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Human Events
The Most
Important State in the 2016 Primary
George Will
Friday Dec 4, 2015
Sen. Tim Scott, who evidently has not received the memo explaining that
politics is a grim and bitter business, laughs easily and often, as
when, during lunch in this city’s humming downtown, he explains that
South Carolina’s Lowcountry is benefiting from what are called
“halfbacks.” These are migrants who moved from Northern states to
Florida in search of warmth but, finding high prices and congestion,
then moved halfway back, settling in South Carolina. Doing so, they
have located in the state where, Scott believes and history suggests,
the 2016 Republican presidential nomination will begin to come to
closure.
Since picking Ronald Reagan over John Connally and George H.W. Bush in
1980, South Carolina’s Republican primary electorate has sided with the
eventual nominee every four years, with the exception of 2012, when
Newt Gingrich from neighboring Georgia was rewarded for denouncing as
“despicable” a journalist’s question during a debate here. This year,
South Carolina votes just 10 days before the selection of convention
delegates accelerates with the March 1 “SEC primary,” so named because
five of the 12 primariesthat day are in Southern states represented in
that football conference.
The Human Snarl, a.k.a. Donald Trump, is leading polls here, where
South Carolinians share the national consensus that, in Scott’s mild
words, “however it is today is not the way it should be.” But it
remains to be seen whether Republicans will vote for Trump while so
warmly embracing the senator who is his stylistic antithesis. Scott is
“an unbridled optimist” (his description) who thinks Republican chances
in 2016 depend on whether their nominee is an “aspirational leader” or
someone “selling fear.” Scott’s un-Trumpian demeanor is both a cause
and an effect of his popularity: He was elected with 61 percent of the
vote last year to complete the term of a senator who resigned. Which is
why 13 of the Republican presidential candidates have eagerly accepted
his invitations to hold town meetings with him. He took Ohio Gov. John
Kasich to Hilton Head because it has so many Ohioans, some of them
halfbacks. All the candidates covet Scott’s endorsement, which will
happen only if, as the Feb. 20 vote draws near, polls show a close
race, perhaps a four-point difference between the leaders.
This could be a choice between two of Scott’s Senate colleagues,
Florida’s Florida Man and Texas’s Ted Cruz. If, he says, South
Carolinians choose well — “not sending independents fleeing in the
opposite direction” — the United States will be en route to a
Republican presidency...
Read the rest of the article at Human Events
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