Tim Scott emerges as top Trump VP pick to attract black voters

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) is preparing to help turn out black voters for former President Donald Trump with a new multimillion-dollar campaign blitz that aims to deny President Joe Biden a win in key battleground states.

The initiative, to be deployed in a half-dozen states, comes as Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, vies to become Trump’s vice presidential nominee. He is an outspoken surrogate for the former president on the trail but also emphasized his appeal with black voters in announcing the campaign to a small gathering of reporters in Washington, D.C.

“I do with black voters in South Carolina two or three times better than the average Republican,” Scott said. “There’s a reason why I win the reddest counties in South Carolina by about 8-10 points better than the average Republican because I performed better with the conservatives there, but I also win the blue counties where no Republicans are winning at all.”

“I’m able to bring together the working-class coalition that is typically more minority than any other place in the country,” he added.

Through his Great Opportunity PAC, Scott is deploying a $14.3 million travel and advertising budget that he and close aides say will build on the shift of nonwhite voters away from Biden. The plan is to flip a nominal number, just a few percentage points, of nonwhite voters, particularly black voters, in favor of Trump.

A 3- to 5-percentage-point swing, Scott argued, could have “tectonic shifts” in battleground states that Democrats would be unable to accommodate.

“There is no way to fill the hole. The coalition that is necessary for the Democrats to have success, period, is not just black and Hispanic; it’s specifically black [voters] in the battleground states where they have to be successful,” he said. “If you change those numbers in those larger cities, you can’t make it up somewhere else.”

Biden and his campaign, with the help of Vice President Kamala Harris, launched a nationwide black voter initiative in Philadelphia last week as the party sounds alarm bells over polling showing lower performance with black voters.

Although the vast majority of black voters still back Biden, 77%, over Trump, 18%, according to recent Pew Research Center polling, the president could be losing sizable ground to his predecessor. Biden captured nearly 90% of the black vote in 2020.

“A lot of African American men have said, ‘You know what, I’m going to take a closer look at the Republican Party and the GOP,’” Scott said. “Much to the chagrin of many folks, there’s no doubt that African American men are wide open for a political shift.”

His political action committee’s $14.3 million operating budget includes $9 million for voter contact, $4.8 million for earned and paid media, $330,000 for research and data, and $225,000 for other operations and legal expenses. An aide for the group who declined to be named said they’ve raised roughly half the funding and plan to fundraise the rest in the coming months.

“There was always an undercurrent of conservatism in the black community, obviously in the social and faith spaces that we felt the most,” the aide said. “We knew that there was potential there for us to kind of spread the message about conservatism.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Scott, echoing Trump, also argued there is more opportunity to convince black voters to vote for the former president after his conviction by a New York court on falsifying business records.

“I honestly think this decision is helpful to driving even more folks to the Republican Party,” Scott said. “African American men are fed up with this two-tiered justice system, so much so that I would suggest the number today is closer to 45% to 50% of African American men who are open” to the GOP.