Respectable Showing

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, is forming an exploratory committee for a run for President of the United States. Will he actually run? I don't know. I suspect, if the committee is serious about doing the job, and not simply stroking Senator Scott's ego, that it will tell him that his path to the Presidency is very narrow; maybe too narrow to actually have room for him to walk it.

From where I sit right now, the basic problem I suspect the Senator is going to have if he does decide to run is that the rhetoric he'll need to get past Donald Trump for a Republican primary audience is markedly different than the language he'll need to deploy to win over unaligned voters in a general election. In order to have any hope of winning the Republican nomination, Senator Scott is likely going to have to lean into something that he claims to disdain; the politics of grievance. And this is different than noting those politics and point out what lays at the heart of the grievances.

Another problem that Senator Scott is likely to have is the rest of the Republican Party. Unless they really take him seriously as a candidate, their habit of holding him up whenever they want to say, "See, we're not racists, we elected this guy for Senate," is going to make him seem like the token that he claims that he isn't.

I'm not sure how Senator Scott's message of Respectability Politics is going to play broadly. It will likely make him at least somewhat popular with White conservatives, as it tends to be part of a racial blame game. But whether he can cast that as something that will really put an end to the damaging discrimination that people perceive in their lived experience is another matter entirely. Doing away with affirmative action because it's discrimination in the name of fighting discrimination is one thing. A credible plan to expand the pool of opportunity broadly enough that there's no use for affirmative action is quite another. And if Senator Scott decides to lean into the idea that if he could do it, then anyone can with the right work ethic, he's going to alienate people.

Recently, Senator Scott has been playing the role of Culture Warrior, warning people against "the radical Left" and "the blueprint to ruin America." And this makes sense, as he's going to have to show that he can out-Republican the rest of the field, especially if he's decided that he's going to focus on attacking Democrats in the primary election, rather than making the case that he's a better person for the job than Nikki Haley or Donald Trump. But he won't be able to double down on that and win a general election; it's simply not likely to pick up enough otherwise non-partisan voters, unless the Democrats find themselves with a poor candidate. (And the fact that he's the current President aside, Joe Biden could turn out to be a poor candidate this time around.) The distance from a spot to the right of most Republican voters to a place in the center is simply too far.