His State To Lose

National Journal Magazine (Opinion)

By Tim Alberta

May 22, 2015

Photos of South Carolina's most celebrated Republicans crowd every available inch of First Tuesday Strategies' suite—framed on desks, stacked on countertops, pinned to corkboards along the wall. Here, in the offices of the state's premier political firm, the operatives and fundraisers who run the GOP circuit display their allegiances to Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott, and Jim DeMint. But there's one man featured more prominently than anyone else: Marco Rubio.

The freshman senator's face is printed on buttons, direct-mail flyers, promotional brochures, dinner programs. He's not from South Carolina. He has never won a race in South Carolina. But the people in this office—and their political allies around the state—aim to change that.

In the six years since launching his Florida Senate campaign, Rubio has become an adopted prince of South Carolina's political royalty. And not by chance. Rubio, whose national ambitions became apparent even before he was sworn into the Senate, quickly identified South Carolina as the home base for his eventual presidential effort, seeing this early-primary state as a more natural fit—culturally, ideologically, geographically—than either Iowa or New Hampshire. He has acted accordingly in the years since—snatching up the state's top talent for his political operation, cultivating personal relationships with influential people on the ground, and making repeated trips to keep tabs on his burgeoning circuit of supporters in the state.

As a result, Rubio has quietly achieved something in South Carolina that no Republican candidate can claim in Iowa or New Hampshire: an organizational lock on one of the most important states en route to the GOP nomination.

The senator's inner circle is stacked with South Carolina veterans. His super PAC is headquartered in Columbia and run by the capital's most experienced strategist. And Rubio has secured the support of major players in the state's business community.

In fact, according to multiple Republicans not affiliated with any candidate, several of the state's most prominent and politically active businessmen have made it known they will support Rubio. This includes Chalmers Carr, president and CEO of Titan Farms; Dan Adams, president and CEO of the Capital Corporation; Hank Scott, CEO of Collum's Lumber Products; and, most notably, Mikee Johnson, president and CEO of Cox Industries, who is chairman of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce. Johnson, sources say, flew with his wife to Miami last month for Rubio's campaign launch.

"Senator Rubio has put together a first-class team," says Matt Moore, chairman of the South Carolina GOP. "Politics is all about institutional knowledge, and Senator Rubio's team has decades if not centuries of institutional knowledge in South Carolina politics. … They understand what motivates voters, how races have been won here in the past, and how races might be won here in the future."

J. Warren Tompkins runs the pro-Rubio super PAC Conservative Solutions. While he won't be able to legally coordinate with Rubio, in many ways he's central to the senator's 2016 operation. A veteran of every presidential campaign since 1980, including senior roles in the victorious efforts of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes in South Carolina, Tompkins is something of a godfather to the state's Republican establishment.

He also is cofounder of First Tuesday Strategies and has ties to most of the major players in Rubio's orbit. His former partner at First Tuesday Strategies, Terry Sullivan, is now Rubio's campaign manager. Sullivan worked as DeMint's campaign manager and Mitt Romney's South Carolina state director before moving to Washington in 2011 as Rubio's deputy chief of staff.

Down the hall from Tompkins at First Tuesday is Drea Byars, indisputably the most prolific fundraiser in South Carolina politics. And in the office next to Tompkins sits Drea's husband, Luke, the firm's managing partner, who previously worked as DeMint's campaign manager and state director. Luke Byars is waiting for word on whether he'll help Sullivan on the campaign side or Tompkins at the super PAC.

Rubio’s courtship of South Carolina goes beyond his roster of official allies.

But that's only a fraction of the South Carolina talent Rubio has on payroll. Heath Thompson, Rubio's senior political adviser and messaging guru, also is a native of South Carolina. Before joining Rubio's 2010 campaign, Thompson was a business partner to Sullivan and Tompkins in Columbia, and he spearheaded George W. Bush's tough 2000 primary victory in South Carolina.

Whit Ayres, Rubio's highly respected pollster, launched his career in South Carolina in the 1980s and has worked for a host of winning campaigns in the state.

Another crucial hire is Katie Baham Gainey, a veteran of First Tuesday Strategies and Romney's 2008 campaign who will now be Rubio's state director. She's a former political director for the state GOP and the House Republican Caucus, giving her extensive relationships across South Carolina with both the establishment and activist classes.

"You can tell who's serious about South Carolina," says Glenn McCall, the state's Republican national committeeman. "The people Rubio brought on board are very well respected. When they call, people listen. Those hires tell me Rubio understands what it takes to win South Carolina."

McCall pauses, and after several deliberate nods, adds: "He has an all-star team."

"It's great to be back in South Carolina, a place that believed in me," Rubio told a crammed auditorium in Greenville at a May forum sponsored by Citizens United.

Indeed, Rubio's rise in South Carolina dates back to June 2009, when DeMint became the first national figure to endorse the young Floridian's upstart Senate campaign against Charlie Crist. The support of DeMint, who had emerged as a tea-party kingmaker, lent Rubio instant legitimacy among conservatives nationally and in South Carolina. The Senate candidate traveled to the state multiple times for DeMint-sponsored fundraisers, giving Rubio access to an A-list of activists and donors, people he would stay close to long after his win.

"That gave him a chance to get one-on-one time with some of DeMint's key political backers … and he's benefiting from that today," says Luke Byars.

A few years later, at the 2012 GOP convention in Tampa, Rubio—like many other potential 2016 contenders—came to address the always-popular South Carolina delegation, Byars recalls. "Everyone in the room knew him, and he knew everyone. He knew who the key activists were, who the operatives were. He knew the donors in the room. And that's just something you didn't see with other candidates who would come to address the delegation."

Meanwhile in the Senate, Rubio forged a close friendship with his colleague Tim Scott—who, with an 83 percent approval rating among Republicans in Winthrop University's most recent poll, is the state's most popular politician. Having witnessed their relationship blossom, many unaffiliated state Republicans believe Rubio is the front-runner for Scott's coveted endorsement.

Rubio's courtship of South Carolina goes beyond his roster of official allies. He's talking directly to South Carolina voters in his stump speech, for example, when he cites "BMW technicians" as the type of good-paying manufacturing jobs available in the 21st century. BMW accounts for 25,000 jobs in South Carolina, between the automaker's plants and affiliated suppliers. "He won't lose South Carolina for a lack of familiarity with the state," says Tompkins, the super PAC leader.

While Rubio has been at the task of building alliances here for six years, his toughest Republican rivals, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, only just began assembling their South Carolina teams. This is problematic, Republicans say, because the state's talent pool is shallow. Both Bush and Walker have secured paid staffers there, but none are viewed as top-tier catches for the respective campaigns.

"I thought Governor Bush and Governor Walker would have attracted some star players, but they don't have those high-profile operatives that Rubio has. And there's only so many to go around," says McCall, who will stay neutral because of his role with the Republican National Committee. Walker's failure to make a staffing splash in South Carolina has been especially surprising, McCall adds. "I understand he's still governing, but he's not doing much here—and all the talent is being sucked up by Rubio."

Rubio's operation is eager to keep the network he has built under wraps for now, hoping to disguise its strength in the state and avoid attacks from rivals for as long as possible. Polling in South Carolina this year has been scarce; the most recent poll was conducted by Winthrop before Rubio's April 13 launch and showed him taking only 4 percent, lagging behind Walker, Bush, and five other candidates stuck in the single digits.

Now that he's a candidate, Rubio's numbers will almost certainly spike in South Carolina's next batch of surveys as they did everywhere else, thanks at least to improved name-recognition. But Rubio's team doesn't want to rely on poll numbers to project his relative strength. Instead, they are preparing a coordinated rollout this summer of Rubio's South Carolina operation—a roster of high-profile supporters at the statewide, county, and local levels—that they think will leave no doubt about whose state it is to lose.

This reality could be unsettling for one candidate in particular: Lindsey Graham. The senior senator has earned the respect and loyalty of the state's Republican establishment since winning election to Congress in 1994. Yet nobody, not even Graham's allies in the state, thinks he can win South Carolina, much less the nomination.

But he might affect the primary in ways that benefit Rubio. He could play the spoiler for Bush and Walker, who are looking to connect with the state's older, establishment-oriented voters. "There are a lot of folks who might otherwise have been for Bush or Walker, but they're Lindsey's folks—and they're not going to abandon Lindsey," says Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a popular conservative who is likely to support Rand Paul.

Graham also could provide political cover for Rubio on immigration, having coauthored the infamous "Gang of Eight" comprehensive immigration package that included a pathway to citizenship for people who entered the country illegally. Graham tackled the issue head-on in his 2014 reelection campaign—refusing to back down from debates about "amnesty" while challenging his opponents to produce a more realistic approach—and was rewarded with a resounding primary victory.

Several close Rubio allies say their camp has studied Graham's 2014 strategy, including extensive polling conducted by his campaign on the issue, and view it as a blueprint for how to handle immigration in South Carolina.

Of the early-voting states, South Carolina's primary best represents the national Republican electorate. Unlike Iowa with its heavy influence of evangelicals, or New Hampshire with its hordes of fiscal-minded libertarians, South Carolina is home to a cross-section of the party: social conservatives, business interests, defense hawks, and an outspoken slice of tea partiers.

In other words, it's a natural home for Rubio, whose capacity for winning the nomination derives from his ability to appeal across the GOP's ideological divides—and whose South Carolina supporters have worked for Republicans ranging from Jim DeMint to George H. W. Bush. "Marco matches up very well with this state," Tompkins says. "The candidate who wins South Carolina is the one with a broad enough appeal across the spectrum of the party."

But make no mistake: Rubio's compatibility with South Carolina is a necessity, not a luxury. No candidate in the modern history of the Republican Party has captured the nomination without winning one of the first three states, and Rubio's two chief rivals, Walker and Bush, are focusing their resources on Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively. Rubio will surely be competitive in both of those states and would not shock anyone by winning either of them. But if he doesn't, Rubio's aspirations of running a 50-state delegate-gathering operation and becoming the Republican nominee will hinge on his ability to first protect a place that has begun to look like his home turf.

"It's clearly a national campaign that he's running," says Moore, the state party chairman, "with maybe a special focus on South Carolina."

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com