Julian E. Zelizer is a historian at Princeton University and fellow at New America. He is the author of The Fierce Urgency of Now and Jimmy Carter.

The next major Republican primary will take place in South Carolina on February 20. “If you are not ready to play,” Sen. Lindsay Graham told an audience while introducing Jeb Bush at an event in the state this week, “don’t come to South Carolina.”

He was talking about the Republican candidates, of course, but he might as well have been talking about the Grand Old Party itself. Saturday’s South Carolina primary race will be not just a test to see who is the strongest candidate in the pack but also a test of how strong the party establishment still is—or perhaps more accurately, just how weak it has become.


Ever since 1980, and up until 2012, South Carolina had been a Republican “firewall” of sorts—the state where insurgents who did well in Iowa or New Hampshire were shoved to the back of the pack and the party-preferred candidate rose to the top, with momentum coming into Super Tuesday and then onward to the convention. The state’s party establishment was strong, the voters reliable, and time and time again, the firewall worked. In 1980, South Carolina was where Ronald Reagan revitalized his campaign against George H.W. Bush and John Connally. In 1988, South Carolina helped Vice President George H.W. Bush put down challenges from Senator Robert Dole and evangelist Pat Robertson. President Bush and Senator Robert Dole used South Carolina to so the same against Patrick Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, respectively. Most famously, Gov. George W. Bush depended on South Carolina to crush Sen. John McCain.

In 2012, that all changed, when a growing Tea Party had weakened the party establishment significantly, and Newt Gingrich, funded by a billionaire of his own, had resources enough to run a ruthless, effective campaign and defeat GOP favorite Mitt Romney. This year, establishment candidates are in trouble again. Following Sen. Ted Cruz’s victory in Iowa and Donald Trump’s decisive success in New Hampshire, the candidates preferred by party leaders—Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Jeb Bush—are all scrambling to survive.

Given what happened in 2012, this year is a crucial test to see whether the party establishment has the chops to make a comeback and preserve the South Carolina firewall—or whether we are now officially in an era of free-for all Republican competition that party elites cannot control.

***

The brainchild of the South Carolina primary as we know it was the bad boy of Republican politics, South Carolinian Lee Atwater, who in 1980 elevated this contest onto the national political main stage. Before 1980, South Carolina selected its GOP nominee through a party convention, which had been controlled by Senator Strom Thurmond and his machine.

In 1979, Atwater, an up and coming political consultant, saw the caucuses and primaries had become the mechanism for picking party nominees, rather than the smoke-filled rooms of the party conventions, and concluded that it was time for South Carolina to join the primary fray.

But Atwater didn’t really want to give full control to the voters: He still believed the new primary system could be a vehicle for national party leaders to bolster their candidate going into Super Tuesday. He had seen how Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had challenged the major party candidates in 1976 by winning in caucuses and primaries as they appealed to Americans who didn’t ordinarily participate in politics and by using the news media to communicate directly to voters, bypassing party elites. South Carolina, according to Atwater, would be a way for the party establishment to gain control of the new primary process by having a state where it could counteract the free-wheeling decisions of earlier states.

So in 1979, Atwater worked with Republican South Carolina Congressman Carroll Campbell to push for a full-scale primary that would come after Iowa and New Hampshire but before Super Tuesday—both late and early enough to completely reset the trajectory of the primary race.

How was Atwater so confident his strategy would work? He knew that South Carolina had one of the most powerful Republican Party operations. The party in the state had started to take form in 1964, when Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond famously switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP. That year, the right-wing Barry Goldwater put this state into the Republican column. Four years later, Richard Nixon won the state once again and in 1974, the state elected a Republican, James Edwards, to be the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. The state’s party quickly developed a formidable apparatus and moved to the forefront of the party’s political presence in a region that had once been totally dominated by the Democratic Party. By the 1970s, the Republican Party had become a major political force in the state.

It also helped that the South Carolina electorate was home to a wide variety of conservatives. There were religious conservatives, who hovered around Bob Jones University, an epicenter of right wing operations. There were fiscal conservatives who still believed in balancing the budget. The tourism, textile industry and defense industry had nurtured a business community whose members were determined to obtain supply side tax cuts. The large presence of military families in the states also produced strong support for hawkish views of foreign policy. This was a state where racial tension also ran deep. A substantial part of the electorate in this state where the Confederate Flag flew high still had little sympathy for federal civil rights legislation.

In this way, South Carolina was much more representative of the GOP base than New Hampshire and Iowa—and was thus less likely to deliver a surprise victory. But more than that, winning in South Carolina required a candidate to muster the organizational and financial tools necessary to build a broad coalition of all the different factions that existed within the conservative movement—and that would be hard for “outsider” candidates to pull off.

In August 1979, South Carolina Republicans agreed to Atwater’s plan. The party switched to a primary system scheduled to take place on Saturday, March 8, 1980, just days before Super Tuesday so that the winner would get a huge boost at a key moment. “To me,” explained Haley Barbour, one of the up-and-coming political operatives in the state, “South Carolina is the most important of the Southern primaries because of chronology. It’s three days before the Alabama, Florida and Georgia primaries, and it’s bound to have an impact on the rest of them.”

But there was another key element to Atwater’s strategy: dirty tricks.

Atwater had learned at a young age that the best way to win an election was to do whatever was necessary, whether that involved lying, dirty tricks or character assassination.. His first campaign consulting job was helping to elect the head of the student counsel at his high school by telling fellow students that, should his candidate win, the cafeteria would start serving beer and the teachers would never give out grades lower than a B. The year Atwater graduated college he helped Karl Rove, the Executive Director of the College Republican National Committee, to win election as president of the College Republicans. Rove’s opponent, Robert Edgeworth, charged that the campaign done things like throw away ballots. The head of the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush, was called in to decide the contested election—and gave it to Rove.

Atwater brought this philosophy with him to South Carolina politics, where he wasn’t above using coded rhetoric to play on the racial and religious animosities in the southern electorate. In 1978, he was tied to an anti-semitic attacks leveled against a Democratic candidate Max Heller, who was challenging Congressman Carroll Campbell, who Atwater also helped elect in 1976. As Atwater famously said in 1981: “You start out in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you stay stuff like forced bussing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”

In South Carolina, he knew that it would be particularly easy to tap into this kind of racial and ethnic tension. It was also a state where politics had always been a blood sport. The new South Carolina primary, Atwater imagined, would be a street fight and the establishment candidate would have to prove his or her muster by engaging in dirty tricks and hardball tactics to destroy the reputation of the opponents. If a party-preferred candidate was willing to get his hands dirty with this kind of politics while appealing to the most rightward parts of the GOP, the state party operation could help to deliver the vote that candidate needed.

***

The first test of how effective South Carolina could be as a firewall came right away, with Ronald Reagan in 1980, who Atwater as his campaign manager in South Carolina.

The Republican Party believed that 1980 was the right time for Ronald Reagan, a hero of the conservative movement who had the charisma to sell their ideas in a way that Barry Goldwater had failed to do. The mood of the electorate was angry. Voters were unhappy with President Jimmy Carter and with Washington, both of which they though had failed to alleviate the problems in the economy and foreign policy. Even though former CIA Director George H.W. Bush looked like a perfect candidate for the GOP given his stellar credentials, the Republican Party preferred Reagan—a bolder candidate who would be able to energize all of the different factions of the GOP. Reagan had proven his chops as governor of California, as a spokesman for GE, and with his popular radio show.

And yet, coming into South Carolina, the Reagan team was looking for a boost. The early part of his campaign for the nomination had been rough. Bush had organized a massive effort in Iowa that paid off in a surprising victory. Although Reagan won in New Hampshire, his polls numbers were falling, and Bush was looking strong. More problematic was the fact that Reagan’s campaign funds were almost depleted. Atwater had canceled a number of television ads in early March, cut down on their radio spots and even replaced a major rally with a bus tour of rural parts of the state.

Another candidate, former Democratic Texas Gov. John Connally, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1973 after feeling that the Democrats had drifted too far to the left, was also making a strong play for South Carolina. Connally had raised a lot of money and put together a strong grass roots operation. Strom Thurmond had endorsed him, and he was polling extremely well in the state. Haley Barbour, who signed on to coordinate Connally’s campaign in the southern states, said: “This is our best chance in many respects. It’s the only state where we’ve got big guns—and in fact, we’ve got the only cannons on ground.”

And that’s when Atwater made his move. He broadcast advertisements and coached Reagan to deliver speeches that showed Reagan’s clear commitment to the conservative base of the party on issues like religious faith and abortion. And then, while Reagan focused on a positive message in public and emphasized socially and fiscally conservative themes, his campaign hand fueled a brutal civil war between his opponents.

Atwater believed that campaigns were won by destroying how voters perceived the character of your opponents. He wanted to make Bush and Connally look more like professional wrestlers than respectable politicians. In a savvy move, Atwater convinced Nancy Thurmond, who unbeknownst to most South Carolinians had not shared in her husband’s endorsement, to leak a story to reporters about Connally’s having tried to bribe black ministers with $70,000 “walking around” money and an endowment for Allen University in exchange for their help in delivering 100,000 votes. (In fact, the group of ministers had actually approached Atwater to work for Reagan. Atwater told them the campaign had no money and suggested they approach Connally.) Harry S. Dent, then working as the chairman of Bush’s state executive committee, immediately handed the story to reporter Lee Bandy, who quickly published it in the state’s biggest newspaper.

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign jumped into action, sending out a press release about these stories stating that “John Connally and his South Carolina campaign have made a deal with African Methodist Episcopal Church leaders for the delivering of 100,000 votes in the presidential primary.” Connally’s campaign team responded that Bush was behind these false charges and that “His connections with the Rockefeller faction and the Trilateral commission will not be accepted in South Carolina.”

“Well, that story got out, thanks to me,” Bandy would later recall, “and it probably killed Connally. He spent $10 million for one delegate. Lee saved Ronald Reagan’s candidacy. A few years later, Lee laughed about that story. He said, ‘Bandy, you got used.’”

Taking aim at Bush, Atwater leaked to the press an internal memo that he obtained from an ally inside the Bush camp, in which the Bush campaign discussed revealing Connally’s support for gay rights in “of all places, San Francisco.” When Connally read the story, he was furious. Connally’s poll numbers plummeted with each of these stories, and Connally slammed Harry Dent as the person behind these attacks.

As Connally attacked the Bush campaign for using sleazy politics, both men began were losing. The state looked like a cesspool of gutter politics. Writing for the Washington Post, Bill Peterson quipped that the primary was “mean and dirty, rife with innuendo, allegations of dirty tricks and political chicanery in the worst tradition of the politics of the Old South.” Despite Lee Atwater’s role in these fierce campaign wars, Ronald Reagan came out looking like the statesman.

On March 8, Reagan scored a huge landslide victory by 24 percentage points, knocking Connally out of the race and greatly damaging Bush. Reagan had tilted to the right, Atwater had unleashed his vicious political style, and the party delivered the votes that were necessary.

From that point on, as it had been for Reagan, South Carolina became a “firewall” against insurgents who did well in Iowa or New Hampshire. In 1988, in a state where Ronald Reagan remained incredibly popular, his Vice President George H.W. Bush brought an end to the campaign of Sen. Robert Dole after Dole’s surprise victory in Iowa. South Carolina also ended the campaign of the preacher Pat Robertson, who, voicing the concerns of the religious right, had put all of his chips in this state. In 1992 Bush did it again—this time to put down Patrick Buchanan’s challenge—and Dole did the same to Buchanan in 1996.

Most famously, in 2000, George W. Bush, the party’s favorite, put a tough campaign full of rumors and innuendo to bring down John McCain. Bush supporters also launched whisper campaigns, which the campaign denied participating in, that spread rumors that McCain’s wife Cindy was addicted to drugs and that their daughter was an out-of-wedlock African-American baby (McCain and his wife Cindy had adopted a baby from Bangladesh). South Carolinians found pamphlets in their car windows charging that he was mentally unstable as a result of being a prisoner of war. In the end, Bush defeated McCain and went on to win the nomination.

It’s not that the insurgents didn’t resort to dirty tricks as well; it’s that the resources provided by the South Carolina state party always overwhelmed the efforts by those Iowa and New Hampshire surprise victors to fight back. Whether it was money for robocalls or the connections Atwater maintained to all the key party players in the state, the establishment resources were simply impossible to match.

***

Today, the South Carolina primary retains its pugnacious character that is Atwater’s legacy. Atwater gave rise to an entire generation of campaign professionals who mimicked his style of character assassination. “People in Iowa expect the candidate to trudge through the snow, do small meetings in diners,” a former state GOP chairman told the Washington Post. “In New Hampshire they expect a candidate to come to their living room, sit on the sofa, have some coffee. In South Carolina, 700,000 people want to see how you take a punch.”

There has been a robocall going around South Carolina which asks the resident whom they are planning to vote for. If they respond “Marco Rubio” the voice on the other end then asks; “Did you know that Marco Rubio and the Gang of Eight are for amnesty? And then the gentleman said he’s for letting 11 million illegal immigrants stay in the U.S. and that he was for letting Syrians cross the borders freely?” The call came from a research firm, Remington Research, that was founded by Ted Cruz’s campaign consultant Jeff Roe.

But just as the national Republican Party has fractured since the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, the South Carolina party operation has also lost its historic role. In 2012, South Carolina did not come through for establishment candidate Mitt Romney. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who had the financial support of Sheldon Adelson, was the first to capitalize on the instability that was emerging within the Republican Party as Tea Party politicians challenged the status quo. Gingrich ran a vicious anti-establishment campaign with advertisements that played to the Tea Party fervor. He highlighted Romney’s work at Bain Capital in order to show all the jobs that were lost as a result of his work and how Romney was simply a wealthy, Wall Street Republican who could not connect to the grass roots. His strong performance in the televised debates allowed him an opportunity to connect directly with the voters. Some Republicans tried to fight back. A fake CNN email alert was sent to party activists close to the primary claiming that Gingrich had pressured his ex-wife into having an abortion, but the state party was no longer sufficiently unified or powerful to push back against the insurgent Gingrich. Two years later, Sen. Lindsey Graham won his Senate primary but with 44 percent of the state’s Republicans throwing their support behind non-incumbent candidates who were barely funded.

By 2012, the Republican electorate in South Carolina, as it did in other red states, had also shifted very far to the right. It was becoming increasingly difficult for a coalitional candidate to move far enough to the right to actually satisfying the different elements the base. Gingrich, according to polls, did well with evangelical Christians, Tea Party Republicans and voters who said that they were “very conservative.”

Finally, Gingrich, funded by Sheldon Adelson and his Super PAC, had huge resources at his command. This meant they had all the money that they need to conduct any dirty tricks of their own and to mount sophisticated, hardball campaigns to undercut Romney who criticized Obama as the best “food stamp president” in his victory speech, proclaiming that “the American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half-century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system.”

This year, it looks like the trends from 2012 will continue. South Carolina can’t really fulfill Lee Atwater’s vision anymore: There is no more party establishment to speak of and the electorate is demanding candidates who are more pure in their allegiance to the right, not just willing to shift their way for a primary or two. South Carolina is becoming one more open-ended contest where everyone, armed with their independent sources of money, will fights tooth-and-nail for victory and where the loudest, most aggressive and ruthless candidate will come out on top. Just look at the polls now: In a state dominated by the establishment for 30 years, the polls show “outsiders” Donald Trump and Ted Cruz at the top of the pack.

This isn’t to say it’s all over for the establishment: Good news for party favorite Marco Rubio’s campaign came this week when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a darling of the Tea Party, endorsed him. If Rubio is able to pull off an upset, or even come in a strong second, it could signal that some sort of South Carolina Republican Party establishment might be resurgent—with the Tea Party in the fold rather than on the outside. Even if the establishment makes it in the state, it sure won’t be Atwater’s establishment anymore.

