It was 9:00 PM on a Monday in South Carolina, and the Charleston County Republican Party was ninety minutes from its February meeting, when the open comments part of the session began. Maurice Washington, the party president and former member of the city council, invited a newcomer to the microphone in front of the room full of seventy members and guests. She identified herself as Elizabeth Rodi, announced that she attended the Donald Trump rally on January 6 and declared false media reports about the Capitol insurrection. “The people who were there were Antifa and Black Lives Matter. They were identified by facial recognition, ”he said. “It was nobody who supported Trump.” She told the meeting that they were “misunderstanding what QAnon is” and said it was time to acknowledge that Republicans were facing an information war from the mainstream media. There was grumbling in the audience, but someone shouted, “Let her speak!”
When Rodi finished, Washington faced a decision. He opened the evening with a prayer and led the members – mostly white and male, middle-aged and older, one with a red “Trump 2024” hat, some wearing masks – in the oath of loyalty and hymn. He had discussed the Party’s celebration of Black History Month, an open attempt to attract non-white voters and a diverse list of candidates, and described his new website, designed to “humanize” local Republicans. A year has passed since Washington, which is black, assumed the Party’s presidency in hopes of expanding the Republican base in an increasingly democratic county. He believed that conveying a clear message and avoiding personal attacks was crucial to the Party’s success in 2022.
Now he had to decide whether to call Rodi for falsely blaming Antifa for the attack on the Capitol. This could signal loyalty to the facts and an end to Trump’s misguided guidance. But it can also cause a scene. A month after a split at the Party meeting in January caused an uproar that was reported in the local media, that was the last thing Washington wanted. Then he said to her warmly: “Thank you for having the courage and the struggle to come and speak to us. We hope you will return. “To the crowd, he said,” Let’s help her. “Most of the audience applauded when Rodi returned to his seat. A woman, known to be a strong supporter of Trump, handed Rodi a business card. .
Four days later, I met Washington for breakfast at Saffron Restaurant and Bakery in Charleston. After the events of the previous month, I wanted to understand your strategy for keeping the Charleston Party together. At sixty and still in shape, he had just returned from a morning run. He ate scrambled eggs, grains and white toast, along with vitamin D and zinc pills he takes in hopes of keeping the coronavirus under control. It is difficult to please everyone, Washington said, especially when some of his fellow Republicans are barely able to stand. But he believes that the best way forward for the Party, if it hopes to remain viable in contested districts, is to welcome everyone. Even the QAnon believers? “Absolutely,” he said. “Look, you can’t look down on people who have strong points of view. People need to be open-minded to hear things they don’t want to hear, but still stay in the meeting. The choice was to condemn, correct and create another division. To do this among colleagues, where do you put people? On the defensive. “
Republican mathematics indicates that keeping the ex-president’s grassroots supporters inside the tent is essential to victory, especially in the states and districts where the Republican Party performed well in November. A Quinnipiac poll released in mid-February found that three-quarters of Republicans want Trump to play a prominent role in the party, even though ninety-six percent of Democrats and sixty-one percent of independents are not. And yet, in purple counties like Charleston, Trump’s pleasing and boxing policy and his most fervent supporters are alienating moderate and independent Republicans, and threatening the prospects of other Republican candidates. The ongoing question is whether Maurice Washington’s “Come one, come all” approach will repel more voters than it attracts, especially without Trump at the top of the ticket to lure sporadic voters to the polls. “Politics is a matter of addition,” Chip Felkel, a former Greenville Republican strategist who disdains Trump and his acolytes, told me. “It is not about subtraction, and if you are not doing things to add to your total votes, if you are taking positions and supporting people who are highly offensive and almost crazy, you will be subtracting.”
The tension in the Charleston Republican Party reflects the way the Republican Party in South Carolina is feeling its way forward following the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol, which was fueled by Trump’s blatantly false claims that the election was stolen from him. The rebellion and its aftermath revealed local fissures largely disguised by the successes of the state party in November, when Trump conquered the state comfortably, as did South Carolina acting senator Lindsey Graham. Nancy Mace, a Republican and the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, claimed a House seat won two years earlier by a Democrat.
However, in early January, Congressman Tom Rice, a conservative Republican who had reliably supported Trump, surprised even his own allies when he became one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach the former president. Rice said the state party was “shrinking from Donald Trump” and that it was time to move on. A few days after Rice’s remarks, several Republican politicians said they could challenge him in the 2022 primaries, and the state party voted overwhelmingly in favor censorship rice. Nikki Haley, the former state governor and a potential 2024 presidential candidate, tried to thread the needle saying that Trump deserved a break and that she was “disgusted” with her actions on January 6. Graham also tried to do both. He washed his hands of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results: “Don’t count on me,” he said, on the Senate floor, after the insurrectionists were dispersed. “Enough is enough.” But at the end of February, he was saying that Trump would be “useful” to re-elect the Republican Senate holders in 2022.
In the deeply conservative district of Rice, which stretches along the border from North Carolina to the ocean, and halfway down to Charleston, the debate over the Party’s leadership can be academic. Whatever happens in the 2022 primaries, voters are sure to elect a conservative Republican. Maurice Washington faces a different dynamic in Charleston County, which is already voting for Democrats, mirroring cities and suburbs that have moved away from the Republican Party in recent years and helped give Democrats their narrow majority in the House. Despite all the success of the Republican Party in South Carolina, Joe Biden and Senate candidate Jaime Harrison beat their opponents in Charleston County, which is about thirty percent non-white. The area is also growing in population, with more liberal voters arriving from other states. The way to win, Washington has told Republicans, is to be “a big party”, where center-right voters “work together to achieve common goals on common ground, despite our differences”.
David Savage likes the president of the Republican Party, but wonders how Washington’s goals can come true. “You can’t be a big tent party and say, ‘But you have to follow this guy, Trump,'” Savage, a Charleston Republican and former Marine who opposes Trump, told me. He followed the January 6 events from his law firm and saw Donald Trump Jr. proclaim, “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.” While watching videos showing the crowd storming the Capitol, carrying Trump flags and attacking police officers as members of Congress ran to safety, he cried. Savage did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but remained loyal to the GOP brand, hoping for a republican reboot. “Don’t leave the Party like my wife and kids are doing, but stay at the Party and drag it in the middle,” he told me later.
Five days after the attack on the Capitol at the Charleston Republicans’ meeting in January, it was Savage’s comments that started the debate that Washington is now trying to calm. Savage told several dozen participants that it was time to “look in the mirror and decide who we really are as Republicans”. He stressed that Republicans lost the White House, the Senate and the House during Trump’s term in office “for blindly following him.” He criticized the local Party for not condemning the takeover of the Capitol and blamed Trump’s far-right supporters – not Antifa – for the violence. “The group was made up of many QAnon conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys and other white supremacist groups and private militias,” said Savage. “This is where the Trump Party is going.” Savage hoped that the local Party would pass a resolution offering condolences to the family of Brian Sicknick, the Capitol policeman killed during the insurrection, and another resolution stating that the Charleston Party “is not a political party for any individual”. Things did not go well. As Caitlin Byrd, from state newspaper, reported, Savage was immediately “drowned out by a shout of boos and screams. A man shouted, ‘You are wrong! You’re wrong!’ Another shouted, ‘Arrest him!’ “
Byrd’s story caught the attention of the entire state, and Charleston Post and Courier printed Savage’s complete remarks. In the weeks that followed, Savage found himself publicly vilified and, in some cases, particularly applauded. Rice, the Republican member of the House who voted for Trump’s impeachment, called to offer friendly support in a conversation that Savage said looked like an outcast talking to another. Richard Thomasson, who invests in vacation properties in Low Country, was one of the few Republicans willing to offer public support. The following month, he gave the floor at the Party meeting and said, “Our county is changing and we either change with it or we are left behind.” I asked him later what he meant. “I am tired of ideology,” he said. “We bought the division. We give up any solution. If we can’t come up with solutions that solve problems for Charleston’s inhabitants and win hearts and minds, then I think the future of the Charleston County Republican Party is a marginal protest group ”