Democrats in a key state want to see their leaders ‘fight’ — and reach across party lines
Columbia, SC – Democratic strategists, elected officials and voters in South Carolina are already impatiently impatient, chasing the next leader of their party after their presidential loss in 2024.
They did not have to look far: eminent democratic officials flooded the state, who was the first to vote in the presidential primaries in 2024 of the Democrats in recent weeks. Govs democratic. Wes Moore of Maryland, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Gavin Newsom from California and Andy Beshear of Kentucky have all crisscrossed the South Carolina so far this year, while the representative Ro Khanna, D-Calif., Also plans an event just outside Charleston this weekend.
While potential candidates are tested in Southern Carolina, state Democrats plan that they want to see them driving them in a post-Donald Trump era. In conversations with more than a dozen democrats across the state, two themes have emerged: they want someone ready to “fight”, but they also want someone who can call through the party’s parts.
And while the two concepts could have appeared an incredible match in the past, at the populist political moment of today, the twinning is more logical.
Tyler Bailey, lawyer for civil rights and member of the Columbia municipal council who attended the Beshear event here, said he was looking for “someone who is not going to just come there and say that I am not for Trump. It cannot be an anti-Trump message.”
There is “a hunger of people who want to see a real leadership on the democratic side,” added Bailey.
Gauge
Again and again, in interviews through the State, the Democratic leaders had a word on their lips: fighting.
“People want someone who will fight,” said former president of the National Democratic Committee Jaime Harrison, in NBC News in an interview after the Beshear event in Columbia. “If there is a theme that I constantly receive, it is tired that the party is a doormat for the Republicans. They want someone who will give the Republicans so much hell – if not more – and fight for them and their families and their communities.”
Harrison, who once presided over the state of Southern Carolina, said that anyone without a case to ensure that he has strongly resisted the Republicans should not take the trouble to take the campaign track.
“If you come here and your backbone is like a wet noodle or spaghetti, you might as well do not-save your plane ticket,” he said, laughing.
Christal Spain, the current president of the Democratic Party of Southern Carolina, echoes Harrison, telling NBC News in an interview at the party’s headquarters that this moment calls someone who “will retaliate against the Republicans of current Maga. We are looking for a leader who is a fighter”.
Spain added that the desire for a “fighter” has “been clear for me in the past few months, going around the state myself, speaking to voters and seeing how they react to different things”.
The governors who visited the state have always reprimanded Trump, positioning themselves against its price program, against its cuts on the federal workforce and against the “Big Beau Bill Act”, the massive Progress of Gop National Policy that Les Républicains du Congress adopted earlier this month.
“Make no mistake,” Beshear told members of the union during the annual agreement of Southern Carolina to AFL-CIO in Greenville. “What Trump and his catalysts of Congress have just done is a direct attack against rural America and against southerners like us. It is betrayal.”
Speaking through the festive lines
Beyond the search for a fighter at the moment, the Democrats in South Carolina are also turning to a post-Trump era, when dozens of national democrats seem ready to throw their hat in the ring in a presidential primary in 2028.
And the former governor of South Carolina, Jim Hodges, the last democrat to serve in the mansion of the Governor of the State, summed up what he thought that his primary voter colleagues should look for: someone who “knows how to win”.
For many Democrats who have spoken to NBC News, this means an emphasis on who can attract voters from all politicians.
“I hear several things regularly. … It is extremely important that we choose well in this next electoral cycle, that we choose someone who can draw independent voters, rally the base and obtain republican votes,” Hodges at NBC News told an interview after the Beshear Wednesday meeting.
Towner Magill, a democrat who attended the Beshear meeting in Charleston on Thursday, echoes Hodges.
“I’m looking for a unit, not only in the Democratic Party. I think we have to manage a unit, but I also think that we may need a white house unit,” Magill told NBC News.
A call for clearer language and clearer problems
Many Democrats in South Carolina have said that to unite voters through the party’s parties, Democratic leaders must remain laser focused on certain issues.
“We have stopped talking about problems that you know, that working class people care: jobs, health care, education, community security,” said Hodges. “This is why we hurt more with the voters of the working class – white, black, Latin – because we have stopped talking about the problems that cared for them.”
“There must be an adjustment in our message to respond to the concerns they have about their own lives,” added the former governor.
The state senator Tameika Isaac Devine called the messaging she hopes to hear from potential democratic candidates an accent on “real things”.
“What I think most people are looking for is someone who, in fact, is to tell them about real things,” said Isaac guess at NBC News after the Columbia event in Beshear.
The Democrats of South Carolina want leaders who “talk about real things, and not only … Cultural wars or correct political terms, but can actually speak to their point of pain. They want people who will give solutions, ”added Isaac Devine.
South Carolinians are not alone in this desire. Other amounting democratic leaders, including Freshman Sens. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Ruben Gallego of Arizona also called on Democrats to stop using words like “Oligarchy” or what Gallego calls “terms tested by the League” – although Bernie Sanders has rejected criticism from his anti -oligarchy activism.
Harrison stressed the constant thrust for Democrats to use certain inclusive or technical languages as a reason for which certain voters may have considered Democratic candidates as inauthentic.
“For so long, I feel like Democrats, we put ourselves in camisoletes of force in terms of our language and the way we speak to people and how we connect with people,” said Harrison.
“We have to let our authentic self go out. This means that we must be ready to take risks.
Bailey, a member of the Columbia municipal council, underlined the character and relatibility as something that could prove to be a major sales argument for voters of his state.
“I think that relative, people factor, will be important. Because, you know, most communications are non-verbal,” he said. “You can get a lot of someone who, for example, walks frightened, does not commit, does not speak, cannot look in the eye, cannot shake your hand, seems, as, out of the place, eating fried chicken [and] I just prefer to have wine and cheese.
