Who we are, and who we look like

The nation looks to South Carolina every four years to see what we have to say about the presidential race. I look to the presidential race to see what it says about South Carolina, and this year’s picture wasn’t particularly flattering.

Last week’s primary had a lot less in common with four years ago, when Republicans nominated one of the most honorable people I’ve ever met and Democrats embraced a message of hope, than with 2000, when we essentially ended John McCain’s first presidential bid after a well-orchestrated smear campaign alleged that his adopted Bengali-born daughter was biologically his own illegitimate black child and that he had given secrets to his Vietnamese captors, and spread lies about his positions on hot-button issues.

What happened this year was tame by comparison, and less clear cut. Certainly, and the nation knows this, some South Carolinians were genuinely attracted to Newt Gingrich’s big ideas and his pugnacious style. Others liked his Republican version of the Occupy Wall Street message, and what red-blooded Republican wouldn’t relish his assault on the media? He probably benefitted from his own Will Folks moment, when voters were just so disgusted with what they saw as an unfair allegation about his sex life that they threw their support behind him.

But make no mistake about it: For much of the nation, the take-away from South Carolina is that our state rushed to embrace Mr. Gingrich after he used an obviously, if not overtly, race-based appeal to whip a Myrtle Beach crowd into a frenzy during the nationally televised Martin Luther King Day debate. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there they go again.

Here’s what the overwhelming majority of us can all feel good about: 91 percent of S.C. voters did not support Mr. Gingrich.

And if you really don’t like Mr. Gingrich, try this one: He received 600,000 fewer votes in our state than Barack Obama did in 2008.

Yes, you read that right. Even though this year’s turnout of 603,000 was the highest ever in a S.C. Republican (or Democratic) presidential primary, it still amounted to just 21 percent of the state’s registered voters. And Mr. Gingrich’s 243,000 votes were just 40 percent of that 21 percent — or a little less than 9 percent of the state’s 2.8 million registered voters.

The point isn’t that Mr. Obama is or was popular in South Carolina. Sen. McCain trounced him four years ago, winning more than 1 million votes to Mr. Obama’s 860,000. And whoever wins the Republican nomination — even if it’s Mr. Gingrich — will do the same this year.

The point is that it is a tiny portion of South Carolinians who speak for our state in presidential primaries. Even four years ago, when both parties had fiercely competitive primaries, just 45 percent of the state’s registered voters participated.

Whether it’s a Republican or a Democratic primary, a presidential or a state primary, primary voters simply are not South Carolina. They are a small, self-selected part of South Carolina. In Saturday’s primary, they were much older, wealthier, better educated, more partisan and more conservative than South Carolina.

Although they don’t tell us anything about South Carolina as a whole, the results do tell us something about the Republican electorate, probably half of which turned out. A third of the primary voters have had someone in their household laid off in the past three years, underscoring the breadth of the recession’s toll on our state. The other surprise was that a third of them think abortion should be always or mostly legal, although that number is probably inflated a bit by the anti-war faction of the Paulinistas.

Feeling better now?

Sober up, then, because the rest of the nation doesn’t care that 60 percent of the people who voted Saturday picked someone other than Mr. Gingrich. Doesn’t make the distinction between Republican primary voters and voters in general. We are, after all, among the reddest of the red states, the thinking goes, so what difference could there possibly be? Certainly no one will distinguish between S.C. Republican primary voters and the larger population of S.C. adults. Add in the 700,000 adults who aren’t registered to vote, and the turnout drops to 17 percent of the 18-and-older population, and Mr. Gingrich’s hold on South Carolinians drops to 7 percent.

Mr. Gingrich carried South Carolina, and that’s all that matters to anybody outside of South Carolina.

Check that. They care that he didn’t just beat Mr. Romney but pummeled him. Turned an 11-point deficit into a 13-point victory. In just five days. And the tide started turning in the midst of the Myrtle Beach debate. That’s the take-away. That’s who we are.

That might seem unfair, but the fact is that when it comes to elections, the only people who matter are the ones who vote. They get to speak for our state. If those of you who didn’t vote don’t like what the nation thinks about us today, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Contact Scoppe, associate editor at The (Columbia) State, at cscoppe@thestate.com.