In the run-up to their big presidential campaign moments, the big media players in Iowa and New Hampshire gave voters a useful online feature, an interactive calendar that let them track where candidates were appearing in person.

Down in South Carolina, it’s different. The interactive site du jour launched last week is the Charleston Post and Courier’s “Whisper Campaign” — a digital tool that begs the public to help keep tabs on the coming blizzard of dirty tricks.


As the White House hopefuls descend on South Carolina, site of the crucial Feb. 20 GOP primary and then the Democratic contest a week later, they're also heading straight into what might be the seamiest underbelly of American politics. This is a state famous for telephone pollsters implying John McCain had an illegitimate child and the bogus Mitt Romney Christmas card with controversial quotes from the Book of Mormon. Fliers dropped on South Carolina doorsteps have told people the wrong date to vote; this is where political rivals have bantered openly with racial slurs and innuendos about sexual trysts.

The state has earned its reputation the hard way: It’s where the late GOP operative Lee Atwater was born, the man who turned negative campaigning into an art form in the 1988 presidential race, starting with his home state. While Iowa and New Hampshire tend to get a year’s worth of up-close and personal attention from the presidential field, South Carolinians usually experience the race in a quick burst of attention once the national spotlight shifts their way, forcing the campaigns into the quickest, often nastiest tactics they can think of to shape the race. And with a larger and far more diverse electorate than the first two states, there are more people with sensitivities to exploit.

“South Carolina on the Republican side is a viper’s nest,” said Neil Sroka, the head of Barack Obama’s digital team in the state during his 2008 campaign.

While the entire slate of candidates is susceptible to attacks from left field, one name running in 2016 repeatedly rises to the top as the most likely to face the kinds of dirty tricks South Carolina is known for: Donald Trump. The real estate mogul has so far weathered months of media scrutiny and survived a seemingly endless run of political obituaries based on the words that have come directly out of his mouth. But for a field of desperate rival Republicans now serious about blocking him from becoming their party’s nominee, the intense days leading up to the GOP primary represent the last, best chance to come up with a smear that sticks.

“No one has talked about the three marriages yet. No one has talked about the casinos. I suspect we’ll see that come Monday,” said Katon Dawson, a longtime GOP operative in South Carolina. “Someone has to take the bark off of him or he’s going to take this primary walking away.”

This presidential campaign has already seen its share of ugly moments. In Iowa, Ted Cruz staffers spread the false rumor as the caucuses were just kicking off that Ben Carson’s campaign was finished. There were also reams of paper scattered into the air outside a Chris Christie town hall in Ames featuring the New Jersey governor’s 2009 statement supporting Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. In Manchester, New Hampshire, last weekend, copies of a Boston Herald front page with the headline “Choke!” somehow found their way onto the dashboards of cars parked outside a Marco Rubio rally, according to a Washington Post reporter.

Now comes South Carolina. As far back as December, one popular local political blog began reporting that a “mistress bomb” was about to rock one of the GOP campaigns. The Post and Courier’s “Whisper Campaign” site has already collected eight suspect submissions from its readers — five unusual phone calls, one strange mailer and two cases of stolen yard signs. It goes into detail on some of the reports but warns that the information has “not necessarily been vetted for accuracy.”

Political insiders in South Carolina say it’s only a matter of time before the rumor mill really starts churning. “There are real stakes involved, so naturally elbows would come out and they have come out in South Carolina,” said GOP Rep. Mark Sanford. “It is a contact sport, and on a variety of occasions there are at times unethical things. It's a full contact sport.”

While he said he so far wasn’t aware of anything major about to drop, Sanford predicted that, if “tradition holds true, we’ll start hearing about them” before the primary.

As the machinery kicks into gear, one big question hangs over the campaigns this year: Does dirty trickery have quite the same punch in the age of social media? While it can be amplified by Twitter, and spread quickly on Facebook or Instagram, the huge variety of info-streams can also dilute the impact of any single stunt. It can even come back to bite the candidate in question. When Cruz’s campaign started incorrectly circulating word of Carson’s premature exit on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, based on a faulty reading of the first in a series of CNN reporter’s tweets, Carson’s campaign quickly complained — and Cruz was forced to apologize and play defense. The Texas senator also got stung when his campaign sent out official-looking letterhead warning of "VOTING VIOLATIONS” if residents didn’t get to their caucus site. It’s actually a familiar tactic from previous years, but this time the campaign lit up Twitter when pictures of the mailers surfaced.

“It’s dangerous territory,” said Chip Felkel, a Greenville-based GOP operative not affiliated with a 2016 candidate. “There’s enough volatility and visceral anger and cynicism with the process. ... If they get found out before the primary it can bite them seriously.”

In South Carolina, political operatives often work overtime to avoid getting connected to a low-blow attack, but they don’t always succeed in covering their tracks. In 2007, reporters deduced that Romney consultants had built a “Phoney Fred” website that took aim at rival candidate Fred Thompson. In the 2000 GOP primary campaign, which featured a heated clash between McCain and George W. Bush, the Arizona senator was hit with rumors that he had an out-of-wedlock black daughter. (In reality, the McCains had adopted a child from Bangladesh.) Observers quickly started pointing fingers at Bush campaign operatives, including Karl Rove, though in the years since, Rove has consistently denied playing a role and actually put the blame on an unnamed professor at Bob Jones University.

“That wasn’t a whisper. That was a phone call,” Dawson, a former state GOP party chairman, says of the scheme. “‘If you knew he had fathered an illegitimate African-American child would you vote for him?’ I remember the call like it was yesterday. So does John McCain.”

That 2000 attack in South Carolina was a quintessential example of just why the dirty trick survives. Combined with false rumors that his wife Cindy had a drug addiction, the call went a long way toward ending McCain’s first foray for the White House. Just days after he had defeated Bush in the New Hampshire primary, McCain’s momentum was killed when he lost South Carolina by 11 percentage points.

Headed into South Carolina in 2016, it’s unclear what exactly Trump’s opponents could dredge up to knock down someone who has lived in the public spotlight, gleefully unfiltered, for decades. “What more could possibly be said about Donald Trump that hasn’t already been reported by the New York Post?” asked Felkel.

Trump himself brushed aside questions about South Carolina’s penchant for campaign tactics that often land below the belt. “Well, we’ve already had dirty tricks in this campaign,” he told CNN on Tuesday night just hours after he was declared the winner in New Hampshire. “I’m ready for whatever they want to throw at me and that’s fine.”

Dawson, who initially backed Lindsey Graham’s presidential bid but is now neutral, said Trump could even end up looking even better, depending on what he does in response to the sharpest attacks.

“You get rewarded,” he said, “by how you handle it.”

Lauren French contributed to this report.