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Could South Carolina Change Everything?

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For more than four decades, South Carolina has been the decisive contest in the Republican presidential primaries—the state most likely to anoint the GOP’s eventual nominee. On Saturday, South Carolina seems poised to play that role again.

Since the state moved to its prominent early position on the GOP presidential-primary calendar in 1980, the candidate who has won there has captured the nomination in every contested race except one. Given Donald Trump’s overall lead in the GOP race, a victory for him in South Carolina over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, would likely uphold that streak.

“We all underestimate how deeply ingrained the Trump message is in the rank and file of our party,” Warren Tompkins, a longtime South Carolina–based GOP strategist and lobbyist, told me. “Take the personality out of it: What he stands for, what he says he’ll do, and what he did as president; he’s on the money.”

This year, though, there may be a twist in South Carolina’s usual role of confirming the eventual GOP winner: Even as the state demonstrates Trump’s strength in the primary, it may also spotlight his potential difficulties as a general-election nominee. Like the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina may show that though most Republican voters are ready to renominate Trump, a substantial minority of the GOP coalition has grown disaffected from him. And in a general-election rematch, that could provide a crucial opening for President Joe Biden, despite all of his vulnerabilities, to attract some ordinarily Republican-leaning voters.

“Trump is essentially the incumbent leader of the party who is not able to get higher than, say, 65 percent” in the primaries, Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me.

Local observers say Haley has run a textbook South Carolina campaign, barnstorming the state in a bus, appearing relentlessly on national television, spending heavily on television advertising, and notably intensifying her criticism of Trump as “unhinged” and “diminished.” Trump, meanwhile, has breezed through the state as quickly as a snowbird motoring down I-95 from New York to Florida for the winter. Yet he has retained an imposing lead reaching as high as two to one over Haley in the polls.

“I think you can argue Haley is running a fantastic campaign” in South Carolina, Jordan Ragusa, a political scientist at the College of Charleston and a co-author of a history of the South Carolina primary, told me. “But the pool of available voters is just so small that no matter what she does, it’s going to be hard for her to move the needle.”

Read: The GOP has crossed an ominous threshold on foreign policy

Over the past generation, South Carolina has had an extraordinary impact in shaping the outcome of GOP presidential-nomination contests. The state moved near the front of the GOP primary calendar in 1980, when Republicans were just establishing themselves as a competitive force in the state. GOP leaders created the primary, with its unusual scheduling on a Saturday, as a way to generate more attention for the party, which had previously selected its delegates at a convention attended by party insiders.

The other key factor in creating the primary was support from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, including Lee Atwater, a prominent GOP strategist then based in South Carolina. South Carolina did what Atwater hoped when Reagan won it in a rout, after unexpectedly losing the Iowa caucus to George H. W. Bush.

Reagan’s victory in South Carolina placed him back on the path for the GOP nomination and cut a mold that has endured, with only one exception, in every contested GOP presidential-primary race through 2016. Each of those races followed the same formula: One candidate won the Iowa caucus, a second candidate won the New Hampshire primary, and then one of those two won South Carolina and eventually captured the nomination. (The exception came in 2012, when a backlash to a debate question about his marriage propelled Newt Gingrich to a decisive South Carolina win over Mitt Romney, who recovered to claim the nomination.)

In 2016, Trump’s narrow victory in South Carolina effectively cemented the nomination for him after he had lost Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and then recovered to win in New Hampshire. A victory for Trump on Saturday would allow him to equal a feat achieved only by incumbent GOP presidents: sweeping Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Three factors, above all, explain South Carolina’s enduring influence in the GOP race. One is that it reflects the overall Republican coalition better than either of the two states that precede it. In Iowa, the Republican electorate leans heavily toward evangelical Christians who prioritize social issues; in New Hampshire, where there are few evangelicals, economic conservatives focused on taxes and spending, as well as a sizable group of libertarian voters, have dominated. South Carolina is the synthesis of both: It has a large evangelical population and a substantial cohort of suburban, business-oriented Republicans outside its three principal population centers of Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston.

“In a lot of ways, the state party here is a microcosm of the national party,” Jim Guth, a longtime political scientist at Furman University, in Greenville, told me. “We replicate the profile of the national party maybe better than New Hampshire [or] Iowa.”

It has been possible for candidates over the years to win Iowa or New Hampshire primarily by mobilizing just one group, such as social conservatives in Iowa and moderate independents in New Hampshire. But because the South Carolina GOP contains so many different power centers, “you have to have a broader appeal,” Tompkins, who has worked in every GOP presidential primary since Reagan, told me.

The second key factor in South Carolina’s importance has been its placement on the GOP calendar. From the outset, in 1980, the primary was designed by its sponsors as a “First in the South” contest that they hoped would signal to voters across the region which candidate had emerged as the favorite. As more southern states over the years concentrated their primaries on Super Tuesday, in early March, that multiplied the domino effect of winning the state.

“Given the demographic alignment between South Carolina and a lot of the southern Super Tuesday states, and the momentum effect, it really made South Carolina pivotal,” Ragusa said.

Read: Trump is about to steamroll Nikki Haley

The third dynamic underpinning South Carolina’s influence has been its role as a fire wall against insurgent candidates such as John McCain in 2000 and Patrick J. Buchanan in the 1990s. South Carolina’s Republican leadership has usually coalesced predominantly behind the candidate with the most support from the national party establishment and then helped power them to victory in the state. That model wavered in 2012, when Gingrich won his upset victory, and even in 2016, when Trump won despite clear splits in the national GOP establishment about his candidacy. But most often, South Carolina has been an empire-strikes-back place where the establishment-backed front-runner in the race snuffs out the last flickers of viable opposition.

All of these historic factors appear virtually certain to benefit Trump this year. Super Tuesday no longer revolves as much around southern states. But it remains a huge landscape: 15 states and American Samoa will all pick a combined 874 Republican delegates on March 5, nearly three-fourths of the total required to win the nomination.

In the limited polling across the Super Tuesday states, Trump now leads, usually commandingly, in all of them. Haley has already announced campaign appearances in Super Tuesday states through next week. But with all of the Super Tuesday states voting just 10 days after South Carolina, it will be virtually impossible for Haley to close the gap in so many places at once without winning her home state or at least significantly exceeding expectations. Like earlier underdogs, she faces a stark equation: To change the race anywhere on Super Tuesday, she must change it everywhere through her showing in South Carolina.

Saturday’s result could also reconfirm South Carolina’s other key historic roles. Trump is now the candidate of most of the GOP establishment—a dynamic reflected in his endorsement by virtually all of the leading Republicans in Haley’s home state. He’s also become the contender with the broadest appeal inside the Republican Party. Because Trump is so polarizing for the general public, it’s difficult to see him in that light. But South Carolina is likely to buttress the indications from Iowa and New Hampshire that Trump, as a quasi-incumbent, now has a broader reach across the Republican Party than Haley does, or, for that matter, than he himself did in 2016. In most South Carolina polls, Trump is now leading her with every major demographic group, except among the independents who plan to participate in the primary.

Yet South Carolina, like Iowa and New Hampshire before it, will also provide important clues about the extent of the remaining resistance to Trump within the Republican coalition.

Haley is likely to perform best among well-educated voters around the population centers of Columbia and Charleston. “Haley must run up the score with traditional Reagan Republicans who want to actually nominate a candidate who can win in the general election,” Stroman told me. “She is going to be absolutely swamped in the MAGA-rich right-wing upstate, and in rural areas across the state—so she needs the suburbs and cities to turn out to hopefully keep her closer than expected.”

In New Hampshire, Haley finished closer to Trump than most polls projected, because a large number of independent voters, and even a slice of Democrats, turned out to support her. She’ll need a similar dynamic to finish credibly in South Carolina, where she has said her goal is to exceed her 43 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. The better the showing for Haley among independents, and among college-educated voters in the suburbs, the stronger the general-election warning signs for Trump.

Democratic voters could be a wild card on Saturday after relatively few of them turned out for the party’s own primary earlier this month. South Carolina does not have party registration, which means that any voter who did not participate in the Democratic primary can vote in the Republican contest. A group called Primary Pivot has launched a campaign to encourage Democrats and independents to swarm the GOP primary to weaken Trump. If Haley exceeds expectations in South Carolina, it will be because, as in New Hampshire, more independents and Democrats turn out for her than pollsters anticipated.

Besting Trump for the nomination may no longer be a realistic goal for Haley if she loses her home state. But, after mostly dodging confrontation with Trump for months, she is now delivering a more cogent and caustic argument against him, and showing a determination to force Republicans to wrestle with the general-election risks they are accepting by renominating him. The biggest question in South Carolina may not be whether Haley can beat Trump, but whether the state provides her more evidence, even in defeat, to make that case.

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Ronald Brownstein

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February 22, 2024
Your boarding pass and weight, please: Why airlines are asking passengers to step on the scales

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Starting Monday, passengers flying on Korean Air may be asked to step on a scale before boarding their flight.

The exercise, which will last about three weeks, is required by law and applies to all Korean flag carriers, a Korean Air representative told CNBC.

The law requires airlines to weigh passengers and their carry-on luggage at least every five years and is “crucial for safety of flight operations,” the representative told CNBC.

The announcement was met with backlash from the public, according to local media.

A notice detailing the exercise — set to begin at Gimpo International Airport Monday, followed by Incheon Airport next month — has been removed from the airline’s website, due to “sufficient notice and media coverage,” according to the airline.

Is it reasonable to weigh passengers?

“Definitely not,” said Vance Hilderman, CEO of the aviation safety company Afuzion.

At least not for the purpose of safety, he said.

“If you’re at a small Bombardier, a small Embraer jet, and we had 10 very obese people … it could make a small difference,” he said. “On commercial aircraft, anything from a 737 and above you know, 120 people, we have it built in.”

Aviation software can adjust for weight changes, air density and other factors, which is why safety isn’t compromised even in situations where passenger makeup is atypical, such as an early morning flight of mostly businessmen, who tend to weigh more than the average traveler, he said.

Overall, a significant weight increase per passenger would be eclipsed by the weight of fuel, cargo and the aircraft itself, said Hilderman. “Fuel is 20 times more than the passenger weight,” he said.

Rather than focusing on passenger weight, it’s more important to adjust for additional cargo and the number of passengers on board, said Afuzion CEO Vance Hilderman.

Casanowe | Istock | Getty Images

But Shem Malmquist, an instructor at Florida Tech’s College of Aeronautics, said random weight samples are a good idea.

“We use average weights of passengers, but people are getting a lot heavier,” he said. “Three hundred people that weigh more than average can put an airplane significantly over weight, and all of our performance calculations — runway length, climb, obstacle clearance, landing distances, altitude capabilities — all are dependent on weight, among other things.”

Hilderman agrees that people are getting bigger, but he said passengers now differ in other ways too.

“Americans are getting heavier. So are Chinese, so are Koreans,” he said. “But we’re also flying younger … so it’s actually offset the average human’s weight increase.”

A study published in 2019 in the Journal of Transport & Health found that regions with higher obesity prevalence “may begin to see significantly compromised safety margins if increasing weight trends continue.”

Jose Silva, an associate professor at Australia’s RMIT University’s School of Engineering and one of the study’s authors, told CNBC that he thinks airlines are reluctant to weigh passengers due to the sensitive nature of the topic.

“There is also a lack of understanding of the safety gains which could be obtained if there were more accurate means to ascertain the passengers’ weight, instead of relying on standards,” he said.

A whistleblower complaint filed in 2021 alleges that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has failed to recognize safety issues caused by relying on average passenger or baggage weights that no longer reflect the U.S. population.

Where airlines weigh passengers

Air New Zealand weighed passengers in June for reasons, it said, related to safety and fuel efficiency.

Finnair did the same in 2017, and Hawaiian Air has conducted multiple passenger weight exercises on flights between Honolulu and American Samoa. (The now defunct Samoa Air used to charge passengers by their weight, according to Reuters.)

Flyers in the United States likely won’t be weighed, said Hilderman, even though an FAA advisory circular published in 2019 stated that airlines can weigh passengers.

It’s a different story in Europe, where carriers follow European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) regulations.

American airlines follow regulations set forth by the International Civil Aviation Organization, which does not require that passengers be weighed, said Hilderman.

Simon2579 | E+ | Getty Images

EASA weighed nearly 23,000 passengers in 2008 and 2009 and found that average passenger weight had increased by 3 to 5 kilograms (6.6 to 11 pounds). A subsequent report published in 2022 found that mean passenger weight increased slightly since 2009, for an average of 82 kg (181 pounds) for men and 68 kg (149 pounds) for women.

Periodic weight assessments — of passengers and other items on board — can help airlines determine if weight estimates are still accurate to offset the amount of cargo they carry, said Hilderman.

But “there’s a little more to this mystery,” he added.

“In Europe, they’re a little more rigorous about individual rights with privacy,” he said. “With EASA, they want to protect the passengers and say: Look, the passengers are getting larger, so airlines, we want you to provide a minimum pitch distance on your seats.”

Commercial airline seating is based on average passenger weight from the 1950s to 1970s, Hilderman said. Since then, people have gotten bigger, but airline seats have dwindled, he said — “29 inches in some cases, it’s absolutely ridiculous.”

A hot-button topic

Passenger size on planes is a controversial topic — with oversized flyers lodging discrimination allegations over Lilliputian plane aisles and seat sizes, and smaller travelers publicly venting about seat encroachment.

But unlike other industries that service heavy people — from makers of chairs to toilets to amusement park rides — the airline industry hasn’t enlarged seats.

“Some have proposed that obese passengers be required to pay for two seats in order to not make other passengers uncomfortable, but that lets the airlines escape any responsibility,” said Nick Gausling, a consumer services business consultant and managing director of Romy Group LLC.

Gausling noted that while other industries have been pressured to prioritize customer experience, “consumers have very little choice to take their business elsewhere” when it comes to airlines.

Tigress Osborn, the executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, told CNBC that most major airlines have responded with three options for overweight travelers: pay for pricier tickets that come with bigger seats, purchase a second seat, or stay home.

“Fat people deserve to travel for pleasure just like everyone else, and we also need to remember that air travel is for work, for family obligations, and for other responsibilities, too,” she said. “Our taxes help support this industry, and we deserve to be accommodated safely and comfortably, with access to accessible seating at all price levels.”

Ideas to help larger passengers

Hilderman said airlines can sell second seats to plus-size travelers at a heavily discounted rate.

As people have gotten bigger, airline seats have gotten smaller, which has led to frequent complaints from air travelers of all sizes.

Jodi Jacobson | Istock | Getty Images

Or they can reserve half a dozen seats for larger people, which passengers could privately register for online, using height and weight details from their driver’s licenses, he said.

Those seats could be sold at a small surcharge, and if not booked by qualified passengers the week before the flight, released to anyone willing to pay for them, he added.

Any hope for wider seats?

As to whether airlines will increase seat sizes for everyone, Hilderman said that while it’s mathematically possible, it’s not practical.

“Fuselage diameters have been predetermined,” he said, referencing the main body of the aircraft. “We currently have 29,000 commercial aircraft flying, and we only make about 1,500 per year, so it would take 20 years to replace the entire fleet.”

Refitting planes with wider seats means narrowing the aisle, which is already a tight squeeze, he said. To widen the aisle, one seat from every row would need to be removed, resulting in a 20-25% ticket price increase across the board, he said.

“Most people don’t look at what kind of aircraft they’re flying, and they have no idea what the seat pitch or width is,” said Hilderman. “They’re simply buying on price — and the airlines know that.”

Arnold Barnett, a management science and statistics professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told CNBC that most flyers are willing to endure current seat sizes in return for lower fares.

If seating changed, “airfares would have to go up, and flying would become unaffordable to passengers on limited budgets.”

For many, a tight airline seat is better than a seat on a bus, he said.

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August 27, 2023