Long Branch Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina’s fourth-largest urban area, was packed on the last Sunday of October last year. Pastor Sean Dogan, in a dark suit, white shirt and pink tie, mounted the dais, where a choir of six and three musicians were already in place. He called a representative of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) to the front. ‘We’re a national organisation trying to promote education, entrepreneurship and economic stability,’ she said. ‘Right now, we’re campaigning to get people registered to vote.’

She asked the congregation how many of them had registered. The vast majority of the 402 congregants (400 Black, two white) raised their hands. ‘Great! Now, who’s planning to vote?’ This elicited a similar response. ‘That’s what we like to see. Come see us, talk about it with those around you. Make your voice heard in November!’ Before returning to her seat, she gave the pastor a cheque for church funds. The voter registration drive was taking place a year before this November’s general election, which looks likely to be a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

South Carolina is predominantly Baptist, but Baptist churches tend to divide along racial lines. Most white Baptists vote Republican; almost all Black ones vote Democrat. In churches like Long Branch, the emphasis is on coping with injustice, adopting a good lifestyle and the need to retain hope. At 26%, South Carolina has the sixth highest percentage of Black citizens in the US. In 2020 Biden secured the backing of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the well-known civil rights organisation.

Despite its large, Democrat-voting Black population (99% backed Barack Obama in 2008), the Palmetto state, as it’s nicknamed after its state tree, is an almost impregnable rightwing stronghold. Obama was roundly defeated here in 2008 and 2012; Trump won 55% of the vote in 2020. That year, buoyed by wins in New Hampshire and Iowa, Bernie Sanders appeared to have a decent chance of becoming the US’s first socialist president. But the South Carolina Democratic primary (which is open to all voters) dealt a crushing blow from which he never recovered; he received just 19.7% of the vote compared to Biden’s 48.6%. A grateful Biden decided that the 2024 Democratic primaries would begin in South Carolina on 3 February, breaking the tradition of New Hampshire being first. Republican primaries will be held here on 24 February (after New Hampshire and Nevada).

‘God will do the rest’

Pastor Dogan chose patience as the theme for his sermon. ‘I know you’d like more money, but more money often brings more problems,’ he said, to nods of agreement. ‘I know you want that little baby, but remember, that child will sometimes cry!’ Laughter from the congregation. ‘Be patient. You want everything in big, neatly tied packages. You want abundance, but God works from little things that grow slowly.’ Noises of assent grew louder: ‘Yes, Sir!’, ‘Amen’, ‘Oh yeah!’ This was exactly the blend of showmanship and teaching the faithful were here for. ‘What you need is just a little bit of faith, hope, wisdom, understanding and God will do the rest,’ the preacher cried, almost in a single breath.

After the service, as the pastor wolfed crackers and cheese, I asked him how churches like his influence voting in South Carolina. ‘I won’t tell you who I vote for. We don’t talk about that in our church. We never tell our members who to vote for. Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president [2009-17] and Biden’s still very popular in our community. I think in 2020, South Carolinians mainly voted for Biden because of that link.’

Bernie Sanders is seen as someone who speaks to white leftists over 40. Joe Biden spent a lot of time campaigning in the state’s Black churches. Obama got him an ovation at an NAACP rally. And he received support from the Black establishment, including James Clyburn, a very popular civil rights activist

Brent F Nelsen

Two days later I visited another Greenville Baptist church, where the congregants were almost all white. I arrived at the Christian Assembly Upstate during a morning of prayer organised by the Republican Party. A dozen or so people were praying ‘for the Greenville County police to continue protecting us, our homes, our marriages, and our way of life’. Yvonne Julian, the Black president of the GOP (Grand Old Party, as the Republicans are known) in Greenville, described her concerns: ‘Democrats, homosexuals, Marxists and Hamas activists have united against our Judeo-Christian culture, our family model.’

The ‘pro-Hamas demonstrations’ that troubled Julian were, in fact, expressions of solidarity with Gazans being bombed by the Israeli army. Barely a hundred people had turned out in downtown Greenville on 22 October, but they alarmed Julian: ‘Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are leftists, and they’re attacking us. We want less government, more individual responsibility. Today, there’s indoctrination in schools and universities. There’s also this growing trans and homosexual movement … It’s all part of a plan to destroy American values.’

Julian, who used to work at Dow Chemicals, cites Furman University in Travelers Rest, a small town in Greenville County, as ‘a good example of what’s call wokeness. All those people who want to impose their view of the world, their gender, their history … Last week, there was a lecture there by a woman promoting Marxist and homosexual books! [A professor had given a lecture on ‘decolonising contemporary art.’] She came to stir up trouble in a university founded by the Southern Baptist Convention!’

‘Trump’s sins were long ago’

Julian will vote for Trump, though after multiple sexual assault accusations and one conviction, he is hardly a model of Christian piety. ‘His sins were long ago,’ said Jeff Davis, a former BMW worker and security guard at the church. ‘Anyway, we’re electing a president, not a preacher. The last preacher elected to that office was Jimmy Carter in 1976, and that was a disaster.’ Julian added, ‘The more complaints against Trump, the more popular he becomes.’ It’s true that the 91 charges against him don’t seem to have blunted the devotion he commands – quite the opposite.

The 2024 campaign has barely got under way. On the Democratic side, Biden is running for a second term, with no alternative candidate standing against him. On the Republican side, Trump is overwhelmingly ahead in the polls. His four challengers – Florida governor Ronald DeSantis, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley – seem consigned to supporting roles. At just 10% in the GOP’s internal polls, Haley also faces the prospect of defeat on her home turf, where Trump continues to enjoy unwavering popularity. Last July, a Trump rally in Pickens, a small town just west of Greenville (population 3,400), drew a crowd of over 50,000.

Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab and former US ambassador to the UN, has been embraced by the business community, though. In late November, she was endorsed by Ken Langone, founder of the Home Depot chain, and by Americans for Prosperity, the organisation set up by billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. Business people sees Haley as a ‘moderate’ alternative to Trump, whom they regard as unpredictable and dangerous. However, in her home state, Haley had received the backing of only five of South Carolina’s 170 state assembly members by mid-December (Trump has over 80).

Furman University in Greenville resembles a gated community, with its own artificial lake, American football stadium, basketball arena and state-of-the-art classrooms. Such facilities don’t come cheap: tuition alone is $50,000 a year, with accommodation on top. Sitting outside the campus cafeteria, sociology and anthropology students Claire Jost and Will Sander dismiss the idea of their university being ‘woke’: ‘You’re joking, right? Woke’s a rightwing word created by the right for the right, for the oppressors. No oppressed person would ever use that word when they’re talking about their oppression.’

‘You can’t cancel me, I quit’

Both students are active in the university’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) group. For Jost, a highlight of the group’s activities was disrupting a rally held by Ron DeSantis, whom she calls a homophobe. Having bypassed security, Jost and Sander unrolled a rainbow flag next to DeSantis’s stage. Jost, who is queer, will vote for the first time this November. ‘It’ll be Biden,’ she said, ‘because he’s the first president to visit a picket line [the United Automobile Workers in 2023] and under his administration, the social movement has scored victories: at UPS, in Hollywood and in automotive plants.’

Sander, who will also vote for Biden, proudly recalled preventing Mary Eberstadt, whom the YDSA regards as an antifeminist, from speaking on campus. Eberstadt had been invited by the Tocqueville Society (a privately funded institute affiliated with the university) but the YDSA condemned her as a ‘vicious transphobe’ who posed as a victim of cancellation. Eberstadt responded with an article in the Wall Street Journal on 27 March titled ‘You can’t cancel me, I quit.’

At the Community Tap, a trendy bar a few minutes from campus, French professor Nathan Brown and politics professor Brent F Nelsen often lock horns on this topic. ’We invite everyone to Furman, that’s the role of a university!’ Nelsen said. ’You’re right. But you wouldn’t invite a racist to campus to argue that whites are smarter than Blacks, would you?’ Brown replied. ‘And Christian intellectuals wouldn’t have speakers who oppose their religion at their universities.’ The two academics forced unconvincing smiles and sipped their beers.

Brown, a Democrat, plans to vote in the Republican primaries on 24 February, a practice disallowed in many states but permitted in South Carolina. ‘I’ll probably vote for Nikki Haley to stop another Trump term because she’s much more sensible than him. But what annoys me about voting in their primaries is getting tons of emails about defending gun rights and fighting abortion.’

Nelsen, a Republican, said of the 2020 Democratic primaries, ‘Bernie Sanders is seen as a Yankee, a northerner, someone who speaks to white leftists over 40. Joe Biden spent a lot of time campaigning in the state’s Black churches. Obama got him an ovation at an NAACP rally. More importantly, he received support from the Black establishment, including James Clyburn, a very popular civil rights activist.’ Clyburn is also a powerful congressman in Washington.

Driving through rural South Carolina, long roads bordered by birch forests in their autumn colours are interspersed with water towers, runs of billboards and wooden houses with rocking chairs and benches on their porches. There are occasional Confederate flags, a symbol of the South. On the highway to Anderson, the mid-sized town after which the county is named, the billboards proclaim ‘Repent’! and ‘Forgive our sins, Jesus, save our soul!’ This is the heartland of rural, white, Christian, Republican America that gave Trump over 70% of its votes in 2020.

Confederate sympathies endure

In front of the courthouse in Anderson there’s a monument to Confederate soldiers. A statue of a Confederate general looks down from its column and the inscription on its base reads, ‘The world shall yet decide, in truth’s clear far-off light, that the soldiers who wore the gray, and died with [Robert E] Lee were in the right.’ In 2020, following George Floyd’s murder, protestors demanded that the monument come down. But ‘we couldn’t do anything about it,’ said Chris Salley, a local Democrat. ‘This statue doesn’t represent us Black people, but obviously, it pleases many around here.’

For Salley, the upcoming Democratic primaries don’t look promising: ‘I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince Black people to vote, but what’s the point? There won’t be any challenger to Biden, so why waste time convincing people to vote for someone who doesn’t represent them?’ He sees the big problem as apathy and general contempt for the two ruling parties. In this county, only 13,300 out of 120,000 registered voters took part in the 2020 Democratic primaries.

Salley resigned as Anderson County Democratic Party chair in late October in protest at President Biden and the Democratic elite’s support of Israel’s bombing of Gaza. ‘I can’t accept their refusal to call for a ceasefire,’ he said. He still intends to vote for Biden ‘or whoever wins the primary’.

He works part-time as a consultant for an animal rights foundation and now plans to devote the other half of his time to campaigning for ‘the only truly active union in South Carolina’, the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW). ‘I go to Waffle Houses, McDonald’s, Subways, trying to get across the idea that there’s a union that can help improve their working conditions. But it’s very hard in a state as hostile to unions as this one. The people I talk to are afraid of being fired if they’re seen talking to a trade unionist.’ South Carolina had only six strikes in 2023, all in the service sector. Its unionisation rate of 1.7% is the country’s lowest.

At a Waffle House in Columbia, Trinity, Zen, Melissa and Alston were busy washing dishes, cooking waffles and flipping rashers of bacon. One of them described the drunken behaviour of customers the night before; another spoke about a family member’s cancer diagnosis. They seemed to know each other well and their customers all looked like regulars. The mood instantly shifted when I brought up the question of their strike. ‘We’ve no comment, sir. We ask you to pay for your meal and leave. If you want to talk about that, call the company’s PR department.’

Employee dissatisfaction

On 8 July 2023 Waffle House employees, with USSW support, walked out, fed up with an automatic meal deduction of $3.15 from their already meagre daily pay. Due to an exemption to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour applied to workers who receive tips, employers can pay their staff as little as $2.17 an hour. Thomas Dixon, a social justice activist in Charleston, explained the challenge: ‘In South Carolina, a strike is at best a brief walkout or a demonstration for an hour or two, one day at the most. Employers have the right to fire people for no reason, whether the employee has been there for 15 years or 15 minutes. That’s what happened to me. I’d been working for 11 years in a restaurant kitchen in Charleston. I found the job when I was on probation after I got out of prison. One morning, the boss fired me for helping other employees.’ I met him at a Starbucks in Charleston, where employees have recently started earning $15 an hour, which would have been unthinkable five years ago.

On 4 November 2023 I attended a Republican barbecue to raise funds for Matthew Leber, a state Senate candidate for next June, whose slogan is ‘Columbia has enough attorneys as lawmakers, they need more paratroopers’. He explained how the right manages to win formerly Democrat-held seats, such as Charleston, the former slavery capital: ‘The district was redrawn in 2022.’ Gerrymandering is widely employed by Republicans to counter their opponents’ demographic growth (see A Republican stronghold, in this issue).

I’ve tried to convince Black people to vote, but what’s the point? There won’t be any challenger to Biden

Chris Salley

Leber and his wife were still reeling from the United Auto Workers (UAW) union’s victory the day before in a national strike that began in the summer. The union had secured a pay rise of 25% by 2028 for workers at Ford, Stellantis and General Motors. ‘The price of cars will rise by at least $900!’ Leber said. ‘All this agreement means is extra costs. It’s because we don’t have unions in South Carolina that so many companies want to set up here: Boeing, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Michelin…’ The French tyre maker is the state’s second-biggest employer. And Volkswagen secured a subsidy of $1.3bn from the state last March in exchange for the promise of creating 4,000 jobs at an electric SUV plant near Columbia.

In the Republican primaries on 24 February, Leber will support Vivek Ramaswamy, a very wealthy young businessman of Indian origin. Ramaswamy is polling at less than 5% (against Trump’s 60%), and, like his rivals, campaigning against multiculturalism. However, he is the most hostile to any further aid to Ukraine and the least enthusiastic in his support for Israel, which he thinks should look after its own defence: ‘There’s no North Star commitment to any one country, other than the United States of America,’ he said in August 2023. On 7 December in Alabama, in a televised debate with his three opponents, Ramaswamy scored a hit by challenging Nikki Haley to name the three provinces in eastern Ukraine occupied by Russia: ‘Look at that!’ he said, pointing to his silent, embarrassed opponent. ‘Look at the blank expression. She doesn’t know the names of the provinces that she wants to actually fight for.’

If Trump wins the primaries, Leber will reluctantly support him in November: ‘The Republican party could probably have defeated him if the Democrats hadn’t attacked him so much. They made him a victim, and people will rally around him. He’s got this freedom fighter mystique, like Robin Hood. He’ll be hard to beat.’

‘Kitchen table’ election issues

In the courtyard of a Charleston bar, about 20 Democratic women met with local party chair Sam Skardon to boost morale ahead of the 30 local elections that will take place before November. ‘Soon we’ll be electing the county council, the House, the Senate; there’s also the county sheriff, the clerk, the treasurer, the water management system steering committee, followed by the US congressional elections etc. The key issues for the next big election will revolve around “kitchen table issues” like taxes, inflation and very low wages … Joe Biden’s economic track record is the strongest since Franklin Roosevelt. His investments in road and port infrastructure and the rollout of high-speed internet are great achievements.’

In this county, Biden secured a 13-point victory in 2020 (55.5% against 42.6%). ‘We need to maintain this lead and ensure his re-election next November,’ Skardon said. ‘And for that, we need you women! Talk to your sisters, cousins, neighbours, and even your bosses so that they give you time to get involved!’ But how? Merrill Towns Chapman, a party activist, had an answer: the next day at 6pm at a smart city hotel, there would be a meeting of Moms for Liberty, an ultraconservative group intent on removing books from schools. ‘They’re trying to erase Black history teaching and books on sexuality from school curriculums and public libraries. They’re even targeting Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. So come with your phones charged; we’ll need your flashlights. Wear light, reflective clothing; the police have been forewarned.’

The following evening at the scheduled time, there were about 15 demonstrators, flanked by police officers in the hotel parking lot on the outskirts of Charleston. They’d hung signs on trees: ‘Which books will they ban?’, ‘Ban intolerance, not books’, ‘Stop Christian nationalism’. Moms for Liberty gained control of the school board in Charleston County and a neighbouring county in the last election.

The group, which was founded in January 2021 by two Florida conservatives to combat mandatory mask-wearing in schools, now has over 110,000 members in 45 states. While much smaller than the two teachers’ unions – the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have five million members – Moms for Liberty nonetheless completely dominates the conversation on school boards and public libraries.

Some Moms were setting out a room on the top floor of the hotel; a dozen books were displayed on a table. Shannon Berlinsky, a new school board member, insisted even before I could ask a question, ‘We’re not Nazis; we have Jewish members. We love teachers, we love librarians too! We’re not anti-gay; we just want to exclude any references to sexuality from our children’s schools.’ ‘We’re defending our children’s innocence,’ Tara Wood, the chapter chair, added.

Another member said: ‘Look at this book, it’s a blatant appeal to paedophilia! It’s available in middle school for kids aged 12 to 15!’ She waved a copy of Mike Curato’s Flamer, a graphic novel in which the Moms had assiduously counted every provocative word. She didn’t mention that the book isn’t on the school curriculum and is only found in particular libraries with educational team approval. For Republicans, this culture war will be at the heart of the forthcoming presidential election. For at least three years, combatting ‘woke censorship’ has been one of their rallying cries. However, purges are always more palatable when you’re the inquisitor.

Bonnie Cleaveland, a psychologist recently fired as Charleston County’s director of school health by the Moms for Liberty’s majority on the school board, voiced her concern: ‘South Carolina is one of the most conservative states on these issues. Sex education is banned in schools. It’s illegal to teach young boys how to use a condom. Even discussing sexual relationships before marriage is off-limits.’ This hardline puritanism means South Carolina has the US’s 11th highest rate of unwanted teenage pregnancies. Cleaveland said, ‘Republicans want to establish an autocracy and they would know how to do it.’