South Carolina is known throughout the United States for its beaches, its golf courses, its boiled peanut recipe and its infallibility in selecting candidates in primaries, especially Republicans. Since 1980, they have been strategically positioned among the first in the long campaign cycle leading up to the November presidential election. Their voters failed only once: in 2012, they chose Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney, the man ultimately chosen to run against (and lose) then-President Barack Obama.
This Saturday, South Carolina will decide whether to award the conservative party delegates to fellow Republican Nikki Haley, who was also the party's governor between 2011 and 2017, or to former President Donald Trump, who is seeking a return to the White House. Of the 14 candidates who started the race for the Republican nomination, only two remain. Along the way, all the polls say, the emotion also remained: This week's polls gave the tycoon a lead of more than 30 points, although Haley has promised that this weekend will not be the end of his retreat. He warned that this will last until the Michigan primary, which will take place in a few days, and also until the famous Super Tuesday, when a flood of votes takes place across the country (15 states decide 874 of the 2,429 Republican delegates ). . It is the date that usually decides whether both parties vote. And everything indicates that in the great déjà vu of this 2024 they will have printed the repeat of the confrontation of the 2020 elections, in which Joe Biden defeated Trump.
A girl attends a Nikki Haley rally in Georgetown, South Carolina last Thursday. BRIAN SNYDER (Portal)
In the language of the primaries, South Carolina has its own nickname: It is the first in the South, the first in the South, this time following the Republican nominations of the Iowa caucuses, the primaries of both parties in New Hampshire and the somewhat chaotic duplicity of the Nevada primaries/caucuses. In all of these cases, Trump easily prevailed, and at a rally he held Friday upstate, in Rock Hill, he assumed he would do it again here and that he deserved it. what traditionally comes after this victory. : that the entire party rallies behind his candidacy.
“The prestige of our primaries comes not only from their high success rate, but also from the fact that Iowa and New Hampshire are accustomed to selecting different candidates.” “We tend to play a decisive role in the tiebreaker,” explains H. Gibbs Knott, professor of political science at the College of Charleston and co-author of “First in the South: Why South Carolina Presidential Primary Matters,” in a telephone interview: Why South Carolina's presidential primary matters. “Things are completely different now,” he admits, “these are very atypical elections.” Firstly because of the eccentric figure Trump, who changes everything. And secondly, because we haven’t even taken part in a debate between the two candidates.”
Knott notes that South Carolina has a special, if different, meaning for each party. For Republicans, their primaries are a near-perfect crystal ball, giving them insight into the preferences of Southern voters that are crucial to winning the presidential election. For the Democrats, it is the first state to have a significant proportion of black voters, a population group that usually falls on the left: at 27.09%, it is the fifth state with the highest proportion of African-American population in the Union country. .
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“Demographically, it’s very different than Iowa, New Hampshire or even Nevada. And that makes it much more similar to the country as a whole,” Caitlin E. Jewitt, a professor at Virginia Tech University and author of an essay on the presidential election process, said in a telephone conversation.
Democratic maneuvers
Jewitt recalls that this is why the Democratic Party tried to put the South Carolina event at the top of the calendar this year. Whoever votes first, the expert warns, is important for their ability to steer the dispute because of “the media attention they receive.” Also for the money that comes with several candidates still at the height of their campaigns, as well as the hotels, rental cars and other expenses incurred by the legion of reporters on the ground.
Barack Obama in the presidential election campaign that led him to the White House in June 2008. Scott Olson (Getty Images)
Had Biden won, New Hampshire would have lost all of this, so local Democratic leaders fought tooth and nail to prevent their prominent leadership position from being stolen from them. They finally held their primary on January 23, but because of this dispute, Biden did not register on time and his name did not appear on the ballot. He didn't campaign either, but he won. He wasn't particularly noticeable a few weeks later in South Carolina, where he received 96.2% of the vote in a vote with unusually low turnout.
“However, the Democrats came too late to the party in South Carolina,” Knott clarifies. They held their first meetings in 1988 and adopted the primary system four years later. They usually hit the target too. Since then, they have failed only once in their predictions of who the candidate for the White House would be, when they chose John Edwards in 2004 (rather than John Kerry, who lost to George Bush Jr.).
Ronald Reagan, in the 1980 Iowa caucuses. Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)
Ronald Reagan played an integral role in fueling Republican enthusiasm for elections in this southern state. “He was elected in 1980 and his options weren’t clear at the time,” Knott said. “The fact that he left here blessed and later became a tremendous reference of American conservatism and a president who served his two terms added to the prestige of these primaries,” adds the expert, who also remembers the case by Obama: His 2008 victory in South Carolina against Hillary Clinton led to an unusual candidacy that ultimately led him to the White House, also for two terms.
There are fewer surprises this year. It is very unlikely that Haley will divert Trump from the clear path that will lead him (barring a very unlikely disqualification, which is in the hands of the Supreme Court) to a new confrontation with Biden. What then is Haley looking for in her efforts to make it to Super Tuesday? “He's probably increasing his national profile with the idea of maybe running in 2028; “By the time that happens, he will have already set up his campaign organization,” says Jewitt, who brings into the equation a “question of principle” on which “powerful donors who have not yet lost patience” appear to be supporting him. “I also think he wants to show that there is still a Republican Party that disagrees with the former president's manners,” he added. The only certainty is that Haley won't have an easy time getting that message across in the middle of the eye of Hurricane Trump.
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