South Dakota’s U.S. Senators seem to have backed the wrong horse in the Republican primary race. Mike Rounds and John Thune both endorsed South Carolina Senator Tim Scott in May. Scott surged above 3% in the Real Clear Politics polling average but has never topped his fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley and now sits at seventh in the GOP field. Scott’s failure to catch fire appears to come in part from his acting like Kristi Noem:
Tim Scott’s old friend and former colleague in the Senate, Cory Gardner, kept pleading with him to get on TV more.
It was one thing, Gardner told Scott in multiple recent conversations, to appear regularly on Fox News, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. But a wider audience would form high opinions of Scott, Gardner suggested, if they actually saw and heard from him as a presidential candidate.
In a strategy shift, Scott over the past two weeks has done just that, appearing eight times on CNN, CBS, ABC and CNBC after spending a summer engaging almost exclusively with the conservative press.
The shake-up may come too late to energize Scott’s faltering campaign.
…Scott also does not speak to reporters in the halls of the Capitol. Nor has he aggressively leveraged his role in the Senate to create the kind of attention-grabbing moments some prior senators seeking the presidency have [Natalie Allison and Burgess Everett, “‘I’m Disappointed’: Even Tim Scott’s Friends and Fans See a Campaign on the Ropes,” Politico, 2023.10.22].
Rounds isn’t giving up on Scott:
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), one of two senators, along with Thune, to endorse Scott’s presidential bid, said that “sometimes you’ve just got to stick with it and wait until your opportunity is there.”
However, he said, it’s clear from examining primary polls that “right now, folks aren’t ready to move yet” [Allison and Everett, 2023.10.22].
Team Scott has been telling donors to be patient and bank on the South Carolina primary to put their guy on top. The South Carolina strategy saved Joe Biden in 2020, but that salvation came after Biden had led the Democratic polls for a year and suffered only a February fall behind just one competitor, Bernie Sanders. South Carolina helped Biden regain momentum; Scott needs to gain momentum in the next four months. The endorsements of South Dakota’s Senators have not apparently rung loudly enough to arouse any such momentum.
Tim Scott suffers from Stockholm Syndrome but since Trump won’t be on any general election ballot Thune and Rounds can transmogrify into Spaceman Spiff any moment.
I’ve seen the Scott campaign commercials and he is clearly pandering to the Trump base. He seems to think that other voters are aren’t watching and if he should, by a stretch of the imagination, get nominated he will have already poisoned that well.
Spaceman Spiff for President!