On April 12th, 1861, the residents of Charleston, animated with anti-federal verve, cheered in celebration as South Carolina troops opened fire on a United States military installation, Fort Sumter. The fort fell the following day, sparking rapturous joy in South Carolina and among anti-federals throughout the nation.
A stern message had been delivered. The people had had enough of Washington, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. Better yet, the quick and virtually cost-free victory presaged an easy path to new political arrangements that would reflect the deep-seated views of the anti-federals.
Four years later, the United States retook the remains of Fort Sumter. In the years in-between, the conflict that began in Charleston harbor had laid waste to an area of America the size of western Europe, and had cost nearly 700,000 lives.
Lessons? Populist impulsiveness is not a strategy. Optimistic conviction is not wisdom. And even best intentions can lead to disaster.
Which brings us to the 2016 presidential race and South Carolina primary.
With the spirit of fervor and defiance symbolized by those guns 155 years ago, SC Republicans sent a message to the GOP, and perhaps irreversibly settled the direction of the Republican primary race by providing a convincing, double-digit lead – and all its delegates – to Donald Trump.
But that’s not all.
South Carolina finished off the campaign of the best qualified Republican to govern on Day #1, Jeb Bush. As I posted on Friday, no candidate in the field can match Bush’s 32 years in the private sector, and eight years of solid conservative accomplishment as governor in Florida. No candidate had a better governing plan, and no candidate was better prepared by temperament, experience and integrity to be POTUS. In any other year, Bush would have been the candidate to beat, but in a year of grass roots fury with conventional politicians, and with the taunting tenacity of Donald Trump, Bush could not gain the support and trust of enough voters to continue.
South Carolina fractured the anti-Trump vote, showing fresh political weakness for Ted Cruz’s blue-print coalition of social conservatives and evangelicals. SC was a state tailor-made for Cruz’s message, and an audition for Cruz’s performance in the rest of the south, yet he finished a distant third.
Marco Rubio exceeded expectations, as he did in Iowa, but it remains unclear, even with his second place finish, where he can actual win a state in the next three weeks. Winning delegates is not enough.
With Carson and Kasich trailing badly in single digits, and likely to continue to do in the majority of states that vote on March 1, South Carolina has given Republicans nationally the choice between two, first term senators, without a shred of executive experience, and a businessman of elastic and contradictory principles, intemperate remarks, as well as colossal ignorance on basic issues of national policy, who is at best notionally a Republican.
A less attractive result is hard to imagine.
Further, SC puts Donald Trump firmly in the driver’s seat for the nomination.
While Ted Cruz leads in Texas, and is competitive in Arkansas and Oklahoma, and Rubio is well positioned in Minnesota and possibly Virginia, Trump, at least according to available polling, is leading in most of the March 1st states that account for 575 delegates. These states award delegates on a proportional basis, so there will be opportunities for Cruz and Rubio to pick up delegates in various congressional districts. The same holds true for the March 5th and 8th contests in Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana Mississippi and Michigan, which account for an additional 231 delegates.
March 15th brings winner take all contests with elections in Florida, North Carolina, Illinois, Ohio and Missouri, for a total of 358 delegates. When the polls close on the 15th, 1,256 delegates will have been awarded, more than half needed to secure the nomination. With 25-35 percent of the vote that he has been receiving, Trump could emerge after March 15th with an impressive, if disproportionate share of delegates in relation to his share of the vote. As a result, the only candidate with a clear path to the nomination as of today, is Donald Trump.
So long as there are four other candidates remaining in the field, the results will continue to fracture and divide the not-Trump vote. Rapid consolidation, between Rubio/Kasich and Cruz/Carson and eventually, between Cruz and Rubio directly, will be key to determining whether the 65-75 percent of the GOP that does not support Trump can unify around a candidate and take the nomination.
The urgency is clear.
In 2012, 18.9 million people voted in the Republican primary. Ultimately, 60.9 million chose Mitt Romney in the general election. Using this as a template, if Trump were to continue to get 35 percent of the vote in the primaries and caucuses to come, he would win 6.6 million votes. But if he is the nominee, that only translates into 10 percent of Romney’s general election total.
While it is certain that other Republicans would join Trump, and the Trump campaign claims cross-over appeal with independents and Democrats (which has yet to be demonstrated), it is also true that Trump is currently the candidate with the highest negative rating, 3x larger than Hillary Clinton. For as passionate as Trump following is, those equally opposed to Trump are also highly energized. As a result, it leaves Trump, of the remaining top vote getters in South Carolina, as the greatest risk to a Republican victory in November, upon which so much depends.
In 1861, amid pomp, conviction and optimism, South Carolina launched the nation into catastrophe. We will know in November whether triumph or tragedy awaits the nation as a result of their choices on Saturday, and whether the certainty of an anti-establishment vote for Trump results in a Democratic landslide that will forever change the America that we know.