It’s the most repeated meme on cable news the past 24 hours: The South Carolina primary has picked every nominee since 1980, with the exception of Newt Gingrich in 2012. Every candidate who, like Donald Trump, has won New Hampshire and South Carolina has gone on to become the GOP nominee.
The facts are indisputable. But the analysis and conclusions are utterly wrong. This was not Poppy Bush’s South Carolina primary.
I spent most of the 1990s working full-time as a GOP political consultant and flack in my home state of South Carolina. In fact, my very first political job was as Pat Buchanan’s statewide coordinator in the Palmetto State. I had even volunteered for a campaign before, so I was stunned to get a phone call from a mutual friend who made the following pitch:
“Michael, Pat Buchanan can’t find anyone in South Carolina to run his campaign. Gov. Carroll Campbell has spread the word to every consultant in the state that, if you work for Pat, he’ll crush your career. So Pat told me ‘Find me someone who’s smart enough to run my campaign and dumb enough to take the job.’ Michael—you’re the first person I thought of!”
Thus a political career was born.
A few months later the Buchanan Brigades marched into New Hampshire and got 40 percent of the vote against a sitting Republican president, then ran into Carroll Campbell’s South Carolina firewall. Campbell was that rarest of creatures: a southern Republican with an actual political machine. He controlled the Chamber of Commerce and Christian Coalition leadership and was able to deliver votes to weakened, establishment Republicans just days before Super Tuesday—a jolt of momentum that carried H.W. Bush, Dole, and W. to the nomination.
I hate to break it to CNN and Fox News, but that’s not what happened in South Carolina this year.
There are two things that the previous South Carolina winners (excluding Newt) have in common: They were all backed by the Washington establishment, and they all were candidates acceptable to the vast majority of Republican voters. GOP voters may have been less-than-enthusiastic about the Bushes or Bob Dole or John McCain in 2008, but all these candidates started their respective races as front-runners with widespread support. Win or lose in South Carolina, they all had the money, organization a voter support to be competitive on Super Tuesday.
That was the point of the South Carolina firewall: to rescue weak establishment candidates. Trump is neither. His victory in South Carolina wasn’t part of the history of the Palmetto’s state in the nominating process. It’s the ultimate repudiation of it.
Trump’s win in South Carolina is impressive, it certainly reflects on the real character of Republican voters in South Carolina (particularly in light of Newt’s drubbing of Mitt four years ago), and it’s a boost to his campaign. But it doesn’t turn him into a consensus GOP candidate that the GOP will rally around.
When Bush stopped McCain in South Carolina, or McCain beat Huckabee eight years later, it was easy for many of the losing candidates’ voters to migrate to the winner. Trump, on the other hand, has all the votes he’s going to get. His 30 percent is impervious to other candidates’ appeals (not to mention logic, fact, and reason); while the 40 percent of Republicans who’ve told pollsters they’ll never back Trump isn’t going anywhere, either.
Trump leaves South Carolina with the same problem he had when he got there: His floor is his ceiling. He was a 30 percent candidate going in and coming out. And 30 percent isn’t a winning number in a winnowed field.
Oh, one more fact about South Carolina that helps explain the grassroots’ anger at the establishment: While Gov. Campbell’s machine succeeded in rescuing the Washington establishment’s nominees, can you name the last non-incumbent Republican to win South Carolina and go on to win the popular vote in November?
Ronald Reagan in 1980.
That’s a lot of losers for a small state like South Carolina.
