South Carolina’s Republican Sen. Tim Scott will formally announce Monday that he is running for president in 2024. The announcement, which will be held at Charleston Southern University, the Baptist college he attended just outside Charleston, comes after he filed papers with the Federal Election Commission on Friday converting his exploratory committee to a formal campaign.
Scott is a two-term senator who was first appointed to that body in 2013 after the resignation of Republican incumbent Jim DeMint. In taking office, he became the first African American senator from the South since Reconstruction.
An adviser familiar with Scott’s plans told Vox that the South Carolina senator would focus on his biography as someone who has “lived the American dream and has seen Joe Biden and the radical left knock out every rung of the ladder that has helped him climb.” The adviser also said that Scott will take shots at the “culture of victimhood” in the United States and contrast himself “not just with the left but with some on the right.”
In his time on Capitol Hill, Scott has managed to walk a careful line. He has criticized Donald Trump at times, including after Trump’s infamous “good people on both sides” remarks about the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, but also spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention. He has built up the voting record of a traditional Republican in the Senate as a social and fiscal conservative with a hawkish foreign policy. However, Scott has been a leader of police and criminal justice reform efforts in the Senate as well, and he helped shepherd Trump’s criminal justice reform bill, the First Step Act, into law in 2018. Scott was also a leader of the unsuccessful efforts to pass federal police reform legislation in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in 2020 when senators were unable to agree on a bipartisan bill. He also received some national attention for giving the…
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