Senator Tim Scott wants you to know that he is not like other candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.
As his recent memoir, ‘America: A Redemption Story’, makes clear, the 57-year-old is an optimist who wants us all to get along better rather than dropping culture war bombs, and that’s someone. one who stood up to Donald Trump. when he was in office.
He is also black. And, perhaps most problematic for the Republican Party, he is single.
When he first campaigned in South Carolina, he made it a selling point, portraying himself as a proud 30-year-old virgin, emphasizing his evangelical Christian faith and devotion to the Ten Commandments.
This did not survive his transition to political life. After winning a seat in the U.S. House, he admitted at the age of 46 that he hadn’t been so good at keeping his abstinence pledge.
Tim Scott attributes his marital status to a difficult childhood and an adult life spent putting his mother first. The 57-year-old Republican senator officially announced his candidacy for the White House in South Carolina on Monday.
“Yeah… Not as good as I was back then,” Scott told the National Journal from his Capitol Hill office.
“The Bible is right. You better wait. I just wish we all had more patience.
This is always the case when it comes to family. While political mailings for other candidates routinely depict smiling nuclear families, Scott never married.
This makes him an outlier among presidential candidates. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hasn’t even declared his race and his wife Casey has already been the subject of countless profiles, describing her astute political skills and ability to soften the edges of her bomb-throwing husband.
Only two single candidates were elected to the White House.
The most recent was Grover Cleveland in 1884. He married while in office.
Before that, it was James Buchanan who took office in 1857 and historians still debate his sexuality.
When Senator Lindsey Graham ran in 2016, he wondered who would arrange the flowers for state dinners and decorate the White House for Christmas if there was no first lady. “I have a lot of friends,” he said at one point. “We will have a rotating first lady.”
Times have changed from when it mattered, according to conservative commentator Matt K. Lewis. Unless Scott looks like he could win.
Scott receives the Senate oath of office in January 2017 alongside his mother Frances
Scott attributes his marital status to a difficult childhood and an adult life spent putting his mother first. She ran away from her heavy-drinking father when young Scott was seven, and he grew up in his grandparents’ two-bedroom house.
Scott excelled in football and he later won a partial scholarship to Presbyterian College. A car accident destroyed his NFL dream
“I don’t think it matters at all,” he said. “However, if Tim Scott started gaining momentum and if he started posing a threat to Donald Trump, that’s the kind of thing Trump would invoke. And then it could matter.
Scott attributes his marital status to a difficult childhood and an adult life spent putting his mother first. She ran away from her heavy-drinking father when young Scott was seven, and he grew up in his grandparents’ two-bedroom house.
He described how his mother sometimes worked 16 hour days to keep food on the table.
“As a poor child growing up, the most important thing for me was to take care of my mother. And until I accomplished that, starting a new family just wasn’t an option for me. me,’ he told Politico in 2020.
He credits a mentor, a Chick-Fil-A franchisee, with helping him focus and encouraging him to work hard in school and football. He then won a partial scholarship to Presbyterian College.
A car accident destroyed his NFL dreams. Instead, after college he began selling insurance, eventually owning his own franchise while seeking political opportunities that would allow him to put his gospel experience into practice.
He could have become a Democrat. But when he went to the local Democratic Party headquarters, they told him to “wait my turn and go to the back of the line,” he recalled in his memoir. The next day, a local Republican told him that a black Republican had never been elected to county council and that he had to get cracked.
He served on the board for 13 years. But later he said it all had an impact on his personal life as he tried to support his mother and build a political career.
“As a poor child growing up, the most important thing for me was to take care of my mother,” he said. “And until I accomplished that, starting a new family just wasn’t an option for me.”
Scott is seen as a child with an unidentified aunt in this 1960s family photo
Just when it might have been, as a relationship got serious in their 40s, South Carolina’s 1st District headquarters opened up. And again, he followed his career.
And in 2013, he became the first black Republican senator since 1979. Again, that makes him an outlier among the candidates for 2024.
As Matthew Continetti, columnist for the American right in the Washington Post, recently pointed out, he will probably be one of the only runners not to owe his place to Trump.
“DeSantis won the 2012 congressional election, but his rise to prominence has been shadowed by Trump, as Trump likes to remind voters,” he wrote.
Only two single candidates were elected to the White House. The most recent was Grover Cleveland in 1884 (above)
“Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are talented politicians, but they owe their high-ranking stature to the former president.”
In fact, Scott has at times been one of the few prominent Republicans willing to call out Trump even when he was in office.
He publicly berated the then-president when Trump said “there are good people on both sides” after a racist march turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“I believe the president has compromised his moral authority to lead,” Scott told CBS News shortly after. “As we look to the future, it’s going to be very difficult for this president to lead if, in fact, his moral authority remains compromised.”
An invitation to the Oval Office followed, where Scott writes that he spent 20 minutes explaining to Trump why so many people were hurt by his words.
When Trump asked how he could help, Scott replied that he was ready to answer, selling his idea of “opportunity zones” – a program of tax incentives to encourage investment in low-income communities – which later became a flagship Trump policy.
Now he wants to take that positive message to a wider audience.
“I’ve seen that people are hungry for hope,” he told Fox and Friends last month when announcing an exploratory committee. “They’re hungry for an optimistic, positive message rooted in conservative values.”
Scott (pictured in a high school yearbook photo) credits a mentor, a Chick-Fil-A franchisee, with helping him focus and encouraging him to work hard in school
He begins his campaign with a healthy war chest. over $20 million. And although a stranger to Trump and DeSantis, he will be one of the best-funded candidates.
His faith means he will have a ready-made base.
And for Lewis, he is one of the few Republicans to have come through Trump’s “trouble,” as he calls it, without being humiliated.
‘I think it’s unlikely he’ll ever be the nominee this time, but if running somehow positions him to be Trump’s running mate, or to be a frontrunner in 2028, I’d see that as anything considered a positive development, he said. .
“And I think he’s really the only person representing a positive type of conservatism who is actually eligible in 2024.”
