How did Haley’s South Carolina become Trump country? Ask the Tea Party.
When Nikki Haley ran for governor of South Carolina in 2010, one of her first campaign stops was Claude and Sunny O’Donovan’s living room in Aiken, SC.
Mr. O’Donovan, the co-founder of a local Tea Party group, had invited Ms. Haley and other candidates to make their case to the conservative activists of Aiken County, a heavily Republican enclave of golf courses and retirement communities. The crowd gathered around the O’Donovans’ coffee table numbered just a few dozen. But the retired couple was in love.
“We fell in love with her,” said the 85-year-old Mr. O’Donovan. “She was a dynamite girl.”
A digital photo frame in the O’Donovans’ home still shows a photo of Mrs. Haley at the meeting. But on Feb. 24, when Ms. Haley faces Donald J. Trump in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, both O’Donovans plan to vote for Mr. Trump.
“I think he has the values of the Tea Party,” Ms O’Donovan, 84, said. “It was for the people, and I see Trump as something for the people.”
Recent polls shows Mr. Trump leading Ms. Haley by 36 points in South Carolina. A decisive loss would put the Republican nomination further out of reach and provide a painful coda to her political career in her home state.
A Trump victory in South Carolina would also write the final chapter of one of the most important political stories of the past decade: the story of how Mr. Trump entered politics amid a transformative grassroots movement and then incorporated that movement into his own.
In the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Tea Party movement turned outrage over bank bailouts and right-wing hostility toward the new president and his policies into a wave of medium-term victories, with Republican majorities in Congress and state houses were won and a new generation of politicians emerged. political stars, including Mrs. Haley.
Four years later, initially skeptical Tea Partiers embraced Mr. Trump, who as candidate and president advanced a souped-up version of the movement’s antipathy toward immigrants, fear of a changing country and anti-establishment fervor.
In Ms. Haley’s state, where the Tea Party movement was unusually influential, Mr. Trump won an early victory in his 2016 presidential bid.
“The kind of people who were Tea Party in 2010 will be part of the MAGA movement in 2024,” said Scott Huffmon, professor of political science at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., and director of the Winthrop Poll. “We owe it all to the Tea Party.”
Today, few of the original Tea Party organizations remain. But their former dominance, and subsequent rift in Trump’s camp, goes a long way toward explaining how South Carolina abandoned its once-favorite daughter for a former New York Democrat.
Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for Ms. Haley’s campaign, defended the former governor’s credentials. “Just like when she ran for governor, Nikki is the outsider, the conservative candidate,” she said in a statement.
But even some once-devoted supporters have moved on.
“Yes, he is the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving,” said Jane Page Thompson, co-founder of Mr. O’Donovan, who also hosted a Haley fundraiser in Aiken during her governorship, about Mr. Trump. ‘But now America needs the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving – not the snowflake niece.
From ‘Nikki, who?’ to No. 1
In the heyday of the Tea Party, South Carolina was home to dozens of local groups involved in the movement.
Ms. Haley credited their support for her ascent in 2010. “You took me from ‘Nikki, who?’ to first place in the polls,” she told a Myrtle Beach Tea Party rally not long before she won the Republican nomination.
It had taken time for the state’s conservatives to warm up to Ms. Haley, the child of immigrants from India who was then in her third term as a state lawmaker. Early in the governor’s race, Tea Party groups mainly favored Larry Grooms, a socially conservative senator. They coalesced around Ms. Haley after Mr. Grooms dropped out, and after Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska endorsed Mrs. Haley.
But Ms. Haley endeared herself by pushing for formal votes in the General Assembly, an accountability measure championed by Tea Party activists who, like Ms. Haley, railed against the state’s clubby political culture.
Once in power, however, some Tea Party activists became suspicious of her. She parted ways with them over a controversial tax provision and then failed to block a federal grant related to the Affordable Care Act. The Governor’s Tea Party Coalition, an advisory council that Ms. Haley formed, went further skepticismand was quietly abandoned after a single meeting.
“They just never called us back,” said Allen Olson, then chairman of the Columbia Tea Party and leader of the coalition. He plans to vote for Trump this month.
Rob Godfrey, then a spokesman for Ms. Haley, attributed some of the disillusionment to the ambitions of the Tea Party activists themselves.
“The Tea Party was in many ways a curious combination of a few true believers and many people seeking the same government jobs held by bureaucrats they claimed to be suspicious of,” said Mr. Godfrey, who is not affiliated at Mrs. Haley’s Presidential Campaign.
Recently interviewed Tea Party veterans argued that it was Ms. Haley herself who had changed and transformed herself into a rising star in a more inclusive, forward-looking Republican Party.
As evidence, they pointed to her call to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds in Columbia after a racist mass shooting at a black church in Charleston in June 2015. Ms. Haley was “completely controlled by what that would mean for her future political ambitions,” said Ms Thompson. “It showed me that that would always be a priority for her.”
But Mr. Olson, who supported the flag’s removal, recalled that it offended many Tea Party goers for less lofty reasons.
“I’ll be honest, many of the Tea Party members were states’ rights people,” he said, referring to the long-standing claim that the Civil War was not fought primarily over slavery, “and gathered around the Confederate flag.”
Trump sees a constituency
By then, the Tea Party had diminished as a force—and its supporters were already leaning toward a new champion.
Mr Trump, who declared his candidacy shortly before the flag debate, made few gestures toward the libertarian economics championed by the Tea Party and, once in power, contributed more to the budget deficit than Mr Obama or George W .Bush. Instead, he had attracted attention Tea Partiers by fanning the flames of conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and the construction of an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.
Some national Tea Party organizers had done their best to keep such concerns within the margins of the movement, but they remained persistent among grassroots and local activists.
“It was an ethnonationalist passion for a changing America,” says Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University who has studied the Tea Party movement. “And that’s something that Trump ultimately picked up on.”
Mr. Trump saw the movement as a natural constituency. At a January 2015 Tea Party conference in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where he teased his unannounced candidacy, he told reporters that he had always supported the Tea Party.
“I think we have values that are very similar,” he said.
Not all Tea Party supporters were quick to return their affection. Mr O’Donovan endorsed Trump rival and Tea Party favorite Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. “I was the most anti-Trump guy in the world,” he said.
The Monmouth University Polling Institute poll also showed initial negative attitudes toward Mr. Trump among Tea Partiers. But the month after Trump declared his candidacy with a speech denouncing illegal immigration and calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” his popularity among Tea Partiers soared. 65 percent. a 2019 Pew Research Center study found that Tea Party supporters were by then among his staunchest supporters.
The angriest voices
In South Carolina, former Tea Partiers who now support Mr. Trump have offered several reasons. Mr. O’Donovan, who could not bring himself to vote for Mr. Trump in the 2016 general election, said his views changed when Mr. Trump made good on his campaign promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices. “I started to come around,” he said. “I became a real Trumper.”
Others saw his appeal as more elemental. “There’s just a group of people in this country, they’re very angry with the direction of this country,” said Colen Lindell, the founder of another Tea Party group in Aiken who co-chaired Trump’s campaign in the county in 2016 and 2020. “They feel like the country they grew up in is disappearing.”
Mr. Trump offered a vessel for that anger — while Ms. Haley warned about it. In a 2016 speech, she urged voters to resist “the siren call of the angriest voices.” It was a reference, she said later recognizedto Mr. Trump and his campaign.
Mr. Grooms, one of the few South Carolina politicians with ties to the Tea Party movement who has endorsed Ms. Haley this year, conceded that Mr. Trump had an edge over an angry Republican electorate.
“I believe one day Nikki Hakey will be president of the United States,” he said. “I just can’t tell you when that day will come.”