We’re starting nearly at scratch when it comes to knowing what’s happening in the South Carolina Republican presidential race. As of Thursday afternoon, the most recent survey in the RealClearPolitics average of polls in the state was completed January 23 — more than a week before the Iowa caucuses, and more than two weeks before the New Hampshire primary.
What effect did those two contests have on the South Carolina GOP electorate? We don’t know. New polls will be out soon, but it will take a while before there are enough to have a reliable sense of where things stand.
Local GOP politicos believe the basic order reflected in older South Carolina polls — Donald Trump in the lead, Ted Cruz in second, Marco Rubio in third — still stands, but they can’t guess how close the contenders are to each other.
South Carolina Republicans have long prided themselves on voting for the candidate who eventually becomes the party’s nominee. It happened in every presidential race between 1980 and 2008. And then came 2012, when Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary and proceeded to go … mostly nowhere.
“I don’t know which it’s going to be,” said Clemson University’s David Woodard, who conducts the respected Palmetto Poll, in a phone conversation Thursday. “Are we going to see the old South Carolina that picked winners all those years, or are we going to pick a Newt Gingrich?”
The biggest question in a South Carolina GOP primary is what evangelical Christian voters will do. They’re a diverse lot. In 2012, according to exit polls, evangelicals made up 65 percent of the South Carolina Republican electorate. Gingrich won evangelicals, with 44 percent, with Mitt Romney second at 22 percent and Rick Santorum — the favorite of Iowa evangelicals who won that state’s caucuses in 2012 — in third place with 21 percent.
There’s so much diversity among evangelicals because the term covers such a large number of South Carolina voters. Maybe it’s oversimplifying a little, but in South Carolina, “evangelical” is pretty much another word for “Christian.” “Even the denominations that are liberal in other places are evangelicals here,” Oran Smith, head of the evangelical Palmetto Family Council, told me in a phone conversation Thursday.
With an eye toward the current race, Smith divided evangelicals into several groups.
1) If you’re an evangelical worried about your job, about paying the bills, about American workers getting beaten up by foreign competition, you’re in Trump territory.
2) If you’re an evangelical who digs a little deeper into the values issues, if the Supreme Court gay marriage decision has made you determined to protect religious liberty, you’re in Cruz territory.
3) If you’re an evangelical who’s a little more analytical and believes the GOP can’t win states like Colorado and Virginia with an ideologue for a candidate, you’re in Rubio territory.
4) If you’re an evangelical who has always loved the Bushes — well, that’s pretty obvious.
They’re all evangelicals, and they’re all different.
Smith has a theory. No, evangelicals do not see Trump, with his three marriages, casinos, and occasionally foul mouth, as one of their own. But they feel increasingly under siege by the forces of liberal secularism, and they’re looking for a strong leader to defend them.
“The thinking is, ‘Of course, he’s not a believer,'” Smith told me. “But they say, ‘We need this secular leader to be forceful to preserve our way of life. He’s not one of us, but he’s out there protecting us.'”
The theory could play out on election day. Or perhaps something will happen in the next few days that changes everything.
It did in 2012. The final debate before the primary that year was a high-wire act — it was held on January 19 before the voting January 21. There was basically no time for the debate to sink in before voters went to the polls.
In that debate, CNN’s John King opened with a question about Gingrich’s former marriage. Gingrich proceeded to turn things around on King and deliver a media beatdown unrivalled in Republican debates. The crowd went wild, and at that moment the race tilted toward Gingrich.
“It was the debate that turned the whole primary,” recalled David Woodard. “I was polling at the time, and Romney was well ahead of Gingrich. After that, Gingrich just shot up.”
Today’s volatile cast of leading contenders — Trump, Cruz, Rubio — has the potential to do something completely different but just as consequential.
South Carolina prides itself as the “First in the South” primary. It’s where Republican candidates prove themselves in the region that has become the GOP’s most solid source of support. The two previous contests in Iowa and New Hampshire tell us a little bit about how the race will go from here. But South Carolina has always had a mind of its own.
