CHARLESTON, S.C. — With former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s campaign launch on Wednesday and a two-state tour by former vice president Mike Pence, it seemed official: The 2024 Republican presidential primary, defined until this week by a single prominent candidacy, is off to a trundling start.
Despite their recent declarations that the party needs to move forward, Haley and Pence both used their events to embrace the culture war battles over race and education, falling back on the same grievance-mongering tactics deployed by the very person both would be ostensibly trying to defeat: former president Donald Trump.
In front of an adoring home-state audience in Charleston, Haley called brightly for a new generation of leadership — while also offering a dark warning about a “virus” she described as “more dangerous than any pandemic.”
“A self-loathing has swept our country, it’s in the classroom, the board room, and the back rooms of government,” Haley said. “Every day we’re told America is flawed, rotten, and full of hate. Joe and Kamala even say America’s racist. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
More than 1,300 miles away, in Minneapolis, Pence, who is mulling a presidential campaign of his own, condemned the teaching of “racial grievance” in schools and blasted educators for supporting transgender youth. For Pence, a longtime culture warrior dating back to his tenure representing Indiana in the House, the message seemed to be aimed at the evangelical voters he once helped secure as part of Trump’s ticket.
“What brings us here today is the now-radical gender ideology that has seeped into our classrooms,” Pence declared, on a day in which he used stops in Minnesota and Iowa to highlight a lawsuit against a school district near Cedar Rapids that protects the privacy of transgender students.
“It wasn’t our choice to start the left’s culture war,” Pence said. “Now we have no choice but to win it.”
The rhetoric is a reflection of how the Republican base in recent years has been gripped by its opposition to issues like transgender children playing sports and how slavery and racism in America’s history are taught in schools, turbocharging the careers of potential GOP presidential candidates like Glenn Youngkin, who successfully campaigned to be Virginia’s governor on “parental rights” in 2021, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has picked high-profile fights with teachers and companies like Disney and the College Board. Trump, himself, called for parents to be able to directly elect school principals in a video last month.
“Everyone who launches a campaign is going to make some variation of this,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist and a former aide to Senator Mitch McConnell. “The question is, which of these candidates is going to be able to demonstrate the fight and the aptitude for winning this war, not just simply complaining about it?”
Haley and Pence, he suggested, might be stuck playing catch-up to candidates who are already better known culture warriors.
“Trump was really good at identifying these fights,” Jennings said. “DeSantis seems to be good at finishing them.”
Indeed, Haley’s path to the nomination appears difficult. Early polls show her trailing Trump and other potential rivals like DeSantis. And her efforts to capture her home state will be complicated by the possible candidacy of Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is holding his own event in Charleston on Thursday.
In a possible warning sign for Republicans hoping to win a general election, some candidates who leaned heavily on culture war issues in the midterms, including Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona, lost close races in swing states. Haley did not acknowledge that, even as she urged her party to embrace an electable candidate.
“We’ve lost the popular vote in seven out of the eight last presidential elections,” she said. “That ends today.”
Seven years ago, Trump differentiated himself from a crowded primary field by playing on voters’ racial grievances, baselessly accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists and calling for a ban on Muslims entering the country. As president, he frequently seized on culture war issues that appealed to white conservatives. That included his defense of Confederate monuments amid the antiracism protests of 2020, his denunciation of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which explored how slavery indelibly shaped the country’s history, and his call for an end to diversity training in the federal government.
“What you have right now are Republican candidates or potential candidates doing their best to understand the Republican base electorate, and what you do find is that the party is very much rooted in Trump,” said Gunner Ramer, political director of the Republican Accountability Project. “It’s rooted in what Donald Trump stirred up in 2015, 2016 . . . these culture wars.”
Haley picked up on that thread in her presidential announcement. A video she released on Tuesday shows a television with the title of the 1619 Project as she denounces people “who look at our past as evidence that America’s founding principles are bad.”
On Wednesday, as she stood in a city that was once the country’s busiest slave port, she offered her own path as an Indian American who rose to be governor and then UN ambassador as evidence to suggest that the country does not have problems with race.
“Take it from me, the first minority female governor in history: America is not a racist country,” Haley said, adding that the principles at its core are “perfect.”
Her rhetoric seemed to be a departure from the way she has discussed race in the past and underscored how her party has dug in on the issue. Haley was governor in 2015 when a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black churchgoers during a Bible study at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. She soon called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the state Capitol, saying it was being used as a “sign of hate.”
In 2016, she denounced Trump’s candidacy after he refused to explicitly reject support from a leader of the racist Ku Klux Klan.
“I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,” Haley said then. “That is not a part of our party. That is not who we want as president.”
But she then went on to serve in Trump’s administration as the ambassador to the United Nations, and she has walked a fine line when it comes to criticism of the former president, heaping praise on his policies and emphasizing her loyalty to him.
On Wednesday, she was introduced by Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a longtime Trump ally who praised him as one of the “great leaders of all time” but said that Republicans are “desperately looking for the new leadership at the top of the ticket.”
Haley herself mentioned Trump only sparingly in her remarks, and any subtle criticism she aimed his way was generational, rather than moral. At 51, she knocked both parties for their aging standard bearers. She called for mental competency tests for politicians older than 75, something that would apply to President Biden, 80, and Trump, 76.
“America is not past its prime,” she said. “It’s just our politicians are past theirs.”
The assembled voters were delighted about Haley’s candidacy, and some in the largely white crowd praised her embrace of the culture wars.
“I don’t believe that everybody’s racist,” said Susie Vahala, 64, a gymnastics competition judge, who merrily waved an American flag as voters filed into Haley’s event. “Whatever happened long ago, we don’t have anything to do with that.”
Margaret Emmans, 72, a registered nurse and certified Charleston tour guide, called Haley the “best qualified candidate,” and described her as a champion for the things she cares most about, including “the future of the country — getting it back to a more Christian environment.”
Jess Bidgood can be reached at Jess.Bidgood@globe.com. Follow her @jessbidgood.