S.C. GOP overlooks ethnicity

CHARLESTON -- A woman of Indian descent nearly wins the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial nomination outright while a black Republican state lawmaker heads to a runoff after polling first in a coastal congressional district.

This week's primary results in South Carolina indicate a Republican Party growing more diverse in a state that continues to distance a past rooted in the darkness of slavery and segregation.

Republican state Rep. Nikki Haley, a daughter of Sikh immigrants, three-term state lawmaker and tea party favorite, overcame unproven allegations of infidelity and a racial slur leveled at her to almost capture the GOP nomination outright.

Making her 49 percent showing even more stunning was that she did it against two established GOP candidates who had already been elected statewide and a sitting congressman.

"Forty years ago she would have never made it this far, being a woman, being a minority and being someone who was not born into the Christian faith," said Winthrop University political scientist Scott Huffmon.

"The fact that she was in it and the fact she almost won it talks about the changes in the state," he said, adding voters now seem more concerned about issues than skin color and ethnic background.

Haley faces a June 22 runoff against U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett.

If she wins and carries the general election in this red state, she becomes the state's first female governor and the nation's second governor of Indian-American descent.

Besides two men accusing her of infidelity - which she vehemently denied - a state lawmaker who backed one of her opponents called her a "raghead." "I do think the establishment, whoever they might be, wanted to push their positions and committed an unforgivable sin in an attack on a woman," said Lonnie Randolph, the president of the state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"That angered a lot of folks."

He said the allegations leveled against Haley by a blogger and a political operative "did come across as though it was a sexist race - a race where the gender that has dominated this state from the first governor until now wanted to keep it that way."

In the 1st District on the coast, state Rep. Tim Scott, the only black Republican state lawmaker in South Carolina, faces Paul Thurmond, the son of the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, who once ran for president on a segregationist platform.

Thurmond on Wednesday picked up a key endorsement in the race, that of Carroll Campbell III, the son of the late Gov. Carroll Campbell who finished third in the nine-way primary in the coastal district reaching from near Charleston north to the North Carolina state line.

The contest pitting a Thurmond against a black man is drawing interest from afar.

A BBC Radio crew was in North Charleston to capture Scott's election night reaction.

Incumbent U.S. Rep. Henry Brown is retiring after 10 years in Washington. He didn't give up politics, though, and ran for Berkeley County Supervisor where he also finds himself in a runoff after Tuesday's balloting.

Scott's campaign signs say he is the conservative Republican in the race.

"Even conservative whites don't worry as much about skin color as they did 20 years ago," Huffmon said, adding that positions seem much more important to GOP voters.

"The rise of Tim Scott, Glenn McCall in York County who is on the National Republican Committee and Nikki Haley - to conservative Republicans these are not so much people of color but people of the right ideology," he said.

South Carolina GOP executive director Joel Sawyer said this year 11 women and minorities filed for GOP primaries for statewide and federal offices. Only seven filed in all other primaries since 2000, he said.