Expect "Real War" in South Carolina Senate Race

Columbia, SC, State ^ | 06-24-2004 | Bandy, Lee

[Theodore R.]

Expect ‘real war’ in Senate race

By LEE BANDY

Staff Writer

Now comes the tough task — winning the U.S. Senate seat in November.

Nothing is guaranteed.

Whoever wins will have to earn it.

The challenge for both Democratic nominee Inez Tenenbaum and Republican victor Jim DeMint is to win a lion’s share of the state’s 280,000 swing voters.

Those voters are going to determine this race. There are not enough Democrats or Republicans to elect one of their own to statewide office.

According to most recent exit polls, 40 percent of South Carolinians call themselves Republicans, 32 percent Democrats and 28 percent independents.

“The swing vote is critical,” Francis Marion University political scientist Neal Thigpen says. “You’ve got to have them. They hold the balance of power.”

Both sides plan an aggressive outreach to those independent-minded voters.

“We’ll win the bulk of them,” says Terry Sullivan, campaign manager for DeMint.

Swing voters are mainly suburbanites who don’t identify with either political party. They are highly educated, tend to be economic conservatives and reject ideologues. They typically don’t turn out in primaries and recoil from strong negative campaigns.

Also, they are disproportionately women, concentrated mostly in the Midlands. Fifty-six percent of the registered voters in South Carolina are women.

But before Republicans can start thinking about reaching out to swing voters, they must first heal wounds left open from their spirited primary contest.

State GOP chairman Katon Dawson sees no problem.

“Inez Tenenbaum and John Kerry are the single most unifying factors we have,” he says.

Being the early underdog in this race, the Tenenbaum campaign plans to fight on every front. It will have an extensive air war and ground operation that will include an aggressive, door-to-door grass-roots effort.

DeMint’s campaign plans much the same.

Tenenbaum plans to spend $4 million in her effort to capture the nomination. DeMint has budgeted $8 million.

So batten down the hatches. The main event is about to begin. It will not be for the fainthearted. At stake is control of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans have a two-seat advantage. This race has national implications, with both parties expected to spend millions.

“The general election between DeMint and Tenenbaum will be a real war,” Thigpen predicts.

Although South Carolina leans Republican, GOP officials are worried about DeMint. He has failed to energize rank-and-file Republicans. Party officials concede Tenenbaum is a more dynamic candidate and that this race could be very close — closer than one would expect for an open seat in the Palmetto State, says Charlie Cook, a Washington-based political analyst.

Republicans plan to tar and feather Tenenbaum as a liberal out of step with conservative South Carolina. They will attack her stance on abortion, noting that she is “pro-choice,” meaning in most cases she favors a woman’s right to chose whether to end a pregnancy.

“We’re going to peel the bark off and reveal her for what she is,” says Rick Beltram, chairman of the Spartanburg GOP. “Once it becomes known she is pro-choice, she will suddenly fade as a threat in November.”

Tenenbaum, in anticipation of the organized attacks, moved early to stake out an independent course for her candidacy. She supports President Bush on his handling of the Iraq war, favors a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages, supports the death penalty and opposes partial-birth abortion.

“They can scream that she’s a liberal, but it won’t work. They’ve got to do more than that,” Winthrop University political scientist Scott Huffmon says.

Tenenbaum understands the state’s terrain. She is not going to get caught out there tagged as a liberal Democrat, Thigpen says.

Her goal is to energize the Democrats, gain support of swing voters and attract Republicans disenchanted with DeMint.

DeMint, though hardly exciting, should be better positioned to benefit from the expected Bush coattails in South Carolina.

“We get to run with Bush. His popularity is still off the charts in South Carolina. She gets to run with Kerry. I’ll take those odds any day in South Carolina,” Dawson says.

Overall, given Bush’s likely landslide in the state, “it will be a major election-night surprise if the Republican nominee does not win the Senate seat,” says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Reach Bandy at (803) 771-8648 or lbandy@thestate.com.

[Theodore R.]

As Ronald Reagan would have told you if he could speak, you have a conflict of interest here. YOU have already been born!