Updated 12:27 a.m. - South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) appointed Rep. Tim Scott on Monday to fill Jim DeMint's Senate seat at a press conference in the Palmetto State.

Flanked by the other Republican members of the state's congressional delegation, Haley named Scott as the state's next senator to follow DeMint when he resigns next month to take over the top position at the Heritage Foundation.

Scott said he was thankful for the opportunity, and opened his remarks with a moment of silence for the victims of the Newtown, Conn. shooting last week. And he sounded a decidedly conservative tone. 

"We have a spending problem, ladies and gentlemen, in America. Not a revenue problem," he said.

Scott will become the first African American from the South to serve in the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction -- and the only African-American senator to serve in the upcoming 113th Congress.

The rest of the South Carolina House delegation – a particularly close-knit group, was asked to attend today’s announcement at the South Carolina statehouse, according to several South Carolina House Republican sources. 

Rep. Trey Gowdy,  one of the five people on Haley’s short list for the Senate seat, said she called him Sunday night to inform him of her decision.

Gowdy, who said he thanked the governor for “making the right decision” in picking Scott, said she was “very gracious” on the call and said she would like him to be at the event.

“I told her that I would the only way I would not be there is if she specifically asked me not to come,” Gowdy said, reached by phone as he was driving from Spartanburg to Columbia for the announcement.

Scott was elected to Congress in 2010, and he represents much of the South Carolina coastline from Charleston to Myrtle Beach. He'll face a special election in November of 2014 to serve out the remainder of DeMint's term.

"I have no doubt that he will fly through 2014," Haley said.

A former state representative, Scott was first elected to Congress during the Republican wave of 2010. He beat out the son of former S.C. Sen. Strom Thurmond in a contested primary thanks to a mixture of establishment and Tea Party support. 
Scott, who is 47-years-old, was tagged for stardom in the GOP just weeks after he was elected to his first term. He was one of two House freshman elected to newly-created positions in the House Republican leadership shortly after the GOP retook the House in 2010. 

A favorite of the Tea Party, Scott's personal story is a remarkable one: While working at Chick-Fil-A, he met a movie theater manager who took him under his wing and taught him the values of conservatism and hard work. Long a poor student, Scott turned his life around and ended up getting elected to the South Carolina State House and then Congress.

Scott is a deeply religious Christian and is unmarried.

With Scott's appointment, South Carolina will be the only state in the union with two senators who are unmarried.

NBC's Ali Weinberg and Michael O'Brien contributed reporting.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) today said she would not fill Sen. Jim DeMint's Senate seat with a temporary "placeholder" appointment.

"I believe South Carolina will be best served by a U.S. senator who will work hard day in and day out, and put him or herself before the voters at the soonest possible time," Haley said in a statement. "Accordingly, I reject the option of a 'placeholder.'"

Given that the appointment is set to fill the seat until 2014 -- when a special election takes place -- the governor had the option of selecting someone who would hold the seat through '14, but wouldn't run for the position in the special election.

But she dismissed that option today.

Also, Haley is set to hold a press conference in North Charleston tomorrow at noon ET, but according to NBC's Ali Weinberg, she isn't expected to announce her appointment at the event.

In his drop-out speech Wednesday, Newt Gingrich singled out one of the two primary states he won: South Carolina, whose 30-year streak of picking the eventual nominee Gingrich acknowledged he had officially ended.

“I have to thank the voters of South Carolina, and I have to apologize to them,” Gingrich said. “We will have broken their tradition of always picking the nominee. This will make me feel slightly guilty every time we go through South Carolina.”

But Palmetto State experts insist that the first-in-the-south primary state’s importance as an early presidential bellwether remains unchanged – even if the current Republican Party slogan -- “We Pick Presidents” -- is no longer completely accurate.

“Think of it as, if you’re a marketing director for a product, and you have all these slogans to sell your product,” Winthrop University political science professor Scott Huffmon pointed out. “You’ll drop that from your advertising but you’ll still stress everything else.”

He noted that South Carolina would remain the first test of candidates’ strength in the delegate-rich South.

“At last count we have something like 160 Electoral College votes, and you need 270 to win,” Huffmon said. “If you can find a Republican who can appeal to the entire South, and they’ve got almost 60 percent of all the Electoral College votes that they need to become president.”

South Carolina can still sell its primary, Huffmon added, as the place “where the presidential mettle gets tested… where you have to face the first fiery brands of Southern conservatism and see if candidates can stand up.”

State Republican Party Chairman Chad Connelly also said he didn’t think the state’s reputation would suffer as a result of its picking a candidate other than the party nominee.

“We might not have our same branding motto or whatever, but the fact that we’re an important part of the process, that hasn’t changed a bit,” Connelly said, noting that the state’s small size and relatively inexpensive media markets allow campaigns with varying amounts of resources to be competitive – something he suggested strengthens the eventual nominee.

“I think Gov. Romney will tell you that he’s a better candidate, he’s a better debater, he’s better with the people than he was before because of this whole process,” Connelly said. Romney lost South Carolina 40-28 percent to Gingrich. 

Connelly stressed that he’s not considering changing the state party’s motto any time soon, focusing more on raising money to send South Carolina volunteers to other swing states to help with Republican get-out-the-vote efforts.

And as far as Gingrich’s apology to the voters of South Carolina, at least one of his supporters says there are no hard feelings.

“He owes no one an apology,” said Allen Olsen, a former Columbia Tea Party leader and one of Gingrich’s earliest proponents in the state. “He just got beat, and I don’t think he owes South Carolina an apology. I’m just proud to support him.”

But, Olsen added, now that Romney has prevailed, he said he wished Gingrich “hadn’t come off sounding like a sore loser” in his speech Wednesday.

“I wish he would have come off and endorsed Romney and offered to work with Romney more,” Olsen said.

NBC News projects that Newt Gingrich will win the SC Republican primary.

That makes history. Never before have there been three different winners of IA, NH, and SC on the Republican side.

MYRTLE BEACH, SC -- With just five days to go before the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich is taking a much harsher tone against a couple of his GOP rivals while raising the question of electability.

“Why would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama?” Gingrich asked the crowd at Rioz Brazilian Steakhouse – a direct jab at Mitt Romney, who lost the 2008 nomination battle to John McCain.

Attacks on Romney by the former House Speaker have been ramping up over the past few days -- after Romney was able to diminish Gingrich’s campaign in Iowa -- but Monday afternoon, Gingrich threw another presidential candidate in the mix.

“If you vote for Senator [Rick] Santorum, in effect you’re functionally voting for Governor Romney to be the nominee because he’s not going to beat him,” Gingrich told the roughly 200-person crowd. “The only way you can stop governor Romney for all practical purposes is to vote for Newt Gingrich.  That’s just a fact.  It’s a mathematical fact now and I think that’ll be a key decision point for conservatives in South Carolina for the next four or five days and I expect it’ll be very intensely discussed.”

But the Speaker’s attack on the former Senator from Pennsylvania did not end there.

“I think evangelical voters would like to defeat Barack Obama and evangelical voters would like to have a nominee who knows how to win a general election.,” Gingrich said. “And somebody who set the all time Pennsylvania record for the size of their defeat has a harder case to make as to why they could be elected.”

The Speaker is staking his campaign here in the Palmetto State after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucus and fifth in the New Hampshire primary. Romney is leading in the state but with Jon Huntsman’s exit from the race, Gingrich says, “now we are into the real game.”

“As the number of competitors keeps shrinking, it will become more and more obvious and we will have clearer and clearer differentiation,” the Speaker said. “If the conservatives decide to consolidate, we can clearly defeat Romney by a substantial margin.”

Tonight the five remaining candidates will debate here in the Coastal Region of South Carolina.

COLUMBIA, SC –- John Rainey, a businessman here who has helped Republican candidates raise millions of dollars in previous election cycles, reminisced about John McCain asking him to join in some serious retail politics during the 2008 presidential primary.

“I was traveling with the senator and his mother. And I would introduce his mother, and his mother would introduce the senator. It was the old-fashioned way!” Rainey recalled. “It was really fun. We had a bus, and we’d go somewhere and it’d be 25 people.”

McCain flaunted the support of Rainey and his campaign’s other South Carolina campaign “bundlers,” who raise money for candidates through their business connections, to show his strength among members of the state’s well-connected business community, as well as his campaign’s fundraising prowess.

But four years later -- and after the rise of super PACs (groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from individuals and corporations) -- the role of the bundler has been marginalized. Unlike Super PACs, bundlers are able to use their connections to raise the maximum of $2,500 per individual in a primary election.

For Rainey, that translates into fewer calls from campaigns asking for fundraising help.

“We haven’t been doing anything. I have not raised one dime,” he said. “It’s been more than one campaign who said, 'We really don’t’ need y’all to raise money in South Carolina.'"

And Rainey’s network of friends and colleagues, who coalesced so quickly first around George W. Bush in 2000 and then McCain in 2008, is supporting a disparate group of candidates, meaning whatever monetary heft they could provide is being broken up.

But as Saturday’s primary nears with the field no less fractionalized, this group of South Carolina business leaders decided to invite candidates to speak with them, in the hopes of eventually landing on one candidate to collectively support.

“Clearly electability is a key concern for this group who’s continued to gather,” said Terry Brown, the CEO of Edens, a retail developer whose Columbia offices played host last week to Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who addressed a boardroom full of 10 to 15 business leaders looking to coalesce around one candidate. A meeting with Jon Huntsman was scheduled for 2 pm Tuesday before he dropped out Sunday, and the group is also working with Mitt Romney’s aides to schedule a session.

Some of the business leaders have already endorsed candidates. Rainey was in Huntsman’s corner; Brown endorsed Romney, and Eddie Floyd, a surgeon and prominent bundler who is also part of the informal group, had thrown his support to Rick Perry.

But Floyd said they were united in one objective: unseating President Obama. And he suggested that he and other members of the group who have already endorsed candidates might change their mind if another candidate was determined to have the best general election prospects.

“We need to get somebody that can win,” Floyd said.

Rainey said one of the reasons he and his friends had not fallen in line behind one candidate sooner was because none of the candidates this cycle instill the same excitement in them as have presidential hopefuls in previous years.

“There’s not anybody among my peers that’s passionate about anybody. The only thing anybody is passionate about is the idea and the objective of taking the White House,” he added.

Rainey expressed doubt, however, that the group could rally behind one candidate this soon before the primary, and said he would be looking towards Monday night’s debate in Myrtle Beach for prompts as to whom to support.

“Monday night’s going to be it. Somebody’s going to have to come through with a deal breaker or a deal maker -- say something that causes a paradigm shift where all of a sudden there’s a reason to coalesce behind one or two candidates. Hopefully one candidate,” he said.

And while it may be too late for the support of the bundlers to have any real effect in the primary, Brown says their main impact could come in supporting the eventual nominee.

“With these sessions, there’s some hope that the business communities will have to help fund some of the campaigns into the general election,” he said.

Yet given his concerns about being edged out of the fundraising game by Super PACs, Rainey said he wasn’t sure how much the endorsement of a handful of businessmen in South Carolina would matter this time around.

“Maybe we send out a letter, something like that,” he said, thinking aloud about how to help the candidate after the group has made a decision. “We’ll have coverage of some kind of announcement. But other than that, there’s not much else we can do. We can lend our name if that particular candidate -- assuming we can agree -- wants us to. I’m sure any one of us would be willing to do whatever their candidate wanted us to do.”

CHARLESTON, S.C. – The audience at a presidential forum here Saturday booed Newt Gingrich for criticizing Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital after Mike Huckabee, the host, told the crowd that candidates would not be allowed to attack each other.

Before the five candidates (Ron Paul was not there) came out one by one for approximately 12 minutes of audience questions, Huckabee explained that they were “not to mention, and not to attack the other candidates.” (The audience, prompted at first by the Huckabee show’s executive producer, clapped and cheered at the directive.)

Gingrich, the third candidate to speak, responded to question about how he could “defend the vilification of companies that are willing to put capital at risk in order to save failing companies” -- a reference to attacks by Gingrich and his super PAC over Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.

Pushing back on the claim of “vilification,” Gingrich said, “I haven’t done that.”

He began to say he would be visiting the city of Georgetown, which used to be home to a steel mill whose parent company was bought out by Bain in 1993 and went bankrupt in 2001 with more than $500 million in debt according to a Myrtle Beach Sun News account.

“Georgetown has a steel mill. Which was closed. Capital wasn’t put at risk; capital was drained out of that company,” Gingrich said. “Governor Romney ran saying he created 100 thousand jobs in the private sector…”

The audience started booing Gingrich after he said, “Governor Romney.”

Huckabee interrupted Gingrich, saying, “Mr. Speaker, we said we will not allow negative…”

Then Gingrich, retooling, continued, “I’m just trying to answer his question. So let me say it differently.”

“OK,” Huckabee replied.

“I believe that it’s fair to ask the records be clear and that people reveal what happened,” Gingrich said. “But I think to ask questions about a particular company is not the same as attacking capitalism and I don’t see how you can expect us to have a presidential campaign in which an entire sector is avoided."

Several audience members at the forum told NBC News they were displeased at Gingrich’s singling Romney out.

“I think Gingrich lost my respect,” said Janice Shumpert, 57, of West Ashley, who said she was leaning towards Rick Santorum. “It was a bad moment for him. I’m not saying he can’t recover but at this point, I wouldn’t vote for him”

Randy Hinson, 56, of Charleston, said the booing was “appropriate” because “that wasn’t the format.”

“Gingrich actually ruled himself out today for me,” Hinson said. “I guess Romney was at the top for me; I wanted Gingrich, and Gingrich kind of talked himself out of it today.”

Pat Neumann, 58, of Edisto Island, who said she favored Perry, noted the enthusiastic response Huckabee received when he said the forum was to be devoid of negativity.

“We weren’t going to put up with that,” she said of candidate-on-candidate aggression. “It’s going to happen because unfortunately negative campaigning works, and they know it. But people just weren’t going to put up with it today.”

HILTON HEAD, S.C. --  Appearing on stage with Mitt Romney for the first time since endorsing him for president, former UN Ambassador John Bolton on Friday night unleashed a scathing indictment of President Barack Obama, whom he said "doesn't care" about national security in the same way other presidents had before him.

"He’s not only the most radical president in history domestically, he is the first president, Republican or Democrat, at least since Franklin Roosevelt, who didn’t get up every morning thinking first about what threats the United States faces," Bolton said. "He just doesn’t care about national security the way other presidents did. He’s much more interested in moving us toward a social Democratic health care system, a social Democratic automobile manufacturing system, a social Democratic environment, you get the picture." 

Romney campaign officials did not immediately respond when asked if the former Massachusetts governor agreed with that assessment.

Bolton also trivialized the biggest national security event to have taken place during Obama's administration, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last May, saying Obama did not deserve credit for the successful mission.

"You know the irony is he’s campaigning on the basis that he’s a success as a foreign policy president," Bolton said. "It’s just really amazing and you ask, What is it that made the success? And it’s because Navy SEAL Team Six killed Osama bin Laden. That’s his definition of success. As somebody pointed out, in 1969 when Americans landed on the moon, it’s like Richard Nixon taking for credit for that, because it happened to occur during his presidency."

Romney himself told Fox News in December that "any president" would have signed the order to take out bin Laden, a statement he later expanded upon in an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, giving Obama some credit for being the person to ultimately have done so.

"I give credit to this president for actually having made the decision. I don't think it's unusual on the part of this president to have finally taken out Osama bin laden," Romney said. "After all, we had been looking for him for some time. Intelligence finally gave him a good indication of where he was. He gave the order. I do think prior presidents would have done the same thing had they been in the same position."

At Romney's campaign event here tonight, a forum for veterans, with a national security focus, Bolton also said Obama was a "failure across the board" on foreign policy and had hurt America's interests abroad, along with those of our allies.

"This president has done almost everything possible to weaken the United States, to jeopardize our interests and our friends around the world," Bolton said.

Bolton is a controversial former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and undersecretary of state for arms control under George W. Bush. He had been back in the news recently after former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in December that, if elected president, he would ask the prominent neoconservative to be his secretary of state. 

But Bolton endorsed Romney on Wednesday night, an event a senior Romney adviser told NBC News that the campaign hoped would be a signal to undecided Republicans that Romney was the strongest candidate in the field on the subject of foreign policy. Friday night, in explaining his decision to endorse, Bolton praised Romney as the "one person in the race today" whom voters could count on to protect the American people. 

ANDERSON, S.C. –- Seeking to help her husband revive his presidential campaign after a fifth-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, Anita Perry recalled the peak of enthusiasm for Rick Perry's campaign as she addressed a local Republican club.

“If some of you were thinking about Rick Perry when we were here in August, I hope you're still thinking about him,” Anita Perry said, referring to Perry’s presidential announcement on Aug. 13 in Charleston. 

“If not, I hope you will go back and visit his record of cutting spending, reducing taxes, and helping build the nation’s strongest economy in Texas,” she told a group of about 50 members of the Anderson County First Monday Club, meeting at a Chinese restaurant here.

Perry told the group that she and her husband had not taken the decision lightly to jump into the presidential race, adding that he still had her full support. “If I didn’t think my husband was the right man with the right record to lead this country, we would have stayed in Texas,” she said.

She took a veiled jab at her husband’s opponents, drawing an implicit contrast between what she called his political consistency -- both on the trail and in office. “With Rick Perry, you don’t have to wonder whether as president you’re going to get the same person you saw as a candidate,” she said.

Speaking with NBC News after her speech, Perry denied that her husband ever considered suspending his presidential campaign after Iowa, despite his late-night announcement on caucus night that he was returning to Austin to “reassess” the campaign.

“We were never going to suspend the campaign. We always said we were going to reassess, and we did and it took us no time at all and we’re happy to be here in South Carolina,” she said. “We are not quitters.”

While her husband continues his bus tour through the state, Anita Perry will visit with the York County Federation of Republican Women tonight in Rock Hill.

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- What if there was a debate but nobody watched it because they were in church?

That seemed to be the case for some in this heavily evangelical, voter-rich region, who skipped the Sunday morning NBC/Facebook debate –- the last chance to see candidates on stage together before the New Hampshire vote –- because they were attending services.

Shopping at a Greenville mall Sunday afternoon, Lisa Eickholt, a 51-year-old adult education professional from Pickens County (which had 26.39% turnout in the 2008 primary, the second-highest in the state), said she and her husband Jeff were getting ready for the 10:30 am service at Five Point Church in Easley when the debate was on.

And in a state where football, too, is a religion, the Eickholts missed the ABC debate the night before.

“Football was on!” Eickholt said simply when asked if she watched the Saturday debate.

The Eickholts said they were both leaning towards Mitt Romney, though they still had not made up their minds completely. “He’s not the most conservative, but probably the one who the independents would probably vote for too so he would be more likely to get the nomination,” Lisa Eickholt said.

Don Phillips, a 57-year-old support program manager from Greer, was attending the 9:40 a.m. service at First Presbyterian Greenville with his wife during the debate. He said, however, that he’s largely tuned out the candidates’ sparring matches.

“Quite frankly, I don’t care to watch Republicans tear themselves apart. They’re just absolutely making ammunition for the opposite party.”

His wife Sharon agreed. “If all they can show me is ‘I can pick on the boy next to me more than you can pick on the boy next to me,’ then they’re not electable.”

Both Don and Sharon Phillips also said they had landed on Mitt Romney as their likeliest pick, although Don said he felt “appalled” with the Republican field overall.

“I feel like out of a nation of 300 million, and let’s say 50% of them are Republican, this is the best we can come up with? It’s amazing.”

Neither of the Phillips said that Romney’s Mormonism was an issue for them, despite the fact that he fared poorly among evangelical voters (many of them concentrated in the Upstate) in 2008.

“I would guarantee you 90% of the folks in South Carolina know zip about what Mormonism is. I believe they need to be more informed before they start tearing one another down. Jesus would not do that,” Don Phillips said. “Don’t do it and profess it and sit your butt in a pew in the church and say you’re a Baptist or a Catholic or whatever, and tear him down for his religion.”

Hoyt Dorn, a 52-year old employee at the American Cancer Society, was at the Reedy Grove Pentecostal church in Waterloo during the debate, but he too said he had largely given up on watching them.

“I think we’ve started the process way too early. I think there’s a lot of wasted time, energy and funds that could be used otherwise,” Dorn said.

A one-time Rick Perry fan who was now leaning towards Rick Santorum, Dorn also said that Romney’s Mormon faith was not an issue for him. “I take a person on face value. I don’t look at their background unless I felt it would be totally detrimental to what we’re trying to accomplish as a country,” he said.

But one disqualifier for him, he added, was a candidate’s focus on attacking his opponents, and he proposed a unique way to deal with negativity during debates.

“The first one that starts the so-called mudslinging, they’re dropped,” he suggested.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Citing his own "peace with God," Rick Perry says he's pressing forward with his battered presidential campaign because he will not "quit on the future of America."

"I've never quit a day in my life. I've never quit in the face of adversity," Perry told over 100 South Carolinians at the famed Beacon Drive-In in Spartanburg. "And I'm not just about to quit  on the future of America. I am going to stay in this race and stay in this fight because our children and our country are worth the fight."

Perry, who suffered a disappointing 5th place finish in the Iowa caucuses and appeared on the verge of dropping out last week, said that he was encouraged to stay in the race by endorser Capt. Dan Moran, a Marine who endured over 30 surgeries after surviving an IED attack in Iraq.

"He said, 'Sir, I didn't get these scars on my face to quit,'" Perry said of Moran. "That's our challenge. That we're not quitting on America. We're not quitting on this race."

The Texas governor said that his faith - which he emphasized frequently during his first stop of a long swing through the state - has guided him through the difficult days of the campaign.

"When you find that peace from God, you stop worrying about what the critics say," Perry said. "Matter of fact, you quit reading the headlines, good ones or bad ones, because they don't matter."

"I've got all the people that love me that I need. Her, (his wife) Jesus. and my family," he added during his pitch as an enemy of Washington. "I'm not going to Washington DC to make a friend."

Team Perry's last best hope lies in the Palmetto State, where they hope he can reconnect with Tea Party and evangelical voters skeptical of frontrunner Mitt Romney.

On Sunday, he painted South Carolina as a prime enemy of the Obama administration, which has recently clashed with the state government over voting and business regulations.

"There are some other states that are under assault," he said. "South Carolina, they're going to war with y'all."

Perry added that he would do away entirely with the National Labor Relations Board, a federal body particularly reviled by conservatives in the state due to its conflicts with Boeing manufacturers over labor laws.

At the famed campaign hotspot, Perry ordered a "chili cheese a'plenty" and sweet tea to go, but he renamed the heart-unhealthy concoction with a more personalized title.

"Having a Chili Cheese Delight Extra ...Governor!" he declared of his meal.

CHESTER, S.C. -- Newt Gingrich’s daughter, Jackie Cushman, said today she thinks her father would have fared better in the Iowa caucuses if there had been a presidential debate in the days leading up to the vote.

Speaking to about 40 Republicans here in the picturesque upstate town of Chester, Cushman said Gingrich’s fourth-place finish in Iowa wasn’t what they had hoped for originally, but they had gradually come to expect that result because of all the negative ads hitting Gingrich there.

“The other reason Dad’s numbers weren’t quite as good is because the last debates were a few weeks ago, and the debates remind us -- when all of the candidates are up on the same stage, and they’re next to each other providing their vision of America’s future -- they provide a very clear contrast to the voters."

Cushman added that voters would have a chance to see her father in his element once again, in two back-to-back debates in New Hampshire this weekend.

When asked later by NBC News about her belief that debates would have given her father a boost in the polls, Cushman said: “Absolutely. I have no doubt in my mind.”

Cushman also said that the campaign’s internal polling had shown Gingrich on the rise right before the caucuses, so that part of his low showing was due to bad timing.

When asked how her father would weather the onslaught of negative ads in South Carolina, Cushman said he plans on handling it “differently."

"He’s already begun to draw a clearer contrast between what he would bring to the table and other candidates, and I think you’ll continue to see that along the campaign trail.”

The appearance in Chester had special significance for Cushman, whose father-in-law is from the small town. At the end of the event, a man approached Cushman to tell her that he was her father-in-law’s roommate at Clemson University.