There are caveats to this happy theme. The victor, 44-year-old Tim Scott, is, if anything, more conservative than the 34-year-old Thurmond. Backed by Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and the conservative Club for Growth, he calls President Obama a socialist and describes himself as coming from “the far, conservative right.” Scott, who had been embraced by white voters for years at the county and state levels (he even co-chaired Strom Thurmond’s Senate reelection campaign in 1996), is a racial outlier…

Just maybe this also shows us something hopeful about the Tea Party movement. I’ve seen with my own eyes the racism at Tea Party tax protests and rallies against health-care reform: the racist signs about Obama, the “Joker” image of Obama in whiteface, the taunting of black lawmakers and the “birther” slander.

But the vote in South Carolina’s 1st District suggests that the clowns who hijack the Tea Party demonstrations do not speak for the conservative movement. It is, admittedly, a small sample — only 14 percent of eligible 1st District voters, or about 70,000, showed up for Tuesday’s runoff contest. But the repudiation of Thurmond was unmistakable: He got 32 percent to Scott’s 68 percent.