In deep red South Carolina, the president helped stoke apprehension of a deeper red surge ahead of November’s US midterm elections
After casting his vote in South Carolina, a man who introduced himself as Chestnut was unwilling to give his full name. “You don’t have a need to know,” the air force veteran declared. He was, however, happy to share his views.
“I’m a true American. I believe in the USA,” said the man, outside Christ the Servant Lutheran church in Conway. “And I don’t believe in communism or socialism.”
Several hundred thousand South Carolinians took part in a Republican special runoff on Tuesday, selecting the party’s nominee for US Senate after the sudden death of the veteran lawmaker Lindsey Graham. Darline, his sister, prevailed – in a victory for Donald Trump.
The US president had traveled down to South Carolina days before the vote, reaching for a familiar theme as he rallied supporters to get behind his handpicked candidate. Also on the ballot was a message that Trump has been ramping up in recent months.
“So the Democrats hate our country. They’re communists,” Trump declared at a rally in Myrtle Beach. During the speech, he mentioned communists or communism no fewer than 13 times. “They’re radical left lunatics.”
As Democrats have looked left in some primaries, nominating socialists to represent the party in November’s US midterm elections, Trump has increasingly – erroneously – claimed the party has been overrun by communists. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot,” he said in the shadow of Mount Rushmore during the US 250th birthday celebrations this summer. “You cannot be both.”
As Trump seeks to galvanize his base ahead of November’s US midterm elections, the thoughts of voters in South Carolina, and fears of an ascendant “Communist party” on the left, offer a window into how his efforts are faring.
Chestnut was not the only voter with whom such warnings appeared to resonate. In deep red South Carolina, where no Democrat has won statewide in 20 years, there is apprehension of a deeper red surge in US politics.
“I don’t like the DSA,” Charles Rogers said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America, as he left a polling station at Marion intermediate school. “I don’t like how the Democrats want to back them. Democrats used to be for the working man, but something’s changed … I do not agree with the DSA, and more Democrats are backing them with crazy ideas.”
While DSA members would adamantly describe themselves as standing for working people, fears of communism coming for America – fanned by Trump – were on the mind of Republican voters contemplating their choices on Tuesday, and in November.
Lee and Donna Criswell voted on Tuesday afternoon at the Lamar library in Darlington county, South Carolina. Asked what issues they viewed as politically important, Lee replied: “We’re concerned about the socialism thing going on in some parts of the country. I don’t think we have an issue regardless of whether you’re Republican or Democrat here in South Carolina, but I don’t know where it’s going, you know, in other areas.”
“We want to maintain our freedoms,” Donna added.
As Trump continues to level allegations of political “extremism” at the feet of the Democrats, his own extreme actions – from persistent election denial to the pursuit of his political enemies – continue to cause alarm in much of the country. Such concerns were not raised by Republicans in South Carolina who spoke to the Guardian this week.
Zachary Cogan, a retired army engineer voting in Lamar, called himself a transplant from the “communist state” of New York. He said he was looking for responsiveness and accountability from conservative political leaders, saying: “We’re not importing [New York City mayor Zohran] Mamdani voters into South Carolina. South Carolina has no danger of turning purple.”
Cogan thought about the political environment he left behind, and laughed. “I mean, when you have to say [US Senate minority leader] Chuck Schumer is the more moderate of the Democrats, that’s going the wrong way. OK? But why – why are the Democrats … well, you’ve got the Communist party now that is so pro-intifada.”
The victories of Mamdani in New York City, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s US Senate primary and now Angie Nixon in Florida’s US Senate primary have been heralded by American progressives as a sign of renewed vigor for the left in Democratic politics amid the provocations of Trump’s administration.
But they have also become daily fodder for conservative cable news channels like Newsmax or Fox News, and social media accounts on Facebook and X. The fear of communism has become a driving rhetorical force on the right.
Fox and other media outlets catering to a conservative audience have been amplifying the anticommunist rhetoric of Trump, according to Brian Leiter, a law professor and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. Leiter co-authored a book on Karl Marx and is a keen observer of America’s history with red-baiting politics.
“Trump and Fox News work in tandem on these things. They’re mutually reinforcing,” Leiter said. “Trump understands red-baiting better than anyone, because who was his mentor? Roy Cohn. And Roy Cohn was, of course, legal counsel to Joseph McCarthy in the original purge and political persecution.”
The words “socialist” or “socialism” have been mentioned almost 6,000 times in Fox News programming since 1 January, according to a search of the Internet Archive’s database of show transcripts. The word “communist” appeared more than 1,700 times. In each case, mentions spiked sharply in May and have steadily increased, occurring about five times as often in August as they did in April.
Often, Leiter said, Fox invites on its shows members of the DSA who – unlike media-savvy Democrats like Mamdani or congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – look and sound like progressive caricatures, espousing fringe views within the Democratic party, unwilling or unable to articulate the difference between the beliefs of a democratic socialist and a committed communist.
“I gather they have been doing a lot on democratic socialism on the theory that it’ll help the Republican party,” Leiter said. “Communism has always been a bogeyman in American politics in a way it’s not in Europe, say, and it’s not helped by the fact that every self-proclaimed communist government was a disaster … None of these people – Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, AOC – none of them are communists. They’re not even close.”
But those distinctions do not seem to have generally filtered down to rank-and-file Republican voters of South Carolina. Trump’s rhetoric has landed.
