The first night of the Republican National Convention highlighted a major, unnoticed theme of our politics that wasn’t really talked about during the Democratic convention last week: The state of South Carolina is setting the future of our politics.
Sen. Tim Scott and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley both received rave reviews for their speeches at the RNC. Haley provided America with a strong voice on human rights at the United Nations and resigned from the Trump administration well-liked by every major faction of the party. Scott has led the GOP Senate on police reform and pushed the successful opportunity zones into the tax bill, a provision that has been repeatedly praised by President Trump in his reelection campaign.
In Haley and Scott, the GOP has seen one of its potential futures, one where the party coalesces around a conservative vision with a populist flavor. The two factions of the party are not irreconcilable; both Haley and Scott backed Marco Rubio in the 2016 primary, yet they’ve managed to work successfully with Trump while maintaining their conservative vision.
But South Carolina hasn’t just set the focus of the Republican Party. It also has shifted the trajectory of the Democrats. It’s easy to forget, but Bernie Sanders looked dangerously close to winning the Democratic nomination before South Carolina threw its weight behind Joe Biden and permanently shifted the course of the presidential primary.
Biden’s platform is indeed progressive, but Sanders is still far more radical and frequently surrounds himself with awful surrogates such as Shaun King. Sanders’s outsized influence on the Democratic platform is nothing compared to letting the biggest American cheerleader of communist tyrants write the platform himself. South Carolina has offered Republicans a bright future beyond Trump and saved Democrats from running full speed down the path of socialism, if only for now.
Perhaps neither party takes the path laid out by the Palmetto State. A Biden loss could bury the moderates under the anger of the Sanders wing, and the Republican Party is in an unpredictable state right now. But South Carolina has shown Republicans what their future should look like and has shown Democrats what their future definitely should not.
