SC Republicans banked on Trump. After Capitol riot, will they leave him behind?
A week after Americans cast their ballots in a historic presidential election that ultimately would declare Joe Biden the winner, South Carolina’s U.S. House Republicans stood together in the S.C. State House. They openly criticized what they called “election irregularities” in battleground states. They openly questioned the validity of President-elect Joe Biden’s win.
They were echoing President Donald Trump, who would continue his election fraud claims for weeks, spouting them before a sea of supporters who had gathered to protest Trump’s loss on the day Congress met to certify the Electoral College victory for Biden. The rally, six days into the new year, later turned violent and deadly when an angry mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The rioters hung on Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen. Some expressed an appetite to spark a revolution.
Now, days before Biden is sworn in as the next U.S. president, the Republican Party is reeling nationally: from losing the White House and the Senate, from Trump’s historic second impeachment, from criticism that Trump and his allies contributed to the violence Jan. 6 by perpetuating fraud allegations that have been rejected again and again in the courts. Deep divisions among Republicans are forming between Trump loyalists and those who see his repudiation as key to rebuilding the Grand Old Party.
Those divisions are playing out among South Carolina’s Republican members of Congress, too, who found themselves on varying sides of the issue. Hours after the Capitol riot, three of the state’s eight Republicans in Congress — Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott and Rep. Nancy Mace — voted to certify Biden’s win, while five — Reps. Jeff Duncan, Ralph Norman, Tom Rice, William Timmons and Joe Wilson — voted to challenge votes from two states.
And in a stunning reversal one week later, Rice of Myrtle Beach voted to impeach the president for his role in the Capitol breach.
The vote earned him support from across the aisle. But, by his own admission, it may also spell his doom in the party.
“You tell my constituents I love ’em, and it’s the honor of my life to do this job,” Rice told The Associated Press. “I’ve tried to do my best to do the right thing and represent their interests, but if they decide that it’s time for me to come home, that’s OK, too.”
Rice’s instinct is right, according to S.C. Republican leaders who warn of the potential cost of criticizing a president who still remains a favorite in South Carolina, especially among GOP primary voters.
State GOP chairman Drew McKissick told The State Thursday that Trump has raised more than $300 million since Election Day, which, he said, he expects to go into his PAC to support candidates in future elections.
“Our elected officials need to be right there with the president and the issues he addresses, that is what has driven growth,” he said.
Now more than a week later, tensions are high inside and outside the party as the country prepares to usher in a new president and, on down to the state level, Republicans wonder aloud how to ensure the rhetoric ceases to continue trickling down.
Days ahead of Biden’s inauguration, the FBI is warning all 50 states of the potential for armed protests, prompting security to shut down the South Carolina State House to the public and lawmakers to stay away from Columbia until the threat passes.
Verbal reckonings over whether Trump is to blame for the party’s problems are spilling over in county GOP meetings.
And some Republicans are pointing the finger at their party’s elected leaders saying they are in large part to blame, connecting their undeniable loyalty to the president for four years and the president’s unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud as reason that Jan. 6 happened in the first place.
Others worry about what it will mean for the party going forward and the electorate’s trust in the election process if Trump should remain the leader of a party that has suffered stunning losses under his watch.
”That legacy has now been wiped out,” Mace told The State. “It is gone, and we have to start over from scratch.”
Elected officials ‘have flat out lied to people’
South Carolina Republicans — whether they voted to certify or not — have found themselves now the targets of the left and right, some fielding shouts from angry mobs at the airport and others facing unified calls to resign their seats.
The lawmakers who voted against have rebuffed any suggestion they are to blame for Jan. 6.
“A loud minority have called me seditious and a traitor to my country,” said Rep. Duncan, of Laurens, who asked that rhetoric be “dialed back.” “They have suggested that I and some of my colleagues should be expelled from Congress for signing two amicus briefs in support of election integrity and for voting to object to electors. These accusations are revolting, politically motivated, and frankly, don’t even make sense.”
In his case, Rep. Timmons, of Greenville, pointed to his own constituents in the Upstate, a conservative red region.
“We have to represent the people. Our vote should represent our constituents,” he told The State. “The overwhelming majority of the 4th Congressional District wanted me to object and that is what I did. I would probably say in Mace’s case, the overwhelming majority of her constituents did not want her to object.”
But even those who voted to certify, calling their colleagues’ votes into question, have walked a fine line in dumping the president.
“Enough’s enough. We gotta end it,” Graham said in a speech on the Senate floor hours after the riots.
Days later, videos of people swarming Graham and calling him “traitor” inside Reagan Washington National Airport went viral.
Soon after, Graham was back on Air Force One with Trump to Texas.
“I want to spend time with the president as he winds down his administration. I wanted to be there when he told the story of how he secured the border,” Graham told reporters Friday. “The president has become my friend. What he did Wednesday, Jan. 6, I think was wrong on many levels. I don’t want to tar the movement with the actions of the rioters. He is still the president of the United States. I will continue to talk to him and hope to have a relationship with him when this is all said and done.”
And he denounced efforts to impeach, calling it unlawful.
“It’s never been done before for a reason. It sets up a never-ending retribution,” Graham said. “I don’t believe the words of the president were criminal. I think they were a big mistake. I think his presence there was wrong.”
Voters have demanded more.
On Monday, about a dozen protesters stood outside Rep. Wilson’s West Columbia office, asking the Springdale Republican to denounce more forcefully the rhetoric that led to the deadly Capitol riot.
Abdullah Mustafa, a retired Army veteran from Columbia, questioned if the mostly white rioters who forced their way inside the Capitol and occupied it for hours would have been treated so lightly by police if they had been Black and protesting racial injustice.
“Impeachment means nothing to Black America,” Mustafa said. “I want them to get the same treatment we get.”
Republicans have too demanded more of their own leaders.
“Look, Joe Biden won and, since Nov. 5, elected officials have flat out lied to people and told people (the election) was stolen, and it wasn’t,” said state Rep. West Cox, an Anderson Republican who watched some of his Republican colleagues this week stand in what some lawmakers who were there said amounted to a loyalty pledge to Trump, rejecting COVID-19 mandates and the Biden administration. “It was a legitimate election, and this was another instance where elected officials had a chance to tell people the truth and they didn’t.”
SC Republicans weigh Trump support in elections ahead
The calculus Republicans must perform to decide whether to attach themselves to the outgoing president or repel him will be tested particularly in 2022. Then, voters will decide elections for South Carolina’s seven U.S. House seats and 124 State House seats.
Gov. Henry McMaster, the first statewide elected official in the nation to endorse Trump’s 2016 bid, will also face reelection.
Having Trump on their side could be beneficial.
Trump remains popular in South Carolina. He first won the state in 2016 with almost 55% of the vote, gaining more GOP voters — nearly 230,000 more — last November when he won the state, again, with 55% of the vote, or by nearly 12 percentage points.
Because of that popularity, South Carolina Republicans will have to walk a fine line, observers say.
As an example, the Friday after the riots, McMaster was asked by a reporter from The State whether he would welcome Trump back to South Carolina to help his 2022 bid, similar to his invitation in 2018 ahead of a tight runoff with businessman John Warren.
Instead, the governor avoided answering either way, telling reporters the president was due some rest.
But, he said,” back in those days in 2018, around the country, I’ve never seen such excitement about a candidate.”
“You’ve got to remember, most of the Republican districts are pretty gerrymandered, and so that means the primary is the main election,” said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University political scientist who directs the Winthrop Poll. “The biggest challenge they face will be among the most hardcore elements of their own party in the primary, and to them, Trump and his message are still highly relevant. As long as primary voters respond to internal polling by saying they like Trump and they agree with Trump, then Trump is going to absolutely remain important to those politics.”
Whether he worries, though, about fallout over Trump’s actions, GOP chairman McKissick told The State there’s always an opportunity to message better. But he pointed to the state party’s growth over the last four years, a credit, he said, to Trump.
If by 2022, “Trump is still a free man and has the support of hardcore Republicans, then you kind of need to watch your mouth,” Huffmon said of Republicans. “If you’re planning to run for president in 2024, then you’re able to walk a wider path and avoid some of the potential pitfalls and potholes.”
Former Gov. Nikki Haley, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, may be using that strategy.
The former Trump administration official told a closed-door meeting of the Republican National Committee this month that the president “has not always chosen the right words,” from Charlottesville to the events on Jan. 6.
“And it wasn’t just his words. His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” Haley said, according to POLITICO.
Rice is unlikely to get the same treatment as Republicans running for president in a country whose popular vote went to Trump’s Democratic opponent in 2016 and in November.
“I think it probably goes well without saying he is guaranteed a primary,” McKissick said.
Graham, on the other hand, Huffmon said, has another six years to figure out how he will respond. That will include trying to be a power broker with the Biden administration now that the Senate is split, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the deciding vote.
“He’s got six years to find religion again before he has to run,” Huffmon said.
State Sen. Josh Kimbrell, R-Sartanburg, who hosted a conservative radio show, predicted Trump will very much still be a factor in S.C. Republican politics years from now.
“But he’s not the only factor,” said Kimbrell, one of five Republicans to flip a State House in November. “You’ll have a lot of conservative leaders in Congress push back on what could be a fairly radical agenda. I think South Carolina’s going to be responsive to anybody in the Republican Party.”
He said that means defending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, rejecting proposals to expand the Supreme Court or making D.C. a state.
“Anybody that fights for that will be a hero to South Carolina and a hero to me.”
Reporter Bristow Marchant contributed to this report.
This story was originally published January 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "SC Republicans banked on Trump. After Capitol riot, will they leave him behind?."
