Dirty south

There Will Be Blood: Why the South Carolina Primaries Could Be the Ugliest Yet

With personal attacks brewing on the G.O.P. side, and a powder keg of racial issues standing between the Democrats, the fight for the Palmetto State promises to be brutal.
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By Andrew Harrer/Getty Images.

For weeks, the media has been hyping the upcoming South Carolina primaries as a potential bloodbath, given the state’s well-deserved reputation as a place where rumors are given oxygen, unsubstantiated accusations find new life, and candidates live or die based on how quickly they can shoot down falsehoods.

South Carolina’s ignoble primary politics are legendary, dating back to the days of Lee Atwater successfully spreading rumors that candidates were secretly Jewish, mentally ill, or Manhattanites. More recently, the dirty tricks hall of fame includes Christmas cards accusing Mitt Romney of polygamy and anonymous calls hinting that John McCain fathered a black child. Anticipating a fresh bout of below-the-belt tactics, Charleston's Post and Courier even created a Web page for citizens to report shady activity.

The primary fight could become particularly ugly on the Republican side, which is grappling to elevate an establishment front-runner after New Hampshire failed to yield a much-desired thinning. Besides losing two smaller players, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina, the still unwieldy Republican field is now preparing for one of the biggest battles of the season, with an exhausting list of well-funded and furious candidates still in the game. The South Carolina voting populace is used to the sight of political blood, and given the reputations of the remaining candidates—Donald Trump and Ted Cruz most of all—they will certainly get it.

South Carolina in particular seems tailor-made for Trump, who, despite signals that campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is planning a more positive campaign, spent the past few days revisiting old insults (“low energy”) and creating—or rather, verbally “retweet[ing]”—some new, highly inappropriate ones.

But if Trump will bring all his ammo and candor into the open, Cruz, already known for pulling some sneaky business in Iowa, will likely be more clandestine. Given the surprisingly little amount of opposition research dumped during the election thus far, Cruz, a pious Southern Baptist in a heavily Christian state, likely has plenty more “New York values”–style mud to dump on Trump. Meanwhile, an already vicious ad war between Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio is sure to grow even more bitter in South Carolina, a crucial state for both candidates, given the intensely personal animus underlying their former mentor-protégé relationship and their near-virtual tie in the polls. According to BuzzFeed, Bush allies are already reportedly suspected of undercutting Rubio's bid by spreading rumors of extramarital affairs and secret families among donors. Those whispers have had little effect so far, but could resurface in the Palmetto State.

The increasingly contentious Democratic race promises fireworks, too, as Hillary Clinton looks to widen the racial divide between her coalition and Bernie Sanders, who overperformed with white, working-class voters in Iowa and New Hampshire but has struggled to win over minority voters from Clinton. The two Democratic rivals, who will face off next in Nevada on February 20, and then in South Carolina one week later, both pivoted in their speeches following the New Hampshire primary to addressing racial issues they hope will appeal to Hispanic voters in Nevada and black voters in South Carolina. While Clinton holds a commanding lead over Sanders in both states, the former secretary of state may not be able to take her support among minority communities for granted.

Clinton’s campaign has repeatedly emphasized her ties to the black community in South Carolina, hinting that Sanders could only gain traction in states with overwhelmingly white populations—a line of attack that may work, given Sanders’s historic lack of engagement with race issues, his awkward encounters with Black Lives Matter protesters in 2015, and the fact that he comes from a state that is 95 percent white. In the past two days, several established African-American leaders have endorsed Clinton, blasting Sanders for his support of a 1994 criminal-justice law that has been blamed for contributing to the rise of mass incarceration among blacks. Clinton also made a point of visiting Flint, Michigan, in the wake of revelations that Governor Rick Snyder ignored complaints that predominantly black city's drinking water was contaminated with lead. That narrative might crumble, however, with Sanders’s renewed discussion of issues that disproportionately affect minorities, which he has persuasively intertwined with his positions on income inequality. The morning after his victory in New Hampshire, Sanders held a prominent meeting with Al Sharpton in Harlem, and has begun focusing on issues that play well to Latino voters, such as criticizing Obama’s deportation policies.

But it is South Carolina that will be the crucial test of Clinton’s support among black voters, whom her campaign is relying upon as a firewall to fend off Sanders in the South and carry her through to the nomination. Judging from the tone of several prominent black public figures—including former N.A.A.C.P. president Ben Jealous and __ Justin Bamberg__, a South Carolina state representative and lawyer for Walter Scott’s family, who initially supported Clinton—she may not be able to assume an automatic victory. *The Atlantic’*s Ta-Nehisi Coates recently declared that he would vote for Sanders, though he emphasized that he was in no way endorsing the Vermont senator, because of their disagreements over reparations. Rather, he was voting against what Clinton stood for, telling The New York Times that he was bothered by her acceptance of over $600,000 from Goldman Sachs and her role in passing the same 1994 crime bill that she is now hanging on Sanders. Michelle Alexander, the acclaimed author of a recent book on Jim Crow, was far more blunt in a provocative essay for The Nation, arguing that younger voters would not buy the argument that the Clintons had little responsibility for that bill’s passage. “There is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it,” she wrote.