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Last Updated June 22, 2005
South Carolina's junior senator is Jim DeMint, a Republican elected in 2004. DeMint was born in Greenville where his father was stationed in the Air Force; when his parents divorced, his mother earned money by turning their home into a dancing school, The DeMint Academy of Dance and Decorum. He graduated from the University of Tennessee and Clemson business school, and returned to Greenville to work as a paper salesman and in his father-in-law's advertising business. In 1983 he founded DeMint Marketing, a research firm with businesses, schools, colleges and hospitals as clients. In 1992 he went to work for 33-year-old lawyer Bob Inglis's House campaign, honing the Inglis message using focus groups and advertising expertise. Inglis upset an incumbent Democrat by 50%-48%, and kept his promise to serve only three terms. In 1998 when Inglis ran for the Senate, DeMint ran in the 4th District. Like Inglis, he pledged to serve only three terms and take no PAC money. He called for a national sales tax or flat tax, for individual retirement accounts in Social Security, and for the right-to-life amendment. The favorite was state Senator Mike Fair, a former University of South Carolina quarterback. In the primary Fair led with 32%; DeMint came in second with 23%. In the runoff two weeks later, Fair bragged about his experience, but DeMint called him a "career politician." The result was a 53%-47% upset win for DeMint. He won the general election 58%-40%. In the House, DeMint was elected president of the freshman class and joined other junior Republicans seeking to rein in spending by the appropriators. He resisted local pressures and was the only South Carolina House member to vote for permanent normal trade relations with China, arguing that the best way to remedy human-rights abuses was "to export our products and principles." The libertarian Cato Institute ranked DeMint in the top 1% of "free traders" in the House. When George W. Bush in 2001 proposed his $1.6 trillion tax-cut package, DeMint was among a small group who immediately pushed for more; he was a leading advocate of the expanded adoption tax credits in the final package. He sponsored an amendment to Bush's education bill to create a state-based block-grant program; to preserve his bipartisan coalition, Education and the Workforce Chairman John Boehner tried to discourage DeMint. Bush, in a meeting in the Oval Office, got DeMint to back down. Social Security was another legislative interest. He worked to advance individual investment accounts in Social Security by getting 117 House members to sign a letter of support for the Social Security Commission and introduced legislation in 2003 that allowed people under age 55 to set aside 3% to 8% of their monthly Social Security contributions in personal investment accounts. DeMint's votes on trade provoked serious opposition in his textile-producing district. In 2002, Public Service Commissioner and former state Representative Phil Bradley challenged him in the primary. Bradley had the support of textile titan Roger Milliken, long a financer of conservative and protectionist candidates. DeMint defended his support for free trade as beneficial for international investment in the district, and said that he also sought to protect domestic workers. DeMint won 62%-38%. After the election, DeMint said that he would keep his promise to serve only three terms in the House and that he would run for Democrat Ernest Hollings's Senate seat in 2004. DeMint couldn't be more different than the man he sought to replace. DeMint was from South Carolina's Up Country while Hollings was a Charleston native with a Low Country political base. Hollings was one of the Senate's leading protectionists; DeMint an unwavering free trader. Where Hollings served in a variety of elected offices over a political career that spanned more than a half-century, DeMint's public service began in 1998, when he won his first House term. DeMint soon gained the backing of White House political strategist Karl Rove; in August 2003, Hollings announced he would not seek reelection. Commenting on South Carolina's increasingly Republican electorate, Hollings said, "It wouldn't be easy for anybody who's a Democrat in this state to get elected," he said. There were three competitive challengers to DeMint in the June 8 Republican primary: former Governor David Beasley, who lost for reelection in 1998, former Attorney General Charlie Condon of Sullivan's Island, and Thomas Ravenel, a millionaire Charleston developer and son of former Congressman Arthur Ravenel. South Carolina has lost nearly 70,000 manufacturing jobs since 1999. Trade policy is a consequential issue here. DeMint and Ravenel ran as free traders; Beasley and Condon took protectionist positions. DeMint got money from the Club for Growth. Beasley's biggest contributor was textile magnate Roger Milliken and he received contributions from many textile executives and political action committees. Beasley ran ads featuring an empty textile plant and talked about how unfair trade practices sent jobs to China; he claimed DeMint advocated trade policies that had cost the state more than 50,000 jobs. A Condon ad singled out DeMint's vote to allow China into the World Trade Organization and showed Red Army soldiers. DeMint responded with ads showing the BMW manufacturing plant near Greer and pointed to increased U.S. exports to China. Beasley was ahead in polls for much of the primary campaign, but he was not close to the 50% percent threshold required to win the nomination outright; the real battle was for second place, which would assure a spot against Beasley in the runoff two weeks later. As expected, Beasley led the primary with 37%; DeMint came in second with 26%, 4,400 votes ahead of Ravenel, who had 25%. Condon finished fourth with 9%. In the June 22 runoff, DeMint picked up endorsements from Ravenel and Condon and won support from Republican voters still unhappy over Beasley's switches while governor on the Confederate battle flag and lottery issues; he won 59%-41% percent. DeMint's general election opponent was State Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum, a popular Democrat who had twice won statewide election. Tenenbaum ran on her record in education, and said she had secured more than $750 million for school construction and renovation and worked to increase teacher pay. South Carolina high school students, she said, were improving their SAT scores at the fastest rate in the nation. Her signature outfits were red dresses and suits and she campaigned around the state aboard the Red Dress Express, a recreational vehicle with an image of her on its sides. She picked up where the Republican primary and runoff campaign left off, arguing that DeMint's House votes cost the state tens of thousands of jobs. She opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which DeMint supported, and she was funded by textile interests. But it was taxes that gave traction to Tenenbaum. DeMint had co-sponsored a bill to replace all federal taxes with a 23% national sales tax, explaining that trade and tax policy were the paths to creating an attractive business environment in South Carolina and the nation; he repeatedly described how Daimler-Chrysler might be Chrysler-Daimler were U.S. taxes more hospitable than German ones. Tenenbaum said DeMint's advocacy for a national sales tax would result in a tax hike on 95 percent of all South Carolina residents and hammered him on the issue in ads and in staged events; his standing in the polls began to drop in the fall and he ran radio and television ads accusing Democrats of misrepresenting his position. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spent $2.5 million through September for Tenenbaum; in October, the National Republican Senatorial Committee ran a $1.3 million ad campaign to shore up DeMint. DeMint's campaign was also sidetracked by controversy over comments he made in the first debate. He said during the debate "folks teaching in schools need to represent our values"; afterwards he said he would not require teachers to admit whether they were gay but if they were, "I do not think they should be teaching at public schools." Two days later, he suggested that unwed pregnant women also should not teach in the public schools. "I just think moral decisions are different with a teacher." On October 17, the two nominees appeared together on NBC's Meet the Press, where host Tim Russert grilled DeMint about his comments and pressed Tenenbaum, a former abortion rights group lobbyist, on her position on abortion. Overall, DeMint spent $9 million to Tenenbaum's $6.2 million. He won 54%-44%, the same as Lindsey Graham in 2002. DeMint narrowly lost Charleston County by 100 votes, but won big margins in his Up Country home turf. He won 63%-35% in Greenville County and 59%-38% in Spartanburg County. South Carolina now two Republican senators for the first time since 1873. As recently as 2002 South Carolina's senior and junior senators, Strom Thurmond and Ernest Hollings, had 86 years of seniority between. In 2005, Graham and Jim DeMint had less than three years between them.
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