Tim Scott’s trying to beat Trump as a nice guy with Wall Street backing

Senator Tim Scott is testing whether Wall Street’s support can help his long-shot bid to move Republicans away from the grievance-laced politics of Donald Trump.

Scott is expected to announce his bid for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination at an event Monday, arguing that he can unify Republicans with a positive, forward-looking message built around a compelling personal story and upbeat demeanor.

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He’ll be counting in part on ties that he’s cultivated to Wall Street through seats on the Senate’s Banking and Finance committees. Financiers including Citadel’s Ken Griffin, Apollo Global Management’s Marc Rowan and Blackstone Inc.’s Stephen Schwarzman all made six-figure donations to his allied super PAC, called the Opportunity Matters Fund, during his 2022 Senate campaign. Representatives of Citadel, Apollo, and Blackstone didn’t respond to requests for comment.

His most important benefactor is Oracle Corp. chair and co-founder Larry Ellison, who has plowed $30 million into the group. Ellison will attend Scott’s event Monday, according to people familiar with his plans. Ellison did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But it isn’t clear that Scott, 57, has a plan to topple his party’s paramount figure — Trump, the former president, who leads GOP primary polling by a wide margin. The senator doesn’t yet show up in an average of primary polls maintained by FiveThirtyEight. Some Republicans believe that his campaign is intended more to raise his own political profile, positioning him for a future run or as a potential running mate for Trump.

“You can’t nice your way to the nomination. People are looking for somebody to fight for them,” said Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, who backs Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor. “You can nice your way to the vice presidency.”

Scott’s campaign insists that his optimism sells among Republican voters and will take him to the White House.

“When we’re out talking to people, they tell us what we’re offering isn’t something they’ve heard in a while,” said Jennifer DeCasper, a longtime aide to the senator and his campaign manager.

Scott has so far trained his criticism not on his GOP primary opponents but on Democrats. He has blamed them for “choosing a culture of grievance over greatness” — not Trump, who continues to falsely claim his 2020 reelection defeat was rigged and has promised to pardon many of the rioters convicted for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.

And Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, charges that Democrats are “weaponizing race to divide the country.”

Scott is jumping into a primary field in which he trails not only Trump but also Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has yet to formally announce a bid, and Haley, a fellow South Carolinian.

After opening an exploratory committee last month, Scott made his bid official when he filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Friday.

‘Authentic’ candidate

Karl Rove, the Republican strategist who advised President George W. Bush, said that Scott’s advantage in the race is authenticity. He said he’s seen the senator speak at two GOP donor events where he was able to “win over audiences.”

“There is a lot of common ground on the issues among the Republican candidates. It’s a question of how you express it,” Rove said. “We will hear a different tone from him. Scott has the chance to make his lane in this race whatever he wants to make it because what he talks about comes from within and he is authentic.”

Scott has so far grounded his fledgling campaign in his personal story. He often refers to his experience growing up poor in North Charleston, where he’s said he failed four classes his freshman year in high school. He’s said he overcame those challenges with help from his mother and a mentor who was a Chick-fil-A owner, eventually graduating from Charleston Southern University and building a successful insurance business.

“The number one thing with him is his story — he’s got a great personal message, said GOP strategist Rick Davis, who was former Senator John McCain’s campaign manager for his 2008 presidential run.

“He’s running this sorta, let’s all kumbaya, let’s get together campaign, and I think he’s well positioned for certain kinds of states,” Davis added, singling out Iowa, which will be the first state to vote in the GOP primary.

Scott has tried to avoid popular culture-war issues, like DeSantis’s attacks on transgender people and what he calls “woke liberal politics,” or the debate over abortion bans in states including South Carolina.

In visits to early-voting states including Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s instead focused on economic empowerment, highlighting the provision of the 2017 GOP tax overhaul he helped write that created big tax incentives for investment in under-developed “opportunity zones.”

It is Scott’s most noteworthy accomplishment as a senator, a job he’s held since 2013. But critics of the program say much of the financing has gone to luxury developments that would have been built anyway, including projects connected to political insiders.

Scott’s office in March highlighted an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan research group in Washington, that found the program drew at least $48 billion in investment to about 3,800 communities, most of them distressed.

“Investments in these underserved areas make a huge impact on communities — to the tune of billions of dollars, he said in a statement.

Scott’s fundraising has been considerable. He raised $43 million for his reelection to the Senate in 2022 and won by nearly 26 points. He has $22 million left over to use for his presidential run, filings show. His top 10 sources of campaign cash were employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Blackstone and JPMorgan Chase & Co., illustrating his Wall Street ties.

The Opportunity Matters Fund, meanwhile, raised $37 million last year, including Ellison’s contribution, and ended 2022 with $13 million in the bank.

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