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SC Republican Sen. Tim Scott is officially running for president

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., gives remarks at his presidential campaign announcement event at Charleston Southern University on Monday in North Charleston, S.C.
Meg Kinnard
/
AP
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., gives remarks at his presidential campaign announcement event at Charleston Southern University on Monday in North Charleston, S.C.

South CarolinaSen. Tim Scott announced his run for the Republican presidential nomination Monday morning in North Charleston, S.C.

Scott made his run official with this statement from a stage at Charleston Southern University, his alma mater: "I'm announcing today I'm running for president of the United States of America."

The senator, who has represented South Carolina in the Senate since 2013, highlighted his own rise from poverty to prosperity and said that America is not a racist country. Scott is the only Black Republican senator in the U.S. Senate.

Scott is the second South Carolina Republican to enter the race for the GOP nomination. Right now, he takes on a frontrunner in former President Donald Trump. He also joins former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Haley originally appointed him to the Senate to fill a vacancy. South Carolina is a pivotal early voting state for both Republicans and Democrats.

Scott has been endorsed by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the second-ranking Republican in the Senate.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.