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South Carolina senator Tim Scott made it official on Friday: He is running for president of the United States in 2024. The 57-year-old businessman-turned-politician filed paperwork this week with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) cementing his intention to seek the highest office in the land.
Scott will formally announce his candidacy at a rally on Monday (May 22, 2023) at Charleston Southern University, his alma mater.
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“(Scott’s) candidacy will test whether a more optimistic vision of America’s future can resonate with GOP voters who have elevated partisan brawlers in recent years,” reporter Meg Kinnard of The Associated Press noted in breaking the news.
According to Kinnard, Scott has already started running ads in early-voting Iowa and New Hampshire – which she described as the most “significant advertising expenditure by a potential or declared candidate” at this early stage in the 2024 race.
Scott becomes the sixth announced GOP candidate for the presidency, joining former U.S. president Donald Trump – the overwhelming frontrunner in the race – and four others. They are: Former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis is expected to announce his candidate next week.
Trump, incidentally, used Scott’s announcement to go after DeSantis – his top primary rival and the man many believed was poised to wrestle the GOP nomination from the former president last fall.
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“Ron DeSantis’ failed shadow campaign has opened the flood gates for career politicians looking to seize an opportunity to raise their profile ahead of the 2028 race,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich tweeted. “Tim Scott’s entrance, and aggressive media purchase, doesn’t only kneecap DeSantis, but Scott sees the same thing as Youngkin, Sununu, Burgum, Christie, and others: The path to second place is wide open. They smell Ron DeSantis’ blood in the water and no longer see him as an obstacle.”
Scott enters the 2024 race polling at 2 percent, according to the latest aggregate polling data from RealClearPolitics.
That puts him in sixth place behind Trump (56 percent), DeSantis (19.9 percent), former U.S. vice president Mike Pence (5.9 percent), Haley (4.3 percent) and Ramaswamy (3.5 percent).
Scott’s entry into the contest sets off a furious undercard battle in the Palmetto State as both he and Haley will be vying for support in this pivotal “First in the South” primary election.
Haley spent six years in the S.C. House of Representatives prior to becoming governor in 2011. An erstwhile #NeverTrumper, she left office midway through her second term to become Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations – a move which cleared the way for Henry McMaster, a Trump sycophant, to become governor.
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Scott spent fourteen years on Charleston County council prior to winning election to the S.C. House of Representatives in 2008. After a single term in Columbia, he won election to the S.C. first congressional district in 2011. After just one term in the U.S. House, Scott was appointed (by Haley) to the U.S. Senate to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Jim DeMint. He won a special election in 2014 to fill DeMint’s unexpired term and has won reelection twice since then (in 2016 and 2022).
Scott was also a #NeverTrumper in 2016, but worked with Trump during his years in the White House – including voting to support all of his nominees to the U.S. supreme court.
Republicans kick off their primary process with the Iowa Caucus on February 5, 2024. New Hampshire comes eight days later (February 13, 2024) followed by South Carolina and Nevada (February 24, 2024).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and seven children.
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8 comments
No thanks! For one thing, he is a Nikki Haley appointee and we know how most of those turned out. For another, he is a guaranteed vote for renewal of our Patriot Act, every time that abomination comes up. Then there is his whining about all the racism he supposedly has experienced. Never mind that a majority of whites (foolishly) vote to send his black ass back to Washington every six years so he can live like a king.
Yeah, a black man in South Carolina has most definitely never experienced racism. (That’s called sarcasm – google that word since your vocabulary is limited) But you, my friend, might need to check your racism status.
Bless his heart.
Yea, I questioned McMaster’s mental acuity when he endorsed Trump. It was Trump’s reward to McMaster to get him into the governor’s office.
He is wasting money on this; he can’t win over Trump in SC, nor can Nickki or Sarah Huckleberry. McMaster and his crazy crew in the StateHouse will back Trump. SC has been bought by Trump enthusiasts with big dollars that want to keep their big tax breaks—No Thanks to any of the Republicans running in 2024. SC is getting almost as creepy as Floriduh.
I have watched Tim Scott closely. I have seen some disturbing things concerning him basically pulling the race card based on feelings and not on facts — just like BLM does. One that really caught my attention was when he came out against Trump and his remarks concerning Charlottesville. Trump rightly stated that there were good people on both sides. Without knowing all of the facts that occurred that day, Tim went ballistic on Trump and pulled the race card BIG time. He could have cared less about the set up that happened to true Conservatives that occurred that day and what happened after it was all over with when the true Conservatives banned the leaders of that protest from their organizations. That didn’t matter to him.
He hides it well most of the time. But, it is still there. It is why I don’t trust him.
OMG! Your boy Trump said that there were good people on both sides in the Charlottesville horror. Maybe you should quit drinking the Kool-Aid. Wacko, uneducated, indoctrinated racists like you are the reason I left the Republican party.
And you might want to check your reverse racism status, or understand that a majority of whites, albeit erroneously, vote him back in every six years so he can live like a king on their dime. You sound like an “injustice collector”.
Other than Missy being senior and Timmy junior I see only one other difference between South Carolina’s senators.