Over the past few months South Carolina has seen the start of what will soon become a flood of candidates testing the waters for a possible run for the White House in 2028.
They’re not coming here for the barbecue, though I highly recommend the mustard-based.
They’re coming here because the road to the White House runs right through South Carolina.
Only once since the Republican Party started holding its “first-in-the-South” presidential primary in 1980 has the winner not gone on to win the GOP nomination. It’s the same for Democrats since they started holding a primary in 1992. No one has ever lost a South Carolina presidential primary and gone on to win the White House in that year.
In other words, if you can’t win in South Carolina, you’ve got about as much of a chance of being president as you do of finding a unicorn with a four-leaf clover in its mouth.
The South Carolina state parties are socioeconomic and philosophical microcosms of their respective national parties, so it makes sense for candidates to compete here to see who best represents their party nationally.
It’s good for both political parties, because running in South Carolina forces candidates to prove their mettle. It’s big enough to test each candidate’s grassroots support and organization skills, but small enough to test their retail skills. And the media markets are cheap enough compared to other states that most candidates can compete in South Carolina without going bankrupt.
Winning here helps get the momentum candidates need to carry them through the rush of primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday and beyond. And it typically works as a firewall that takes out any further serious competition to wrapping up either party’s presidential nomination.
It’s also an economic boon to our state.
A study done after the 2012 Republican presidential primary demonstrated that the primary had an approximate $50 million economic impact on the state. Given inflation and the vast increase in campaign budgets since then, that impact has easily more than doubled for Republicans, not to mention whatever Democrats generate during their primary.
These primaries also increase our state’s political influence because they magnify the impact of grassroots South Carolinians on each party’s eventual presidential nominee. People get to meet the candidates, ask questions, get to know them, work for them, even potentially head to Washington, D.C., when the election is all over, further expanding our state’s political influence.
Normally, I would say that more South Carolina influence over the Democrats’ nomination process would be a good thing, but the problem is Democrats in South Carolina have been decimated by their national party’s lack of grasp on reality.
More normal South Carolinians have been driven away from supporting them, and the process trickles down to state and local races. That means that the Democrats that remain tend to be much more liberal, which means South Carolina Democrats’ influence on their party’s presidential nomination won’t stop their continued drift to the left, continuing the doom loop.
It’s part of the reason why South Carolina Republicans have beaten Democrats by over 20 percentage points on straight-ticket voting in the past two elections.
Democrat presidential wannabes would be better served by spending more time investigating why their party has lost touch with the average voter in South Carolina, and with Middle America in general. It’s become a party that’s driven more by the faculty lounge crowd than anyone who has a true sense of where most Americans really are on the issues.
GOP versus Democrat participation in the 2024 primary said it all: Republicans outpolled Democrats almost six times over (756,806 to 131,472) — even though Democrats had a sitting president on the ballot. Not exactly what you would call enthusiasm for what they’re selling.
But no matter what happens between now and the 2028 presidential campaign, one thing is certain: South Carolina will be at the center of it all.
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