The Collapse of Tim Scott’s Campaign: Debate Flops, Distrust, and an AWOL Billionaire

It was late October and Tim Scott’s campaign manager, Jennifer DeCasper, was trying to rally the troops for an all-staff call, announcing they would soon move to Iowa in a last-ditch effort to salvage his floundering presidential bid. She broke the news from the backseat of an Uber, according to four people familiar with the call.

As the car drove through the streets of Chicago after a long speech by Scott, Ms. DeCasper insisted, “We are not failing.”

But by then, even many people close to Mr. Scott believed his candidacy was already over.

His debate performances were flat. His television commercials didn’t work. His operation cost much more money than he brought in. And his super PAC had canceled its own television ads days before Ms. DeCasper’s staff called.

There was another detail that was closely guarded: The man long expected to be the super PAC’s biggest donor, billionaire Larry Ellison, ultimately stopped giving to the group after Mr. Scott entered the race, according to four people who were aware of the group’s finances. From 2020 to 2022, Mr. Ellison donated $35 million to groups aligned with Scott, and a huge check seemed like a foregone conclusion when Mr Ellison appeared at Scott’s kick-off and got a shout-out from the stage.

Before taking office, Mr. Scott cabled to allies that he had expected a significant amount of money to flow to his super PAC, according to three of the people familiar with the discussions and planning, and the super PAC wrote a budget for about half the amount Mr. Scott had predicted. But donations fell far short of even that smaller amount.

By early November, Scott had fallen so low in the polls that he barely qualified for the third presidential debate in Miami. Then, one night last week, when he knew he needed a performance that would revive his flagging candidacy, the biggest splash he made in Miami was his girlfriend’s public debut.

Days later, he dropped out of the race on Fox News in an announcement that surprised much of his staff.

For a South Carolina senator who entered the race with high hopes as the Republican Party’s highest-ranking Black elected official, Scott, 58, was unable to translate his compelling life story — and initially raised more campaign cash than any other candidate – in concrete support.

Externally, Mr. Scott’s relentless optimism never found traction in a battle dominated by former President Donald J. Trump’s dark and fear-laden campaign.

“Sometimes the message and the tone don’t match the moment,” said Rob Godfrey, a veteran Republican political strategist from South Carolina who has followed Mr. Scott’s career for years. “It may be that the potential in this campaign was not realized because there is such anger and polarization among the electorate.”

Internally, the campaign was plagued by miscommunication, missed opportunities and mistrust. The allies questioned the candidate’s commitment to the race and his decision to lean on a senior team, led by Ms. DeCasper, with so little presidential experience. Mr. Scott himself expressed concerns to a person close to him about how the nearly $22 million he poured into the race through his re-election to the Senate was being spent by others, further shrinking his circle of trust.

“It’s difficult for any presidential candidate to surround himself with people he doesn’t know and ask them to be loyal to the cause,” Ms. DeCasper, who has worked with Mr. Scott for more than a decade, said in an interview. “I had been his protector for a long time and no one could have done that but me.”

Ms. DeCasper said those who doubted Mr. Scott’s commitment to the cause misinterpreted his core values.

“He promised his mother he would take her to church every Sunday,” Mrs. DeCasper said. It was a promise, she added, and one Mr. Scott rarely broke. “People without context would see it as a lack of commitment to a presidential campaign,” she said. “But in reality he promised to be a good senator as well as a good Christian and a good son.”

In some ways the debates were Mr Scott’s undoing. He had signed up for the first time in August, prepared for a moment when Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida had faded and he had polled well in Iowa. But Mr. Scott was largely absent that evening and never fully recovered. Donors and voters instead looked with fresh eyes to his fellow South Carolina native, former Gov. Nikki Haley, whom Mr. Scott first appointed to the Senate a decade ago and who replaced him as Mr. DeSantis for a Trump alternative.

The fourth debate in December, with its higher voting requirements, had threatened to unceremoniously end the Scott campaign and so the weekend events in Iowa were canceled due to what his campaign said was a case of flu, Mr Scott bowed to the reality on Sunday evening that the race was over.

His announcement on Fox News on Sunday blindsided most of Mr. Scott’s aides and supporters, including Ms. DeCasper and Nathan Brand, his communications director.

The shock factor was the latest and final sign of a campaign criticized by some as an island at the top. Less than an hour before he announced his departure, fundraising appeals had gone out. And the suspension of his campaign was not posted to his own account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. for almost three hours.

Privately, allies and advisers of Scott had questioned his commitment to the fight, pointing to a campaign schedule that was less robust than that of his main non-Trump rivals. According to a calendar maintained by The Des Moines RegisterVivek Ramaswamy hosted more than twice as many events as he did in Iowa this year, while Mr. DeSantis had 50 percent more events and even Ms. Haley, who has made Iowa much less central to her candidacy, nearly matched Mr. Scott’s total . . (Unlike Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy, Mr. Scott has a full-time job as a senator.)

Questions about Mr. Scott’s future had accelerated after his super PAC pulled the advertising plug after running about $12 million of the $40 million in ads he said he would reserve for the summer. “We’re not going to waste our money if voters aren’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” Rob Collins, the super PAC’s co-chair, wrote in a blunt memo to donors.

Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman who supports Ms. Haley, called the memo useless. “That was the first thing that sucked the oxygen out,” Mr Dawson said.

But Mr. Scott himself soon repeated that message on CNBCa relatively rare interview outside the friendly confines of Fox News.

“One of the things we have realized in recent days is that breaking into the media with any campaign material is simply futile,” Mr Scott said. “Why waste those resources when you can save them for the end of the campaign, when you have a chance to break through.”

That opportunity never came.

Despite a black Republican rising to the top of the polls in each of the last two open Republican primaries (Ben Carson in 2016 and Herman Cain in 2012), Scott has never had a breakthrough moment in 2023, even though polls show him still remains there. very popular with voters.

Ultimately, the party appeared content to allow Mr. Scott to remain in the Senate. Mr. Ellison’s lack of money was symptomatic of a broader trend of donor hesitancy.

In the first half of 2021, when Mr. Scott delivered the Republican rebuttal to President Biden’s first speech to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Scott had nearly 247,000 online donations. This year, when he ran for president, he had much less: fewer than 109,000 online contributions, according to federal data from WinRed, the company that handles nearly all online Republican campaign contributions.

While Scott has repeatedly downplayed any interest in the vice presidency, his lack of frontal criticism of Trump — and Trump’s lack of attacks on him — has fueled repeated questions about them as potential running mates.

But Mr Scott, who has previously indicated he will not seek another term for the US Senate in 2028, did not rule out a different political future on Sunday, saying he listened to voters in his interview with Trey Gowdy.

“They tell me, ‘Not now, Tim,’” he said. “I don’t think they’re saying, Trey, ‘No,’ but I do think they’re saying, ‘Not now.'”