Senator Tim Scott at Microsoft

Tim Scott is the junior Senator for South Carolina. He was appointed as senator in 2013 after South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley named him to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint.  Scott ran in a special election in 2014 for the final two years of DeMint's second term, and won the seat.  He now running for his first full Senate terms in 2016. 

In November 2010, Scott was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for South Carolina's 1st congressional district, and served from 2011 to 2013. Scott, a fiscal and cultural conservative, was endorsed for the Senate by Tea Party groups (DeMInt’s Senate Conservative Fund).  He served one term in the South Carolina General Assembly (2009–2011); prior to that, he had been on the Charleston County Council from 1996 to 2008.

Scott is one of two African Americans serving in the Senate. He is the first African-American senator from the state of South Carolina, the first black Republican elected to the Senate since the defeat of Edward Brooke in 1979, and the first elected from the South since 1881, four years after the end of Reconstruction. Due to long decades of disenfranchisement for African Americans in the South, he is the first Republican African American Congressman from South Carolina since 1897 and since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He is also the first African American to have been elected to both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Scott serves on the Small Business Committee, Energy & Natural Resources Committee, the Commerce Science & Transportation Committee and the Special Committee on Aging.

He is unmarried and owns his own insurance agency.  

Opportunity Agenda: Senator Scott’s “Opportunity Agenda” has been his primary focus since being elected to Congress.  The Agenda is founded on the principle that all Americans should have the ‘opportunity’ to succeed.  He fundamentally believes people want to work, they want to get ahead and provide a better life for their families.  He has introduced four bills as part of the agenda: (1) The SKILLS Act – focuses on delivering technology job training skills; (2) The CHOICE Act – seeks to expand educational opportunities for individuals and communities by making federal IDEA dollars portable; (3) the Southern Energy Access Jobs Act or SEA Act focuses on expanding off-shore energy production; and (4) the Leveraging and Energizing America’s Apprenticeship Program or LEAP Act which provides tax credits to employers to help increase the number of registered apprenticeships.