JANUARY 19, 2012
\nby William Mitchell \u201913, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n
The FYI Center on\u00a0South Main Street\u00a0usually provides a safe place for local teens to hang out downtown, but on Wednesday the trendy upstairs lounge was filled by a quite different crowd as Furman professor Jim Guth spoke about the upcoming South Carolina Republican Primary.<\/p>\n
This has been a busy week for Guth, who has been interviewed by a wide range of media including CNN, National Public Radio and the Houston Chronicle<\/em>. Guth has even received calls from reporters in Britain and France who were interested in the primary.<\/p>\n Guth, an author and longtime political science professor, was participating in the High Noon Lecture Series, a popular university-sponsored free event that connects faculty to members of the community on Wednesdays during the school year.<\/p>\n Guth began by highlighting some trends in South Carolina\u2019s candidate selection.<\/p>\n One is that South Carolina picks winners. Since the creation of the primary in 1980 the S.C. Republican Primary has selected the candidate that would go on to win the nomination, if not the presidency itself. According to Guth, the primary also has a tendency to pick the most well-known candidate.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s almost always been what we think of as the establishment Republican candidate. It\u2019s always been the frontrunner, the one that has the broadest rapport within the establishment, whatever that may be.\u201d<\/p>\n Apart from trends in candidate selection, the South Carolina Republican Primary\u00a0has historically been a contentious election. Guth claimed that people who have followed the primaries over time have become opinionated about the process.<\/p>\n \u201cThe outside meme that reporters use is,\u00a0\u2018Oh boy, we moved from New Hampshire, where everyone knows what they think, to Iowa, where everyone is nice, to South Carolina, where politics is always dirty.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Guth also discussed a number of changes in the primary\u2019s environment that have shaped its development.<\/p>\n The primaries this year are operating on a compressed schedule as states like South Carolina and Florida have pushed\u00a0their dates earlier into the season. This has shortened the time between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primary, leaving less time for candidates to make their cases.<\/p>\n In this short window of time\u00a0the large number of candidates that have survived have greatly increased their output of emails, \u201crobo-calls\u201d and newsletters. According to Guth, these outpourings are made possible by the newly created super PACs. The committees are capable of spending unlimited amounts of dollars supporting candidates as long as they do not coordinate directly with the candidates themselves. Guth, however, said he was skeptical of the efficacy of the condition: “Most of them seem to have various ways of coordinating with the presidential candidates.\u201d<\/p>\n In predicting the results of the general election itself, Guth said,\u00a0\u201cIn aggregate the situation in the economy is by far one of the best predictors, and the president\u2019s popularity rate, which in part reflects that, is also a good predictor.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" JANUARY 19, 2012 The FYI Center usually provides a safe place for local teens to hang out downtown, but on Wednesday the trendy upstairs lounge was filled by a quite different crowd as Furman Professor Jim Guth spoke about the upcoming South Carolina Republican Primary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-politics-and-international-affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nby William Mitchell \u201913, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n