The Power of Our Primary - Matt Moore

Grace: 00:00:00

Matt. Hi. Welcome to Frogmore Stew.

Matt: 00:00:03

Thanks for having me.

Grace: 00:00:04

I have been so looking forward to talking to you, especially just before the upcoming Republican presidential primary, because I understand you are a wealth of knowledge about the history of the Republican presidential primary and its lasting relevance.

Matt: 00:00:22

That is very kind. 44 years now. South Carolina's big primary. We'll see what happens on, on Saturday.

Grace: 00:00:28

So the story really starts in 1980, which is probably before you were born with Lee Atwater, right? He was the first, it was the first year the Republicans would have a primary in South Carolina. And prior to that, it was just through the state party convention.

Grace: 00:00:46

I don't think the Dems had a primary here until maybe 1988. But do you want to start us from the beginning, 1980, what was going on politically in South Carolina?

Matt: 00:00:56

You're right. It's before my birth by a couple of years, but the story actually goes back well before then, the 1950s, people forget that primaries to pick a president are a relatively recent invention.

Matt: 00:01:08

Before the 1960s, really, presidents were chosen in smoke filled back rooms, right? They're all kind of stories from the 1930s, 40s, and even before that, where they looked around at the senators and the governors and the rich guys, literally all white guys, in the room and said who wants to be the nominee for president, and they chose it that way.

Matt: 00:01:29

So the populism of the 1960s led eventually to South Carolina's primary in 1980, but in the late 1950s, when the textile baron Roger Millican in the upstate began to support Barry Goldwater, who was a hardliner U. S. Senator from Arizona these guys were very much of a John Birch Ayn Rand libertarian strain of Republicans.

Matt: 00:01:50

So Goldwater is actually the first Republican to win a general election versus Johnson in 64 shortly before that was when Senator, U. S. Senator Strom Thurmond switched to the Republican Party. And they were off to the races, right? In the late 60s, Gerald Governor Richard Nixon won in 68 in South Carolina.

Matt: 00:02:08

74, Governor Jim Edwards was the first South Carolina Republican Governor. Since the Reconstruction period. So in 76, Ronald Reagan actually wins the South Carolina Republican Convention. Of course, he lost the nomination to President Gerald Ford. It was a very hard fought race. So headed into the late 1970s, Lee Atwater who was about to become Reagan's state campaign manager, was looking really for any advantage to help Ronald Reagan become the Republican nominee for president.

Matt: 00:02:39

There was a competing faction of the party, led by Texas Governor John Connolly. Haley Barber, I think, was his campaign manager. Again, these are very famous political operatives. But they decided Lee Atwater decided to have the novel idea to move the South Carolina primary to right after Iowa and New Hampshire, of course, before, quote unquote, Super Tuesday.

Matt: 00:03:01

So the idea was that there'd be a lot of focus on South Carolina. It was a relatively small state. Candidates could get around cheap media markets. You have three to four distinct media markets. Which is key, right?

Grace: 00:03:12

It's very key. It's key, instead of having it in a big state where it's super expensive, it gives the little guy more opportunity.

Matt: 00:03:20

That's right. He also had the really novel idea to put the primary on a Saturday. This is where that comes from. The South Carolina primary is referred to as the working men's primary. They were keenly aware that having a primary on a Saturday certainly leads to more working turnout.

Matt: 00:03:33

Folks that aren't working can come to the polls. And Ronald Reagan wins and South Carolina takes off from there. So that's the back story.

Grace: 00:03:41

I read something that Atwater once said where he said, In Iowa, they want the candidates to trudge through the snow. In New Hampshire, they want you to come and sit on their couch. But in South Carolina, they want to see you take a punch.

Matt: 00:03:56

That sounds about right from what I've seen over the past couple of decades.

Grace: 00:04:00

And can you tell us the story of how Atwater pitted the two candidates, George H. W. Bush and John Connolly, against each other so that Reagan would come out looking good?

Matt: 00:04:12

Yeah, the way I understand it there's a lot of accusations were thrown around. If I get any of these details wrong of course, literally before I was born, but I think it actually involved Nancy Thurman, who was Sean Thurman's. Creating all kinds of rumors against Connolly and they pitched the story to Lee Bandy and I forget the exact topic of the story.

Matt: 00:04:30

Lee Bandy is a very famous political reporter. Yeah. But Mandy later admitted that he basically won the election for Reagan in South Carolina.

Grace: 00:04:38

So the way I understood it was that there were some black pastors that had gone to Lee Atwater and said, listen, we like your candidate, but, and we want to push him within our congregation, but we need some money to be able to do that. And he was like, Oh, we're out of money, but John Connolly has a bunch of cash. And so he sent them over to John Connolly. And before they even got to him, he had called Atwater had called the reporter Bandy and said, Hey, Connolly is bribing the black community to vote for his candidate to vote for him.

Grace: 00:05:15

That's the story. Bandy ran the story and yeah, and then it pitted. George H. W. Bush against John Connolly and made Reagan look like he was this, a fray candidate,

Matt: 00:05:27

Right? That sounds right. And that's, that's just scratching the surface of 44 years of crazy stories.

Grace: 00:05:32

Of South Carolina, right?

Grace: 00:05:33

So many people believe that Reagan would never have won the presidency if he lost the South Carolina primary that year. And that's, that too is what made South Carolina such a big deal about indicating who will go on to become the nominee.

Matt: 00:05:49

Yeah, when I was state chairman, we had this slogan we use quite a lot in marketing is we pick presidents, right?

Matt: 00:05:56

It's like Iowa picks corn and New Hampshire picks something and South Carolina picks presidents, right? And so we use that marketing that marketing kind of faded in 2012 when Newt Gingrich won the primary But nonetheless, I think it's still true. It holds true because South Carolina as you mentioned is a It's a diverse geographic state.

Matt: 00:06:14

It's diverse in terms of media markets. It's diverse in the types of voters who vote, all the way from Charleston to the upstate. Yeah, it's enjoyed that spot for 44 years. I think Republicans here, probably, and Democrats for that matter, too, shouldn't take it for granted that you have this sort of front row seat.

Matt: 00:06:32

South Carolina has always punched above its weight politically. As we joke, any U. S. conflict, South Carolina is usually at the front of the line causing the conflict, right? We have a ton of international political people from South Carolina, of course current DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, the RNC co chair, Drew McKissick are from South Carolina.

Matt: 00:06:51

The state generates a lot of interesting political people.

Grace: 00:06:54

That is for sure. Okay. In doing some research on you, I. I found that you wrote your master's thesis from USC on the economic impact of South Carolina's 2012 Republican presidential primary. So what was the standout of the 2012 primary?

Matt: 00:07:13

So it does seem like half my life ago, 2012 I was working on my master's in economics and the university said, you have to finish. And. You have to write about something and I was like, Oh gosh, I like, I'm not excited about this at all. So I said, let's write about politics. And so I actually studied the impacts, economic impacts of South Carolina's 2012 primary, which these studies are interesting on multiple levels, right?

Matt: 00:07:38

One, because modern campaigns is, they're always changing, right? In terms of the spins. But also interesting, just because it helps actually real people in South Carolina have jobs and, often joke, the big winners in South Carolina politics are restaurant owners and hotel owners because all these people like to send on the state.

Matt: 00:07:57

And I can't remember the exact numbers. I think I'm pretty close though. There was, there's upwards of 60 million even 10 years ago in terms of earned and unearned earned media impacts of these races, right? The TV ads and. Staff hired and people buy gas at gas stations for the buses and this is actually a big deal for a state you got a few hundred jobs every couple years created by these primaries you have all these You know national media folks who come to South Carolina and spend money at hotels and I can guarantee you almost it Every hotel this weekend in Columbia, for example in Charleston to be booked up by media covering the race, which is cool.

Grace: 00:08:35

And 2012 was an interesting year, too, for some other reasons. Because that was one year that South Carolina did not pick the eventual nominee, right? We picked Newt Gingrich instead of Mitt Romney. And also that was when Operation Red Map was taking effect and a lot of things were happening within the party that were really changing, right?

Grace: 00:08:59

The Tea Party was weakening the establishment. There were, there was a lot happening that really you can look to today as the beginning of a major change in the Republican party.

Matt: 00:09:10

Yeah, looking back should have seen it coming that the, the establishment, the so called establishment lost the thread with the ascendant, the ascendance of Newt Gingrich the way that, that Newt used the fight against the media to generate a lot of, of headlines.

Matt: 00:09:25

And of course there was a, a Fox News TV host contributor on Fox News. around at that time named Donald Trump, who was saying a lot of the same things he's saying now, right? And so we should have seen it coming that at that point we were in for quite a decade ahead.

Grace: 00:09:41

And is that, do you feel like really where this the primary voters really started?

Grace: 00:09:49

The primary voters were really the people that moved to the far but then the general voters continued just voting Republican because that was their party. But that's really, I feel anyway, in South Carolina, I don't feel like the majority of South Carolinians are as far right as our state legislature and our state government would suggest.

Matt: 00:10:12

Don't forget that the… the sort of spirit of this South Carolina Republican Party goes back to the 1950s, right? Those guys were Roger Millican, we're still a John Birch Society, hard libertarians. And that strain of that, that sort of fighting spirit in the party goes back at least 70 or so years.

Matt: 00:10:29

It's not really a recent thing, right? It ebbs and flows in terms of regional dominance and those kinds of things, whether it's upstate Midlands or low country, who's in power, who's not. But typically the loudest hardest voices in the party are the most active in the primaries.

Grace: 00:10:44

And then that's who determines the general, right? Because those, which is where we are. So I read something that you said in 2021 saying Republicans must expand the tent and focus on issues that matter. MAGA plus substantive policy ideas is a winning political mix while MAGA plus conspiracy theories and lunacy is a dead end road.

Grace: 00:11:07

Is that, do you feel like that's still an accurate statement?

Matt: 00:11:13

I think it's true to the degree people actually want policy anymore. So much of politics now is about just general demeanor and comportment. Will you fight the other party? But that being said though, there's still a lot of like serious policy debates happening in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party for that matter too, right?

Matt: 00:11:31

Hopefully some of those come out in the fall as we head towards the general election. Yeah. There's part of me that thinks it'll be all about. Facebook memes and. And little silly videos like it's been recently, right?

Grace: 00:11:42

Yes and also, Trump has said to his donors, who Trump has said to specific donors who give to Haley that they'll be permanently barred from MAGA if they give to her, there's, there definitely, it feels it's hard to determine right now who the heart and soul of the Republican Party is from a Democrat looking in it's very difficult to say the majority of the party, want some sort of moderation on the policies, but they want conservative policy, but then there's this small, very vocal group who are Trumpers, but I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's just, I have no idea.

Matt: 00:12:21

What I, what I would say is that the GOP needs to come together more than the Democrats seem to come together in the fall, right? We had this fairly, it's become fairly bruising this primary season. The, and the Democrats do, do team sport better than the GOP does.

Matt: 00:12:35

And so look, I think that the Haley Republicans so to speak, and the Trump Republicans and maybe the, let's call them the DeSantis Republicans, I don't need to get in a room, hash it out, and come together if there's going to be a chance to win really. What's really four or five swing states in the fall?

Grace: 00:12:50

Yeah, and so I'm super curious you on your opinion on this, there's a lot of talk right now about the way that Nikki Haley could potentially or is hoping to win the South Carolina or Republican primary is by having crossover votes that the Democrat turnout was low and they think that big The substantial portion of those voters are gonna vote for Nikki Hilly and the Republican primary. What do you think about that?

Matt: 00:13:21

I would say that's wishful thinking. There's not a lot of data there. There's not a lot of data in South Carolina to show that the Democrats crossover and vote in GOP primaries. Yeah. I would say too that the past four, at least four competitive primaries for president have featured record turnout.

Matt: 00:13:40

I'd be surprised if the primary Saturday has record turnout. I think there's less interest. It's fait accompli that Trump is going to be the nominee and therefore, it's hard to see that people maybe are as motivated to come out as they might've been if it were six, seven, eight people in the race. But again, there, there's just not much data to show that.

Grace: 00:13:58

No. And there's an argument to that, the Democrat primary was low because we have the incumbent. And so, everyone knows who it's going to be. And so what does, why is South Carolina important right now for where Republicans are in this state of being?

Matt: 00:14:17

The Republican, the Republican Party recently is a southern party. The Sunbelt, the growth over the past 20 years it's focused a lot on South Carolina. We're still a very socially conservative state among Republicans which sort of lines up with most of the rest of the South. But also we have a ton of sort of manufacturing, a ton of military.

Matt: 00:14:37

The traditional three legged Republican stool was military international security, sort of economics and southern evangelicals, right? I think that still holds true, but people jumped around in categories. There certainly is a far more isolationist strain now when it comes to national security and maybe rightly so in some ways, right?

Matt: 00:14:56

The past two decades, America has wasted a ton of money on things and I think at the heart of Trumpism is the legitimate criticism that, we can't do everything and if someone has a road that needs to be paved in Denmark, South Carolina We shouldn't be paving roads elsewhere.

Matt: 00:15:12

And so that really I think is the, a sea change from the sort of robust foreign policy. Republicans that we saw 20 years ago,

Grace: 00:15:21

That's, that is interesting. And one thing that's super fascinating to me and I know I've watched some old video of you and Jamie Harrison when you were both state chairs talking about some crossover that you both were in agreement on.

Grace: 00:15:36

And one of the things was how badly gerrymandered our state is that essentially dictates outcomes for a majority of our state. And the Republicans have won every statewide race for the last 16 years, and we are technically a red state because out of the voters, more voters statewide vote Republican, but it doesn't mean that.

Grace: 00:16:01

Our legislature necessarily should be as lopsided as it is. And a lot of that gerrymandering has led to Democrats not even running. I think the last election in 2022, 45 percent of races didn't even have a Democrat running on the ticket. Do you think that there is any chance whatsoever that our legislature could potentially Create an independent or bipartisan committee to read it when we do the districts in 2030,

Matt: 00:16:33

I highly doubt it. I do, I do think what's changed, though, is the Supreme Court has taken the Supreme Court has taken a much more broader view of maps, and frankly, they've said that political gerrymandering is totally fine. They have not obviously endorsed any sort of racial gerrymandering. The thing is that those two things are so intricately related.

Matt: 00:16:56

There is pending court decisions that have redrawn some of the maps around Columbia, I think the congressional map around Charleston. Being a GOP strategist who runs campaigns, I'd love to see more competitive general election campaigns, but it's hard to see the legislature willingly going in that direction.

Grace: 00:17:15

Okay, last question. Is Trump going to pick Tim Scott as his running mate?

Matt: 00:17:21

I sure hope he does. Tim Scott really compliments Trump well. Tim Scott can not only help Trump in many ways, he can go places that other VP nominees potentially cannot, and we've done recent polling in South Carolina that shows that Tim is the top choice of conservatives and Republicans in the state if you poll and ask that question, so I'm, hopeful and optimistic.

Grace: 00:17:39

Will he announce Tim Scott is his running mate right before the South Carolina primary on Saturday?

Matt: 00:17:45

Probably not. But there's actually going to be a while before that happens. I think June is probably the earliest we'll see a, a VP nominee, but who knows?

Grace: 00:17:51

Matt, I can't thank you enough for being with us today. This was really a fun conversation and I hope you'll come back and talk to us. Would love to. Thank you so much. That's all the stew for today.