Sen. Tim Scott, South Carolina's first elected African American Republican senator, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that race was not the reason voters were sending him to Washington.
"South Carolina voters vote their values and their issues and not my complexion. This is a great sign for what's happening throughout the South. But, certainly, a fantastic sign for the evolution that has occurred in South Carolina," Scott, a Republican, said Thursday.
Story continues below video.
Scott was appointed in 2013 to fill the Senate seat left when former Republican Sen. Jim DeMint retired. He said his legislative priority was to create a "foundation of education" to open opportunities for middle income and poor families to have choices about where they sent their children to school, perhaps like the charter school system in Louisiana.
"I'd love to give parents the tool of choice. When parents have choice in education, I think their kids have a better chance of success. Had it not been for education, I would not be sitting here today," he said.
People who were "sandwiched," taking care of their parents and their children, were of particular concern, Scott said, because they needed "access to a better education system that sometimes they cannot afford."
Democratic social programs had not worked well for minorities, Scott suggested, since the poverty level rose from "11 percent to 15 percent" since the 1970s. He said progress had to be made, but that "the government is not the answer for progress."
"All the social programs that we've had. We have the largest government we've ever had in the history of the country. We have more nonprofit organizations working on the same issue. And, yet we have higher percentage of people living in poverty," he said.
Scott said the key to lifting people out of poverty was to fuse "individual freedom and economic opportunity," with an agenda that "focuses on education." He said he wanted all children to have access to programs like the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship that "produced (a) higher percentage of kids going to college."
"It's produced 91 percent of the kids graduating from high school versus 56 percent for those who are simply in everyday schools in D.C. I want that to be the case for every child," he said.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.