Republicans really think America is a 'hellhole'

Why Tim Scott failed.

(Tim Scott, no longer a presidential candidate)

Tim Scott’s presidential campaign ended Sunday night as the candidate admitted publicly what had been clear to anyone paying attention for a while now: Republican voters weren’t buying what he was selling.

The South Carolina Senator started with low single digit support and, well, that really never changed. When he got out, Scott was averaging 2.5% of the vote in national polling, according to Real Clear Politics. (Scott is the grey line in the chart below.)

What’s really interesting to me though is: a) what Tim Scott was selling and b) what it tells us about Republican voters that they weren’t buying.

What Scott was selling was pretty simple: Optimism.

“America is not a nation in decline,” Scott said on the day he announced his presidential campaign back in the spring. “This is the freest fairest land where you can go as high as our character, our grit and our talent will take us.”

“I believe America can do for anyone what she’s done for me,” Scott would say regularly on the campaign trail — casting his own personal story (the son of a single mother, first person in his family to go to college etc.) as evidence that the American Dream was thriving.

“The hope within the American people is still alive and well, we just need to bring it to the light,” Scott wrote in an op-ed in the New York Post. “To bury hope and optimism is to suffocate the American Dream.”

You get the idea. Scott’s entire campaign message was premised on the idea that Republican voters wanted to be inspired and uplifted. Which, historically, has been a pretty good bet!

There was Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” And George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light.” Heck even George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” message was an appeal to the better angels of the Republican party.

But, it didn’t work for Scott. At all. And we know why!

Look no further than the message pushed by the candidate currently lapping the Republican field.

Here, for example, is how Donald Trump celebrated Veteran’s Day last week:

Marxists! Fascists! Vermin! (I’ll have more on Trump’s increasingly radical rhetoric later today in this space.)

This is — by no means — an isolated incident.

Here’s a line from Trump’s speech last year announcing his 2024 campaign: “Your country is being destroyed before your eyes.”

Here’s one from his inauguration speech — all the way back in January 2017:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

And here’s one from his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention:

Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally. Some have even been its victims.

I still remember when Trump rolled out this decidedly dark vision for the country. I was convinced — based on all my priors — that people wouldn’t respond to it. That they wanted to be inspired, not terrified.

The reality is that Trump understood something fundamental about the current Republican party: They were scared. And angry. And wanted retribution for what had been taken from them by the “elites.” (They could never really say what that was but I digress…)

The mood of the GOP base was actually summed up best by not Trump but by his clone — Vivek Ramaswamy — in the 2nd Republican presidential debate. Here’s Ramaswamy (in a back and forth with Mike Pence):

Mike, I think the difference is -- you might have, some others like you on this stage may have a it's morning in America speech, it is not morning in America. We live in a dark moment and we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold cultural civil war and we have to recognize that.

Yes. That exactly.

Consider the arc of the 2024 Republican race through that lens.

The two most optimistic candidates in the race were Scott and Pence. (“I believe in the American people, and I have faith God is not done with America yet,” Pence tweeted on the day he entered the race. “Together, we can bring this Country back, and the best days for the Greatest Nation on Earth are yet to come.”)

How’s that working out for them? Not only are both Scott and Pence now out of the race but, the truth is, neither one was ever a real factor. They never mattered. Because their message was totally out of touch with how the average Republican voter feels.

Now, take a look at the other end of the spectrum.

Trump is crushing the field with an incredibly depressing view of the country.

Just one more from Trump — to REALLY make the point. “Millions of illegal aliens have stormed across our borders, it is an invasion, like a military invasion,” he said in a speech this summer. “Our rights and liberties are being torn to shreds. Your country is being turned into a third-world hellhole, run by censors, perverts, criminals and thugs.”

Third world hellhole!

Ramaswamy, as I wrote last week, is now over. But he had a moment in the campaign! Largely built on the idea that the people and institutions we have long depended on are collapsing under the weight of establishment politicians and old ideas.

And even Ron DeSantis, who remains at or close to second place in the race, rode to that spot on a dark message too: America was being overrun by wokeness and we were losing our fundamental values in the process.

(The only candidate who doesn’t fit entirely in this framework is Nikki Haley; I can’t pinpoint if I would describe her message as positive or negative per se.)

The simple fact is this: Republican voters believe the country is going to hell. They think — or have been convinced to think —that we are the precipice of total failure (economic, moral and otherwise).

And they want candidates who meet them where they are. No sunny visions of a bright and promising future here. Doom and gloom — and a promise to turn it around by punishing those who have pushed this country into (near) ruin.

That’s what sells. And that’s why Tim Scott never stood a chance.