Tim Scott quits 2024 presidential race. Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has dropped out of the US presidential race as he acknowledged that Donald Trump continues to lead in the primary polls and he does not see a way to win the Republican nominee.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday night, Scott announced he was suspending his candidature, giving other contenders attempting to unseat front-runner Donald Trump a slight advantage, The Guardian reported.
“I think the voters, who are the most remarkable people on the planet, have been really clear that they’re telling me: ‘Not now Tim,’” he said.
Scott, the only Black Republican serving in the Senate, made the announcement six months after he launched his White House bid with an optimistic vision of America’s future.
He had used a personal story of his mother as a single mother to argue for America’s greatness and accused Joe Biden and other Democrats of “attacking every rung of the ladder that helped me climb”.
“We live in the land where it is absolutely possible for a kid raised in poverty in a single-parent household in a small apartment to one day serve in the people’s house and maybe even the White House,” Scott said as he announced his candidacy in May.
“This is the greatest country on God’s green Earth.”
To increase his prospects of securing the nomination, Scott recently shifted to darker rhetoric on the campaign trail.
He made the argument that Black Americans could tolerate slavery better than President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which aimed to combat poverty and gave rise to social welfare initiatives like Medicare and Medicaid.
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Critics were incensed by this because they believed Scott was minimising the horrors of slavery.
Scott also lambasted Biden for his response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, accusing him of inadvertently causing the violence. This sparked outrage and criticism of Biden’s foreign policy agenda.
Scott later praised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his “restraint” in response to Hamas attacks, despite Israeli airstrikes killing Palestinians.
Despite his shift to more severe rhetoric, Scott’s support in national primary polls remained low, leaving him with no path to the nomination.
