COLUMBIA, S.C. — The biggest winner of the Republican primary season so far, besides Donald Trump, might be Tim Scott.
The South Carolina senator failed in his own bid for president. But his enthusiastic campaigning for the former president has been generating buzz about Scott’s prospects as Trump’s potential pick for a running mate.
Scott played a starring role in his home state’s Feb. 24 primary election, hyping the crowd about Trump at rallies and in interviews. During a Fox News town hall, Trump, who rarely likes to share the spotlight, taped a segment in which he and Scott appeared together on stage in matching red ties, a visual that made them look like they were already a ticket.
“A lot of people are talking about that gentleman right over there,” Trump told the audience earlier in the program when asked who was on his vice presidential shortlist, pointing to Scott, who was sitting in the front row, smiling wide.
Trump’s march to the Republican nomination has brought forward a slew of vice presidential hopefuls. Some have been openly jockeying for the spot for more than a year now, flying themselves to Trump’s rallies and campaigning for him across early-voting states. If Trump wins the White House, he will be constitutionally ineligible to run again, making his vice president a nearly automatic front-runner in 2028.
But any potential contender to join Trump must consider the political fate of his last running mate, former Vice President Mike Pence. He became a pariah among many Trump supporters for refusing to go along with Trump’s debunked voter fraud theories and for trying to stop the certification of the 2020 election that Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Scott, 58, has refused to talk about whether he would have acted differently during the Jan. 6 insurrection and sidestepped questions about the vice president’s role in elections. Scott voted in favor of certifying the 2020 results and said during a presidential debate last year that Pence had…
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