The NPR Politics Podcast - Tim Scott Prepares To Join Expanding Republican Primary Field

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Scott, who serves as a senator from South Carolina, announced a presidential exploratory committee — a fundraising vehicle often used by candidates ahead of formal campaign announcements.Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Donald Trump have all formally entered the GOP primary contest. Former vice president Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are also expected to run.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, political correspondent Kelsey Snell, and political correspondent Susan Davis.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It is edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Kristen in Annapolis, Maryland, where our General Assembly has just adjourned sine die after its annual 90-day legislative session. This podcast was recorded at 1.09 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, April 12th of 2023. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I'll still be counting the days until I get to do it all again next year. Okay, here's the show. I feel like I can think of a lot of lawmakers in Washington who would be happy to only have to be in session for 90 days, but I appreciate that she is looking forward to going back.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover politics. And I'm Susan Davis. I also cover politics. And today on the show, the state of the 2024 Republican presidential field. I will never back down in defense of the conservative values that make America exceptional. And that's why I'm announcing my exploratory committee for president of the United States. Earlier today, Senator Tim Scott, he's a Republican from South Carolina, took a key step toward announcing a presidential run. He announced he is starting an exploratory committee. And to be clear, that allows him to build, you know, name recognition and raise money that could then be transferred to an official presidential campaign.

And Kelsey, I want to start with you because in this announcement video, Tim Scott seemed to be really leaning into his own personal story. You know, he spoke about being a black man who grew up with a single mom in poverty. And it feels like that biography is central to who he is and why he's running. You know, it's been central to who he is as a senator, too. So he was appointed to the Senate in 2013 by Nikki Haley, who was then the governor of South Carolina and who is also running for president. And, you know, he has spent his entire Senate career kind of going back to his background, kind of talking about how he's a very religious person and that his

religion is very fundamental to the way he views politics. He talks quite a bit about, and we'll probably get to this sometime later, but he's talked a lot about his experiences in America as a black man in his discussions with Democrats on police reform. And he's also kind of known in the Senate as a nice guy, as somebody that gets along with people, that is a good messenger for Republicans. That seems like a rare breed in national politics. I will say, though, that as much as he gets along well with a lot of people, he doesn't have a particularly strong record of actually taking those discussions through to fruition on big pieces of legislation. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's easy to align Tim Scott with sort of the Tea Party movement. He really coincided getting the rising star moniker very early in his career. He's very

fiscally conservative. You know, he was someone who always voted against debt limit increases. He's voted against most big budget deals that were bipartisan. He has a lot of credibility among that sort of activist right. And he's cultivated that in Congress. I mean, he's one of those conservatives that it's like he's probably voted against more helping pass legislation that would overhaul sentencing reform, criminal justice reform, and he was a player in that. But, you know, one of the issues that he's very closely associated with is police reform, which occurred most notably after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. But obviously, we know there have been many other incidents involving police, and they got close a bunch of times, but he just couldn't get it over the finish line. And I think that that was a disappointment for him and something that,

you know, when I think about him, I think about he spent years trying to get something done and he couldn't do it. I also think about him as kind of keeping a foot in two different parts of the party. You know, in 2016, he endorsed Marco Rubio at the outset, but he has come along to be a very strong supporter of former President Trump. As Sue mentioned, he is partially of this Tea Party movement, but he is partially of, you know, a movement of people who wanted to negotiate. There is tension there in his background. I don't know how you feel about that, Sue. I think that's right. He's also someone that has at times been an ally of Trump, but he's also not been afraid to criticize him. I think particularly after the racist events in

Charlottesville and the way that President Trump, then President Trump, handled that event. Like Tim Scott very publicly criticized the president, said he shouldn't stoke any kind of racial resentment. Because there's so few black Republicans, you know, I think that there's a lot of pressure on him to sort of speak on these issues. At times, he really seems to embrace it. I mean, he's had a couple of very memorable Senate floor speeches in which he talks about the racial profiling that he's received over the course of his life, that he's been pulled over more than a dozen times by police for what he saw as no cause. I mean, he's sort of he's lived that life. And he's also just a very conservative person. The thing that Kelsey said that I do think is worth dwelling on, too, is that temperament.

He is a nice guy. He's kind of really well-liked among his colleagues. He's not sort of like a name-caller, an aggressive guy. Yeah, and I think that matters in the context of running for president because I actually think the Republican base has shown a lot of interest in people that are more aggressive and bombastic and stylistically, like more willing to attack Democrats. And you see this obviously with Trump and with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who's another potential contender. And I'm genuinely curious if his style of politics is something that will have much of an appetite with a Republican. Like, is there room for the nice guy who wants to have this optimistic message of America?

Like, is there room for him in the current Republican Party? Yeah. And I think that that's something that is actually even tested in his time in the Senate, because he I mean, there there's tension within the Senate itself on that question in a pretty significant way right now. It's hard to exactly see where he fits into this growing field because he is so different from the presentation that a lot of way right now. It's hard to exactly see where he fits into this growing field because he is so different from the presentation that a lot of them are taking. So Kelsey, earlier you mentioned the former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, also hailing from the state of South Carolina, which means now Republicans have two prominent

South Carolinians who are potentially running for president in the Republican primary. How do you interpret that? I mean, just sheer coincidence? You know, it's so funny because they also share staff backgrounds. So there are some former Tim Scott staffers who have found their way into the Nikki Haley campaign. It is, I mean, this is a state that has... Like the orbits are the same. It is a state that has a very strong relationship among the politicians. And so it will be interesting to watch how they navigate

that place for fundraising and for support from other people within the state. I'm not exactly sure how I read it at this moment, other than that they're both people who are trying to present a campaign of, you know, moderate temperament in a moment that is not necessarily about moderate temperaments. And look, like, if you want to be president, you need a path. You have to win somewhere and somehow. There is still a very prescriptive way to be the nominee, and it involves early states and delegate counts. And South Carolina is one of the early three.

And, you know, not everyone that's ended up being a nominee has actually won their home state. But I think in the context of a Republican primary, South Carolina is still very important. And these two seem to have a natural base there. Obviously, they've both won there with very high margins. Problem for them is if they both stay in the race, do they sort of divide up that support and again, create an easier pathway for former President Donald Trump, who's still the leading contender for the nomination. And, you know, we've talked about this in the podcast in the past, but honestly, the more candidates that get in and get in and get in might actually benefit Trump because they divide up whatever the non-Trump vote might be and he can walk through with the plurality. All right. On that note, we are going to take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. And we're back.

And I want to talk about a couple of other figures in the race whom we have not discussed so far on the podcast. And let's start with the former governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson. In a recent interview with ABC News, he said that he is going to run for president, that he will actually make a formal announcement later in April. Sue, what is his pitch to voters? I will say he is not a very well-known name outside of political circles. He's not. You know, if we lived in normal political times, he's got sort of the resume and the background that would seem to make a pretty easy presidential candidate. He's got a very long career in state and federal politics. He's a former federal prosecutor, a two-time governor from the state of Arkansas. And again, like Tim Scott, temperamentally known as being a pretty nice guy, pretty reputation for being moderate in terms of temperament. But he is what's notable about Hutchinson to me, the first

candidate to really be running expressly as an anti-Trump candidate. Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, they're not really addressing the former president in their own campaigning and announcements. And Asa Hutchinson has very distinctly said that he believes the party needs to move on from Trump. He said he believes he should withdraw from the race following his indictment by a New York district attorney, but he's also acknowledged that Trump's unlikely to do that.

He thinks Trump is a danger to the Republican Party. I think he's in the camp of Republicans who do not believe that if Donald Trump is ultimately the nominee that they can win the election in 2024. It's hard to see this kind of message getting a ton of oxygen, at least at this stage of the race. I'm not exactly sure what that that seems to be more of a general election message than a Republican primary message. But it'll be curious to see if he can kind of crack through any kind of polling and sort of test out how much appetite there is in the Republican base for an anti-Trump candidate. And another Republican in the race is Vivek Ramaswamy. He's a businessman and conservative media fixture. Kelsey, why does he say he's running?

Well, first of all, we should say that this is kind of the first time he's really entering into politics. And you said he's a businessman and he is willing to spend a lot of money. He has indicated that he is willing to spend his own money on this campaign. Which would be what? Millions. Millions. Is the suggestion of how much he's willing to put into this. You know, he announced his intentions to run in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which is a different approach than what we've seen from others.

And he said he is running to forge, quote, an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance. So he's kind of trying to find a pathway of, you know, he calls himself a capitalist, and he's very proud of that. So he's kind of trying to take this businessman, woke warrior kind of image into the primary. He sort of has this very pro-capitalist libertarian bent to him. And he's sort of associated with the likes of people like Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, who won the Senate race in Ohio, Blake Masters, who won in Arizona, comes from a very sort of tech, entrepreneurial, very suspect of any kind of social justice policies. He also, to me, is kind of interesting, not only because he has the money to spend in this, but the kind of candidate that can actually sometimes catch a little fire in the Internet age. You know, he's very savvy online. He uses social media platforms

really well. In some ways, I see sort of an echo of a candidate like Andrew Yang, who ran for president in 2020. And, you know, obviously never really got far on the Democratic side, never really got far in the primary, but did manage to sort of build up a brand and had a small following of like really passionate supporters. And I could see a candidate like Vivek Ramaswamy maybe enjoying a moment in the sun in this campaign. It's always hard to see people like this actually winning the nomination. And I would also, as someone who rode the Michael Bloomberg private jets covering his presidential race, you can have all the money in the world and it's not

necessarily going to win you very many voters in a primary race. But he could make things interesting, especially if we ultimately get to the debate stage and he makes it onto the stage. So I want to ask you both about something which is just very obvious and looking at who has entered this field so far. So you've got, you know, five prominent Republicans running for president. Three of them are not white. And the reason I guess I'm mentioning this is because we hear so much about woke politics, anti-woke politics, culture war issues around race and gender and identity and all of that. And so it seems to be of like no accident, right? This is a very conscious decision,

it seems, amongst Republicans and these particular individuals to defy that assumption of what the Republican Party is. Something Sue and I talk about a lot is that the class of Republicans that were just elected to Congress is the most diverse group of Republicans that have ever been elected to Congress. And so I think there is a part of the party that is really cognizant of that and focused on that. But again, that is a part of the party. And there is real tension about whether or not the party as a whole is accepting of that effort. That's true. And you know, I do think that there is some truth to the fact that non-white voters,

particularly men, Latino men and black men, have seen some movement, more among Latinos, towards the Republican Party. I do think it's also represented, like Kelsey said, in candidate recruitment. You know, I've talked to top Republicans, especially say going into 2024. The party is really hungry to find future-leaning, non-white women, people of color, people that sort of break the narrative that the Republican Party is a party for old white men. Now, to be clear, the Republican primary electorate is still overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly skews older. But the party is trying to expand the tent. And they have had some victories in that. I think sometimes it just gets

crowded out, especially when Donald Trump keeps coming back into the news and is still this like dominant force in the party. It's hard to sort of focus on those gains when Trump always sort of seems to blot out the sun on that narrative. So a final question for you both, you know, as we've seen more Republicans enter this race, it is still, I think, an undeniable fact that when you look at every poll, Donald Trump, the former president, is at the top of the field by far. And I don't really see a clear path at this point. And I should mention, you know, sure, we're many months away from voters actually casting ballots, but I don't see a clear path of how these challengers maneuver around Trump.

Yeah. I mean, to me, when I think of people getting in, one of the questions I ask myself is like, are they really running for president or are they really are they running for a place on the ticket? And I think a VP spot. Yeah. Like I think I mean, I don't think Mike Pence is running to be vice president again. But when I when you look at candidates like Tim Scott, like Nikki Haley, potentially like Mike Pompeo or others, they're seeing the same numbers we see, right? Like they have advisors who are giving them very clear-eyed advice about this. But one, presidential races can surprise. Donald Trump is a really volatile candidate.

You know, anything could happen with him either being the nominee or dropping out of the race or any number of outcomes. So you want to be ready and you want to be poised. But also, you know, nominees ultimately oftentimes look to their opponents to pick a running mate. It doesn't happen all the time, but it's obviously the pool that you might look to first. It happens very frequently. And if you want to be part of that conversation, running in a national election, being on the debate stage, seeing if you can, you know, have some kind of connection with the grassroots, that's a really good way to do it, if not to be on the ticket, but to potentially serve in a future administration. And partly, I mean, I think you have to want to be president to run. I do think that that's true. And I think

Tim Scott and others probably want to be president. But to me, it also tells me when people like Tim Scott announced that, like, they're just looking beyond the Senate. They're ready. They're ready for a political future, potentially off of Capitol Hill. And this is a pretty good way to try to make a run at it. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell.

I cover politics. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.