South Carolina is a Southern Republican state, the “First in the South” for presidential primary elections. Republicans have only lost the presidential race in South Carolina once since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in 1976 by Jimmy Carter against Gerald Ford (by a double-digit percentage margin). South Carolina did not vote for Lyndon B. Johnson in his landslide 1964 election, nor for George Wallace in 1968. Trump continued the Republican tradition in South Carolina, carrying the state with 54.9 percent of the vote, while Hillary Clinton received just 40.7 percent of the vote, under-performing Obama by about 4 percent. With a Partisan Voting Index of R+8, South Carolina has a Republican governor and 2 Republican U.S. senators; five of the seven members of Congress are currently Republicans. The population in South Carolina is approximately 67.3 percent white and 27.4 percent African American.

Republican Tim Scott is the state’s junior U.S. Senator. He is not up for re-election in 2020. Scott was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Governor Nikki Haley when Jim DeMint retired in 2013. He was elected in a special election in 2014 and then re-elected to a full term in 2016 with 60.5 percent of the vote, almost 6 percent higher than Trump’s margin. Before that, he served in Congress from South Carolina’s First District. Since January 2017, Scott has been one of three African Americans in the U.S. Senate and the first to serve in both chambers of Congress. He is the first African American senator from the state, the first African American senator to be elected from the southern U.S. since 1881 and the first African American Republican to serve in the U.S. Senate since Edward Brooke left in 1979.

South Carolina is home to Governor Mark Sanford, who served as the state’s 1st District Congressman from 1995 to 2001 and was then elected governor in 2003. In June 2009, after an unexplained disappearance that made national headlines, Sanford publicly revealed that he had gone to visit his mistress in Argentina. While the scandal led to censure by the South Carolina General Assembly and to his resignation as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Sanford did complete his second term as governor. Scott ran again for the U.S. House and served from 2013 to 2019.

In the 2018 Republican primary, Sanford was defeated by State House Representative Katie Arrington. Sanford had repeatedly criticized Trump since Trump had taken office, and Arrington ran ads criticizing Sanford for being insufficiently supportive of Trump. On the day of the June primary, Trump endorsed Arrington over Sanford, saying she would be tough on crime and would fight for lower taxes. Arrington won the Republican primary, earning 50.5 percent of the vote to Sanford’s 46.5 percent. Then, in a major upset Arrington lost the general election to Democrat Joe Cunningham.This was the first time since 1986 that South Carolina Democrats had flipped a U.S. House seat.

When Governor Nikki Haley was appointed by President Trump as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 2017, South Carolina’s Lt. Governor Republican Henry McMaster served out the rest of her term. In the 2018 election, Governor McMaster defeated Democrat James Smith, Jr., 54 percent to 45.9 percent. Prior to his tenure as lieutenant governor, McMaster served two terms as the state’s Attorney General. He was first elected to the position in 2002 and won re-election in 2006. Although McMaster was eligible to run for a third term, he chose to run for governor in 2010 and was defeated by Haley in the primary election.

All 46 State Senate seats are up for election in 2020. After a 2018 special election, the partisan balance shifted to 27 to 19. In the State House, all 124 seats were up for election in 2018 and the partisan balance did not change, with Republicans holding their 80-44 majority. All State House seats will be up for election again in 2020.

We are following the South Carolina Senate race because it is clear that there is a lot of political fluidity in the state with incumbents and frontrunners losing unexpectedly, and we believe that Democratic voter mobilization in 2020 could swing the Senate race to the Democrats.