In modern times, no state has a record for vicious presidential primary politics to match South Carolina. “In South Carolina, meanness is a political virtue,” former John McCain advisor Steve Schmidt said earlier this week on MSNBC. “This state has a political culture that is unique in America.” Schmidt’s former boss knows this better than anyone. In 2000, coming off a big win in New Hampshire over George W. Bush, McCain was the victim of a whisper campaign, reputedly spawned by George W. Bush’s campaign, that spread the false rumor that the Arizona senator had an out-of-wedlock black child and that his wife Cindy was a drug addict.

The worst part: It worked. Bush beat McCain, a victory that changed the dynamics of the race and helped propel Bush to the nomination. More than anything, that’s what has set South Carolina’s GOP primaries apart: Voters are known to respond to the ugliness.

As the 2016 Republican campaign moves on to South Carolina, with the leading candidates debating there on Saturday night, there’s every expectation that an already-nasty race will turn nastier. This expected ugly turn is dictated not just by South Carolina’s long history of dirty tricks, but also by the logic of the race. The field is starting to winnow and the primaries are coming faster and faster. Candidates no longer have the luxury of months in Iowa and New Hampshire to calibrate their message. They have to finish off their rivals as soon as possible.

The problem is, though, what avenues of personal attack are left? After all, this is a race in which Donald Trump has insulted Jeb Bush’s manliness and Carly Fiorina’s physical appearance, and likened Ben Carson to a child molester. Moreover, Trump has done all these things not in the time-hallowed Bush family manner of starting whispering campaigns, but out in the open, publicly and brutally. In the age of Trump, is there any room for back-stabbing when the front-runner is a master of stabbing people in the front, live on national television?

Trump himself provides the juiciest target for whisper campaigns this time around. His two divorces alone, let alone his libertine life while a bachelor, is full of hair-raising material that would cause anyone who believes in family values to pause. Yet Trump’s sheer brazenness and shamelessness would make it hard to get very far with this sort of gossip. When attacked, he’s unlikely to retreat and might successfully fend off attacks by his openness.