joe Biden, and has concerns about the 80-year-old’s decline.
Winn said that while he wouldn’t give Haley or Scott any advantage because of their local status, he does like Scott’s optimistic demeanor and the way he listens to people.
“He doesn’t seem to be a hothead,” Winn said of Scott. “He seems to think things through.”
The Palmetto State Candidates
Ned Forney, a Marine veteran in Charleston, said he is leaning toward supporting Haley, the former South Carolina governor. “I respect her and her views,” he said, speaking outside the Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant on Thursday.
Forney said he wouldn’t really give Haley any special consideration just because she’s from the state. “I think she would be a good leader. She’s fiscally conservative,” he said. “I just think our country can do better than Biden and Trump.”
Winning South Carolina is likely critical for both Haley and Scott. “It looks bad if you don’t carry your home state,” Ragusa said. “There is a strong connection between how the candidates do in South Carolina and how they do in the Southern Super Tuesday states.”
Haley is from Bamberg, a small town between Charleston and Columbia that featured heavily in her presidential launch video. Scott was raised by a single mother in North Charleston, and he has said his upbringing there contributed to the development of his conservative politics.
Ragusa suspects that both Haley and Scott will do well with their natural base of support in South Carolina. “Both are incredibly popular statewide,” he said.
They’ll need to make the case that they are serious contenders. They’re both far behind Trump in state polls and are barely registering in most national polls.
Ragusa said Haley has done a good job of jabbing at her Republican rivals; she has been critical of Trump over the years, including during her time as United Nations ambassador and after the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, without really drawing the former president’s ire. And she has taken shots at DeSantis for his feud with Disney – a position that may play better in the more moderate Lowcountry than in the socially-conservative upstate region.
While Scott has taken shots at Democrats over the years, “I have not seen anything from him lately that suggests he’s going to be effective at jabbing at his fellow Republicans,” Ragusa said.
Peeling Away Trump’s Supporters?
While there is still the better part of a year before the South Carolina primary, the race appears to be Trump’s to lose, Ragusa said. “Given everything that I see right now, it’s hard to imagine it being anyone other than Trump,” he said, noting Trump’s legal challenges as a wild card.
He said the race is setting up to be unique – somewhere between the open primary of 2016 and 2020 when Trump was the incumbent president. “I would say it’s closer to the latter in that Trump is for all intents and purposes an incumbent. And voters, for better or for worse, have made up their mind on him,” Ragusa said. “So, his supporters are going to support him, and it’s going to be very, very difficult to peel them away.”
Curtis Smith, chair of the Spartanburg County GOP in upstate South Carolina, is urging Republican voters not to jump on any bandwagons until the field is set and people have had time to review all the candidates.
Smith’s group recently hosted Vivek Ramaswamy, the anti-woke entrepreneur running for the Republican nomination. He called Ramaswamy “very, very impressive.” They were also impressed by DeSantis when he visited in April.
“I don’t think you’ve got a whole lot of people that have made up their minds,” Smith said. “It’s going to be the campaigns that do this. Let’s hear what you are going to do.”
Aaron Franklin, a retired Marine from Goose Creek, a suburb of Charleston, hasn’t made up his mind, but he has supported Trump in the past and is starting 2024 as a likely Trump backer.
“On his first run as president, he accomplished what he said he was going to do,” Franklin said. “I know what he’s capable of.”
But he said he intends to listen to other candidates. He’s impressed with DeSantis, he said. And he likes Scott, too. He’s not ready to pick one just yet.
“We’re way too early on that,” he said. “Ultimately, I’d like to see Trump and DeSantis. Why not?”