South Carolina: Republican Success, Democratic Decline

Abstract

In 2004 South Carolina continued to play an increasingly familiar role: a critical battleground state in the presidential nomination process but a minor, generally ignored player in the general election. South Carolina has become such a reliable source of eight electoral votes for Republican presidential candidates that the state no longer figures in presidential campaign strategies. Republican presidential candidates assume that the state will be a nearly fail-safe “red state” with little or no effort, and Democratic presidential candidates assume with a high degree of certainty that the state will once again be a Republican stronghold, regard-less of what happens elsewhere. In the 2004 presidential election these assumptions quickly turned into hard facts early on in the election cycle. Indeed, beginning with the 1964 presidential election, Republican presidential candidates have carried the state in ten of the eleven presidential contests to date, with only 1976 standing as the lone exception (when Georgia neighbor Jimmy Carter carried the state).