Late August. One hundred degrees outside. A special primary runoff that almost nobody in the country is paying attention to, and at the end of it South Carolina has a Republican nominee for the United States Senate.
Chad Connelly ran the South Carolina Republican Party and is still actively involved with it. Two weeks ago the party modeled 265,000 people turning out for the special primary. It got 342,000. Early voting for this runoff came in at 104 percent of the primary's early vote, which points to somewhere around 305,000 to 320,000 total tomorrow. That is the entire electorate for a six-year Senate term.
Then he goes district by district. The Third, Fourth and Fifth, which is the Upstate, north and west, from York County down to Aiken County, were up in early voting. The First, Second and Sixth, the Midlands and the Lowcountry, were flat. The Seventh, which is Russell Fry's district and which did not put a candidate in this runoff, was down 24 percent.
Jenny Beth Martin discloses on air that Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, a 527 super PAC, endorsed Ralph Norman late last week, after polling its South Carolina supporters and hearing back that they wanted an endorsement and they wanted it to be Norman. She lays out why: he was the only member of Congress willing to stand with the doctors in July 2020 who were pushing to reopen the country, and he has been a supporter of the SAVE America Act, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.
The endorsements split the party in half. President Trump, Governor Henry McMaster and Majority Leader John Thune are with Senator Darline Graham Nordone. Senator Mike Lee, who wrote the narrower version of the bill, and Senator Rick Scott are with Norman.
Connelly's read: Norman ran the state for nine months as a candidate for governor and knows it cold. Graham Nordone has thirty years of Lindsey Graham's contacts and one of the best teams on Capitol Hill. What decides it is whether President Trump can pull a zero-out-of-four voter to the polls in August. Connelly does not think he can, and he thinks the negative advertising that poured in over the last eight or ten days hurt the people who paid for it.
Sign up to be a poll worker or a poll watcher at HelpAtThePolls.com. The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. More at jennybethshow.com and teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — An August Runoff Nobody Is Watching
00:29 — One Hundred Degrees, and It Is All Turnout
00:49 — They Modeled 265,000 and Got 342,000
01:23 — Why Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund Endorsed Ralph Norman
02:16 — Standing With the Doctors in July 2020
03:01 — President Trump on One Side, Mike Lee on the Other
03:45 — The Early Vote, County by County
04:29 — Nine Months on the Road Against Thirty Years of Contacts
05:04 — The Negative Ads Nobody Liked
05:27 — His Call: A Toss-Up With the Edge to Norman
#JennyBethShow #SouthCarolinaRunoff #RalphNorman #ChadConnelly #SenateRace #Turnout #ElectionIntegrity #TeaPartyPatriotsAction