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      Supreme Court to Consider South Carolina Voting Map Ruled a Racial Gerrymander

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      A unanimous three-judge panel found that a congressional voting district anchored in Charleston, S.C., violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would decide whether a congressional voting district in South Carolina should be restored after a lower court struck it down as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., ruled in January that the state’s First Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.The district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.The lawmakers achieved that goal, the panel found, in part by the “bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”The new House map moved 62 percent of Black voters in Charleston County from the First District to the Sixth District, a seat that Representative James E. Clyburn, a Black Democrat, has held for 30 years.The move helped make the new First District a Republican stronghold. In November, Nancy Mace, the Republican incumbent, won re-election by 14 percentage points.Republican lawmakers acknowledged that they had redrawn the First District for partisan gain. But they said they had not considered race in the process.The panel ruled that the district’s boundaries must be redrawn before future elections are held. But the panel rejected challenges to two other House voting districts, saying that civil rights groups had failed to demonstrate that the districts had been predominantly drawn to dilute Black voting power.The Supreme Court has called for very close scrutiny of a state’s actions when race was shown to be the predominant reason in drawing legislative districts. That principle, rooted in the Constitution’s equal protection clause, is often invoked to limit the creation of districts that empower minority voters.In the new case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., No. 22-807, the challenge came from the opposite direction, saying that the map hurt Black voters by moving them from one congressional district to another.The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to allow a congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers in Alabama. A lower court had said the map diluted the power of Black voters, violating the Voting Rights Act. The South Carolina case poses different questions, centered on the Constitution’s equal protection principles.In their Supreme Court appeal, South Carolina Republicans argued that the panel should have presumed that they had acted in good faith, as required by Supreme Court precedent, and analyzed the district as a whole.“The result,” the lawmakers wrote, quoting from an earlier decision, “is a thinly reasoned order that presumes bad faith, erroneously equates the purported racial effect of a single line in Charleston County with racial predominance across District 1, and is riddled with ‘legal mistakes’ that improperly relieved plaintiffs of their ‘demanding’ burden to prove that race was the ‘predominant consideration.’”The challengers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the justices that “the panel correctly found that race was the gerrymander’s primary vehicle.”“That predominant reliance on race is impermissible even if mapmakers used race as a proxy for politics,” the challengers’ brief said. More

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      Representative Nancy Mace Is Trying to Change the Republican Party

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      It was just after Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, had fired off a blunt text to the No. 3 House G.O.P. leader — featuring two f-bombs and four demands that needed to be met to gain her vote for the party’s debt limit plan — that she experienced a momentary flash of dread.“Now I’ll look like a flip-flopper,” Ms. Mace worried aloud.Speaker Kevin McCarthy was planning within hours to hold a vote on his proposal to lift the debt ceiling for a year in exchange for spending cuts and policy changes, and Ms. Mace had just published an op-ed declaring herself a hard no. Now the second-term congresswoman from a swing district, who had already established something of a reputation for publicly breaking with her party but ultimately falling in line behind its policies, was privately negotiating her way to yes.Ms. Mace would, in fact, vote for the bill after meeting with Mr. McCarthy and extracting several promises from him, including to hold future votes on two of her top priorities: addressing gun violence and women’s issues related to contraceptives and adoption. She anticipated criticism for the turnabout, but consoled herself with the fact that she had leveraged her vote to force her party to take on issues she cared about.“This is a way I can drive the debate,” she said as she walked back to her office. “It’s a way of using my position to push those issues.”It was a typical day for Ms. Mace, 45, who represents Charleston and the Lowcountry along South Carolina’s coast, and whose political profile — she is a fiscal conservative but leans toward the center on some social issues — puts her at odds with the hard-right Republicans who now dominate the House.Ms. Mace has said Republicans will lose control of the House if they fail to temper their most extreme stances on abortion and guns.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesMs. Mace, who last year beat a Trump-backed candidate in a primary, is constantly pivoting as she figures out how to survive and play a meaningful role as a mainstream Republican in today’s MAGA-heavy House G.O.P., where extreme members of the party have greater power than ever.She often styles herself as a maverick independent in the mold of Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat whose tendency to buck his party has earned him outsize power in the closely divided chamber — and the political fame that goes with it. But she has built the voting record of a mostly reliable Republican foot soldier, even as she publicly criticizes her own party and racks up television hits and social media clicks. And Ms. Mace — savvy and irreverent — has become fluent in the art of the political troll, finding ways to signal to the MAGA base that she hasn’t forsaken it.She has repeatedly, and baselessly, accused the Biden family of being involved in “prostitution rings.”Above all, Ms. Mace, a high school dropout and former Waffle House waitress who went on to become the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, is hyper-aware of how she is perceived and of her precarious place in her party.Ms. Mace with her father, J. Emory Mace, a retired Army brigadier general. She was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel.Paula Illingworth/Associated PressDuring Mr. McCarthy’s prolonged fight for this job, Ms. Mace and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — who have publicly feuded — huddled together on the House floor chatting about how to secure his victory. When a male lawmaker noticed them and said their joint effort was something Republicans would like to see more of, Ms. Mace dryly disagreed.“Who do you think you’re kidding?” she said. “The only thing people want to see of me and Marjorie is if we’re wrestling in Jell-O.”Behind all the tacking back and forth, Ms. Mace insisted, a bigger project is at work. She said she was trying to create a model for a “reasonable” and re-electable Republican in a purple district, and demonstrating that there was a path to winning back moderate and independent voters.“I’m trying to show how you can bring conservatives and independents along to be on the same page,” she said. “Americans want us to work together. That’s not what’s happening. There’s very little that we’ve done that’s going to get across the finish line to Biden’s desk to sign.”Ms. Mace has yet to prove that it’s possible.The debt ceiling vote was the third time in four months that Ms. Mace had publicly threatened to break with her party on an issue where her vote was critical, before ultimately falling in line. In January, Ms. Mace had threatened to oppose the House rules package for the new Republican majority, but ended up supporting it. She had said she would oppose removing Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from the Foreign Affairs Committee, but reversed course.In both instances, she insisted that she had pried promises from Mr. McCarthy in exchange for her support, such as a vow to institute due process for committee removals in the future. She is aware of the danger of becoming the congresswoman who cried wolf.“Every handshake I’ve taken with Kevin has been legit,” she said of the speaker. “I haven’t gotten rolled. If I were to get rolled, I’d go nuclear. I’m just trying to move the ball in the right direction — that’s what matters to me.”Some of her constituents view her tactics in a less flattering light.Ms. Mace, who has two teenage children, says she does not have any hobbies and rarely takes vacations.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times“You live around Nancy long enough, she will talk about being bipartisan and reaching across the aisle and working together until the cows come home,” said David Rubin, a Democrat and a retiree who moved to the district six years ago and attended a “coffee with your congresswoman” event with Ms. Mace last week in Summerville. “When it comes down to the actual votes, she always sticks with the party.”A Strategy to ‘Shut Up’Ms. Mace voted to certify the 2020 election and vociferously condemned President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but she did not join the small group of Republicans who supported his impeachment. These days, she avoids the subject of Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, at all costs.“I’ll support the nominee — that’s what I say,” she said while talking on the phone in her car between events in her district. “And then I shut up.”That silence is a deliberate contrast to former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, another Republican who tried to move her party — and failed miserably, ultimately losing her seat because she refused to stay quiet about her unrelenting opposition to Mr. Trump and his election lies. In fact, Ms. Mace ultimately joined Republicans in voting to oust Ms. Cheney from her leadership post.Still, as Ms. Cheney did in her final days in Congress, Ms. Mace regularly warns her party that it is at risk of losing its way. She argues that Republicans will lose control of the House if they fail to temper their most extreme stances on abortion and guns.“Signing a six-week ban that puts women who are victims of rape and girls who are victims of incest in a hard spot isn’t the way to change hearts and minds,” Ms. Mace said last month on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” responding to a new six-week abortion ban instituted by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. “It’s not compassionate.”On guns, she supports improved alert systems and stronger background checks.But Ms. Mace has also co-sponsored legislation that would ban transgender women and girls from participating in athletic programs designated for women. On fiscal issues, she is aligned with the hard-right Freedom Caucus.And while she criticized Republicans for choosing an abortion-related bill as one of their first acts in the majority, saying it would hurt the party and alienate many of her constituents, she voted for the legislation, which could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties.Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who serves with Ms. Mace on the Oversight Committee, said he found her effective in trying to find common ground while working within the constraints of her party.“She doesn’t do things that would marginalize her and make her completely ineffective in her party,” Mr. Khanna said. “There’s only so much she can do to push the party. If the Republican conference had everyone of Nancy Mace’s temperament and ideology, we’d be in a much better place in our country.”Yet Ms. Mace’s approach comes with political risks.In 2020, she won election to Congress by narrowly defeating a Democrat. Last year, she won by 14 points, after her district was redrawn to make the electorate more conservative. But the seat could shift again in 2024; federal judges ordered South Carolina to redraw its congressional maps after ruling that the lines split Black neighborhoods and diluted their votes in the last election.Ms. Mace represents Charleston and the Lowcountry along South Carolina’s coast.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesConservative voters in her district are increasingly skeptical of Ms. Mace.“Sometimes I think she speaks out, particularly on the abortion thing, she needs to let that go,” said Paula Arrington, a retiree who attended an event with Ms. Mace in her district last week and who is of no relation to Ms. Mace’s former Trump-backed challenger, Katie Arrington. “We’re real conservatives and we support the Republican Party.”‘Nasty,’ ‘Disloyal’ and VictoriousOver a skinny margarita and tacos at a waterside restaurant in Mount Pleasant near her district office, Ms. Mace credited Mr. Trump with fueling her political rise, but unlike other Republicans, it was his wrath — not his backing — that made the difference.She worked for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, but after she broke sharply with him after the Jan. 6 attack, the former president called her “nasty” and “disloyal.” He supported her opponent in last year’s Republican primary, in which he savaged Ms. Mace for fighting with her own party and said she was “despised by almost everyone.”“He defined me as an independent voice in a way that I couldn’t have,” she said. “I would not have won by 14 points had Donald Trump not come after me, and had I not been outspoken when Roe v. Wade was overturned.”Ms. Mace, who sold commercial real estate before being elected to the statehouse and then to Congress, is obsessed with her work and has huge ambitions.Ms. Mace often styles herself as a maverick independent.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesShe only halfheartedly denies that she’s thinking about a run for Senate at some point — “La la la la la,” she said, putting her fingers in her ears, when asked about running for a statewide office — while her aides half-jokingly pass along an article that floats her as a potential presidential running mate to former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.In a party shaped by extremists who view the middle ground with disdain, the day-to-day can be pretty “lonely,” she said, noting that she has few friends on Capitol Hill. She got a dog during the pandemic, a Havanese named Liberty, and started carrying a gun at all times when threats against her increased after she voted to certify the election. She said that only “emboldens me,” as does the fact that she’s not the popular girl at the lunch table. She calls herself “a caucus of one.”Her hardened exterior is in part the result of personal trauma. She was molested at a swimming pool when she was 14 and said that for years she blamed herself, because she had been wearing a two-piece bathing suit. She was raped when she was 16, leading her to drop out of high school.“I was in a really bad situation for a long time,” she said. She was on Prozac and then self-medicated with marijuana, which she credits with reducing her anxiety and saving her life.“You carry it for a lifetime,” she said. “When I want to punch a bully in the face, it’s all still there. I’ll bring a gun to a knife fight, and that’s overkill. It’s still there.”Yet Ms. Mace is anything but aloof. As she took meetings across her district on a recent Wednesday, she shared personal details, joking with a reporter about doing the “walk of shame” home from her fiancé’s house and talking openly about her struggle with long Covid.“I overshare because I do want to connect with people on a personal level,” she said, explaining why she had told several groups throughout the day that she had gained the “freshman 15” during her first term in Congress and subsequently cut out bread. “Everyone struggles with their weight.”Ms. Mace visiting the office of Representative Kevin McCarthy, now the House speaker, in 2021.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMs. Mace, who has two teenage children, said she does not read books or have any hobbies. She rarely takes vacations. She is divorced and engaged to be married to an entrepreneur, but has set no wedding date.The grind is worth it, she said, if she can shift her party even a touch.“The message matters,” Ms. Mace said. “I’m trying to move the national narrative.” More

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      It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like 2016 Again

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      Around the time that Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, there was a lot of chatter about how anti-Trump Republicans were poised to repeat the failures of 2016, by declining to take on Trump directly and letting him walk unscathed to the nomination.This take seemed wrong in two ways. First, unlike in 2016, anti-Trump Republicans had a singular, popular alternative in Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose polling was competitive with Trump’s and way ahead of any other rival. Second, unlike in 2016, most Republican primary voters have now supported Trump in two national elections, making them poor targets for sweeping broadsides against his unfitness for the presidency.Combine those two realities, and the anti-Trump path seemed clear enough: Unite behind DeSantis early, run on Trump fatigue, and hope for the slow fade rather than the dramatic knockout.But I will admit, watching DeSantis sag in the primary polls — and watching the Republican and media reaction to that sag — has triggered flashbacks to the 2016 race. Seven years later, it’s clear that many of the underlying dynamics that made Trump the nominee are still in play.Let’s count off a few of them. First, there’s the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. This is my colleague Nate Cohn’s main point in his assessment of DeSantis’s recent struggles, and it’s a good one: DeSantis has spent the year to date accumulating legislative victories that match up with official right-wing orthodoxy, but we already saw in Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign the limits of ideological correctness. There are Republican primary voters who cast ballots with a matrix of conservative positions in their heads, but not enough to overcome the appeal of the Trump persona, and a campaign against him won’t prosper if its main selling point is just True Conservatism 2.0.Second, there’s the mismatch between cultural conservatism and the anti-Trump donor class. Part of DeSantis’s advantage now, compared with Cruz’s situation in 2016, is that he has seemed more congenial to the party’s bigger-money donors. But many of those donors don’t really like the culture war; they’ll go along with a generic anti-wokeness, but they hate the Disney battles and they’re usually pro-choice. So socially conservative moves that DeSantis can’t refuse, like signing Florida’s six-week abortion ban, yield instant stories about how his potential donors are thinking about closing up their checkbooks, with a palpable undercurrent of: “Why can’t we have Nikki Haley or even Glenn Youngkin instead?”This leads to the third dynamic that could repeat itself: The G.O.P coordination problem, a.k.a. the South Carolina pileup. Remember how smoothly all of Joe Biden’s rivals suddenly exited the presidential race when it was time to stop Bernie Sanders? Remember how nothing remotely like that happened among Republicans in 2016? Well, if you have an anti-Trump donor base dissatisfied with DeSantis and willing to sustain long-shot rivals, and if two of those rivals, Haley and Senator Tim Scott, hail from the early primary state of South Carolina, it’s easy enough to see how they talk themselves into hanging around long enough to hand Trump exactly the sort of narrow wins that eventually gave him unstoppable momentum in 2016.But then again, a certain cast of mind has declared Trump to have unstoppable momentum already. This reflects another tendency that helped elect him the first time, the weird fatalism of professional Republicans. In 2016 many of them passed from “he can’t win” to “he can’t be stopped” with barely a way station in between. A rough month for DeSantis has already surfaced the same spirit — as in a piece by Politico’s Jonathan Martin, which quoted one strategist saying resignedly, “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”Influencing this perspective, again as in 2016, is the assumption that Trump can’t win the general election, so if the G.O.P. just lets him lose it will finally be rid of him. Of course that assumption was completely wrong before, it could be wrong again; and even if it’s not, how do you know he won’t be back in 2028?Then, the final returning dynamic: The media still wants Trump. This is not offered as an excuse for G.O.P. primary voters choosing him; if the former president is renominated in spite of all his sins, it’s ultimately on them and them alone.But I still feel a certain vibe, in the eager coverage of DeSantis’s sag, suggesting that at some half-conscious level the mainstream press really wants the Trump return. They want to enjoy the Trump Show’s ratings, they want the G.O.P. defined by Trumpism while they define themselves as democracy’s defenders.And so Trump’s rivals will have to struggle, not only against the wattage of the man himself, but also against an impulse already apparent — to call the race for Trump before a single vote is cast.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      South Carolina Democrats Elect First Black Woman to Run State Party

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      The NewsSouth Carolina Democrats elected Christale Spain, the former executive director of the state Democratic Party, as state party chair at their convention on Saturday. She ran with the backing of the party’s top brass, including Representative James E. Clyburn, and will be the first Black woman to lead the state party.Christale Spain, who was elected Saturday as chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, was backed by the party establishment.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesWhy It Matters: Clyburn and Old Guard Still RuleA longtime organizer in Palmetto State politics, Ms. Spain was widely considered the front-runner in the race, a usually sleepy contest that saw more candidates run than it has in more than 25 years. Her biggest competitor, Brandon Upson, the state Black caucus chair, painted her as an establishment candidate whose connections to the old guard would stymie the party’s progress in an all-important election year.Democrats who supported Mr. Upson were seeking to overhaul a state party they felt had long been dominated by Mr. Clyburn — who helped President Biden win the state primary in 2020 — ahead of South Carolina’s debut as the party’s first presidential primary state in 2024 and in the wake of a down cycle in the 2022 midterm elections.Still, it was Ms. Spain’s connections, paired with her campaign strategy — characterized by social media blasts and regular visits to county party meetings and cattle calls — that ultimately delivered her the victory. She won with the support of nearly 700 of the party’s roughly 1,000 state delegates in a standing vote. Before delegates for Mr. Upson could stand up to vote for him, he conceded to Ms. Spain in a short speech calling for party unity.What’s Next: Primary Prep and Party RepairAs the next chair, Ms. Spain will be responsible for preparing the state party for its moment in prime time: voting first in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary election. She will also have to rebuild a party in turmoil. Democrats lost several safe State House and Senate seats and had low voter turnout during the 2022 midterms, a year that was otherwise considered positive for the party nationally. Ms. Spain’s leadership will offer Palmetto State Democrats a chance to make up those losses and get ready for the national stage.In a news conference after her victory, Ms. Spain offered a message to the South Carolina voters waiting for more meaningful change from the Democratic Party.“Wait no longer,” she said, vowing to focus on year-round voter engagement efforts. “We know who our voters are. We’re going back after them and we’re going to turn them out, plus more.” More

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      Pro-DeSantis PAC Makes Hires in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina

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      The Florida governor has not entered the 2024 race yet, but a super PAC supporting him is laying the groundwork for his likely run.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his allies are expanding his political footprint in key states that will begin the 2024 presidential nominating contest, with the main super PAC backing his bid making hires in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and an operative with recent Iowa experience joining the payroll of the Republican Party of Florida.The Iowa strategist, Sophie Crowell, managed the successful re-election campaign of Representative Ashley Hinson, Republican of Iowa, in 2022, and is now working for the state party in Florida, according to people familiar with her hiring. The party is serving as a way station where Mr. DeSantis has been adding strategists and policy advisers who are expected to eventually work on his likely 2024 run.Mr. DeSantis has not yet declared his bid, but a pro-DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, has acted as something of a campaign-in-waiting, hiring staff members and responding to regular attacks from former President Donald J. Trump. Almost as significantly, it has engaged with mainstream news organizations that Mr. DeSantis instinctively shuns.The super PAC previously announced that it had raised $30 million in its first three weeks, as major donors poured money into the group in a bid to slow the momentum of Mr. Trump, the Republican polling front-runner.Never Back Down has begun answering a pro-Trump group’s ads on television and is now building out a team in the important states that kick off the race. David Polyansky, who held senior posts on the 2016 presidential campaigns of former Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is overseeing the hiring, according to people briefed on the process. The recent hires are expected to constitute only the first wave of additions in early states.In Iowa, the pro-DeSantis group has hired Tyler Campbell, who previously served as campaign manager for the state’s agriculture secretary, Mike Naig, and now runs his own political consulting firm.In New Hampshire, the PAC has hired Ethan Zorfas, another veteran of the Cruz campaign and a close ally of the strategist Jeff Roe, who is overseeing Never Back Down’s strategy.Mr. Zorfas, who served as chief of staff to the state’s last Republican congressman, Frank Guinta, attended Mr. DeSantis’s speech on Friday in New Hampshire at a state party dinner. Mr. Zorfas worked for the congressional campaign of Karoline Leavitt in New Hampshire last year. Ms. Leavitt won the primary but lost the general election and is now working for a pro-Trump super PAC.In South Carolina, the group has hired Michael Mulé, who runs a political consulting firm in Charleston that has done extensive work in the state and beyond.Mr. DeSantis’s allies have made clear that he is unlikely to formally enter the race before the end of the Florida legislative session in early May. Mr. DeSantis has more than $85 million remaining in his state-level PAC, which is widely believed to be eligible to be transferred to the super PAC if and when he enters the 2024 contest.Mr. DeSantis has already traveled to all three early states in 2023 and was in South Carolina on Wednesday, speaking in North Charleston and talking about his “Florida blueprint” for the nation. More

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      Tim Scott Sets a Positive Tone for 2024. Will His Party Come Along?

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      The all-but-declared 2024 candidate hosted supporters and donors in his home state of South Carolina with a kill-them-with-kindness message. But will it resonate with the Republican base?Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, two days after announcing an exploratory committee for president, brought his message to friendly territory.After greeting supporters on Friday at Alex’s Restaurant, a Charleston-area eatery, the senator made the case for his candidacy to a group of donors at a private retreat that took place over two days at a high-end hotel near the heart of Charleston’s downtown.Among the most pressing questions from his backers at the retreat — both longtime supporters and relative newcomers — was how his message, at this stage a mostly positive and Bible-backed homage to America’s future, might play in what many expect to be a vitriolic Republican presidential primary.Mr. Scott defended his strategy, according to two people who attended the retreat, saying he would take a kill-them-with-kindness approach, and he maintained that positivity is core to his personality and to his potential campaign. But, he added, he would be able to defend himself if he should face negative attacks.The assembled group, a mix of South Carolina-based donors and national funders committed to Mr. Scott, left the two-day event on Saturday afternoon seemingly bought in to his potential presidential candidacy. His challenge now will be getting a broader Republican audience to follow suit.“I haven’t seen him do anything offensive that would annoy anybody,” said Jim Morris, a Charleston-based retiree who attended Mr. Scott’s restaurant visit on Friday. Mr. Morris said he had not decided whom he would support in the Republican primary but criticized the party’s widespread infighting.“The party needs to get back together a little bit,” he said. “We don’t have to be the same, but we don’t have to hate each other.”Should he formally begin a presidential campaign, as is widely expected, Mr. Scott will face an uphill battle to the Republican nomination. Public polling shows that former President Donald J. Trump maintains a hold on a majority of the party’s base, with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida capturing much of the rest. And though Mr. Scott has the advantage of outsize name recognition in this must-win state, he will still have to fight for support from donors and voters with another South Carolina powerhouse, former Gov. Nikki Haley, who has already declared her candidacy.But the senator would enter the presidential primary with a financial advantage: He has roughly $21.8 million in his Senate campaign account. A handful of big-name Republican donors, including the tech magnate Larry Ellison, have given to the super PAC supporting him.Mr. Scott, the son of a single mother and the grandson of a man forced to drop out of elementary school to pick cotton, has made his compelling personal story a feature of his public speeches and interviews. He often mentions his background to highlight a rise he believes would only be possible in America.“It’s a blessing to come from a state like South Carolina, where a kid who grows up in a single-parent household mired in poverty can one day even think about being president of the United States,” he told reporters on Friday. “Only made in America is my story.”Mr. Scott’s history and positive message, however, can sometimes seem at odds with the mood of many in his party. Mr. Trump, long known for crafting insulting descriptors for his competitors, goes after Democrats and Republicans alike. The super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign has spent nearly $4 million on television ads — most critical of Governor DeSantis — in the last three weeks, according to the advertising tracker AdImpact. Mr. DeSantis’s PAC has returned fire, running an ad suggesting that the former president joined Democrats in supporting gun control.“The ones who are negative are the ones who are loudest,” said Kathy Crawford, 67, an independent voter and lifelong Charleston resident who said she would support Mr. Scott in the Republican primary if he ran. Voters, she said, “want to bring the country back together, and they want a positive message.”And Mr. Scott’s message could resonate with a key audience in the Republican primary: conservative evangelical Christians. Mr. Scott has spent significant time focusing on evangelical voters in his tour of early primary states, often meeting with small groups of religious leaders in between quasi campaign stops. His public remarks are often peppered with quotes from the Bible. And in the video announcing his presidential exploratory committee, he pledges to “defend the Judeo-Christian foundation our nation is built on and protect our religious liberty.”Mr. Scott’s Friday restaurant appearance had all the makings of a campaign stop, as he greeted employees, worked the room around a swarm of reporters and hugged patrons. Outside, supporters held signs that read “Please Run 4 President” and “Cotton to Congress to White House,” alluding to his biography.“It is always good to come home,” Mr. Scott said to applause.But Mr. Scott has already gotten a taste of the added pressure that comes with being a possible presidential contender. At stops in Iowa and New Hampshire this week, the senator did not directly answer reporters’ questions about which abortion restrictions he might support as president, at one point saying he would support a ban on the procedure after 20 weeks and another time offering a vague answer, only claiming that he was anti-abortion.In an interview with NBC News on Friday, he promised to sign “the most conservative, pro-life legislation” that Congress passes if elected president, without throwing his support behind a specific time frame.Mr. Scott will travel to Iowa and New Hampshire again next week and told reporters he also planned to make stops in Nevada in coming weeks. When asked if he was considering a presidential campaign to juice a vice-presidential nod — a belief his advisers widely reject — he disputed the claim with an air of optimism.“If you’re going to go for it, go for it all,” he said. “Period.” More

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      The Quiet Coronation of Joe Biden

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      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicA few weeks after the midterms, something happened that largely flew under the radar. Democrats were celebrating a successful election, and giving all the credit to President Biden. And against that backdrop, the party made an announcement: It would be changing the order in which states voted in the primary election, moving South Carolina first. The party was talking about it in terms of representation and acknowledging the role of Black voters.But given that South Carolina essentially saved Mr. Biden’s 2020 candidacy, Astead wondered: Was something else going on? We headed to the party’s winter meeting as it prepared to make the change official.Photo Illustration: The New York Times; Photo: Al Drago for The New York TimesAbout ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is The New York Times’s flagship political podcast. The host, Astead W. Herndon, grapples with the big ideas already animating the 2024 presidential election. Because it’s always about more than who wins and loses. And the next election has already started.Last season, “The Run-Up” focused on grass-roots voters and shifting attitudes among the bases of both political parties. This season, we go inside the party establishment.New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

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      Tim Scott Set to Announce Presidential Exploratory Committee for 2024

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      Mr. Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina, will appear on Fox News on Wednesday morning.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the most prominent Black leader in the Republican Party, will start an exploratory committee for a 2024 presidential run on Wednesday, according to three people with knowledge of his plans.The announcement, which was first reported by The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., opens an all-but-declared presidential campaign for Mr. Scott, who will test his message this week in the early primary voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, his home state.An exploratory committee will allow Mr. Scott, who would enter the Republican primary with nearly $21.8 million on hand in his Senate account, to raise money directly for a 2024 campaign and garner more national attention before a formal presidential announcement. He will host a donor retreat in Charleston this weekend, where he is expected to update his top donors on his plans.Allies have already established a super PAC that is expected to be supportive of Mr. Scott, should he make his run official. Last week, the PAC announced that it was expanding through the hiring of two veteran South Carolina political operatives, Matt Moore and Mark Knoop.Mr. Scott also teased his plans to run in a fund-raising email to supporters on Tuesday evening, saying he would make “a major announcement” on Wednesday. He will announce his plans on “Fox and Friends” on Fox News that morning, according to the email.Mr. Scott, who will campaign in Iowa on Wednesday, in New Hampshire on Thursday and in South Carolina on Friday, is expected to heavily emphasize his only-in-America rise, a story he first told on the national stage at the 2020 Republican National Convention.“Our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” Mr. Scott said. “And that’s why I believe the next American century can be better than the last.” In 2021, he was tapped to deliver the Republican response to President Biden’s first joint address before Congress, a speech that turbocharged Mr. Scott’s online fund-raising.Mr. Scott’s biography, his oratorical skills and his prominence as the top-ranking Black Republican in Congress have him on many Republican short lists to serve as a potential vice president, though advisers to Mr. Scott have rebuffed that as the goal.If and when Mr. Scott officially enters the race, he will be the second South Carolina Republican in the 2024 sweepstakes, following the entry of Nikki Haley, the former governor and former United Nations ambassador. He also joins an increasingly crowded primary field for president: Former President Donald J. Trump, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and the tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have all begun campaigns. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is expected to join the field in the coming months. More