Warning: The dirty tricks are about to start

In the run-up to their big presidential campaign moments, the big media players in Iowa and New Hampshire gave voters a useful online feature, an interactive calendar that let them track where candidates were appearing in person.

Down in South Carolina, it’s different. The interactive site du jour launched last week is the Charleston Post and Courier’s ‘Whisper Campaign”—a digital tool that begs the public to help keep tabs on the coming blizzard of dirty tricks.

As the White House hopefuls descend on South Carolina, site of the crucial Feb. 20 GOP primary and then the Democratic contest a week later, they’re also heading straight into what might be the seamiest underbelly of American politics. This is a state famous for telephone pollsters implying John McCain had an illegitimate child, and the bogus Mitt Romney Christmas card with controversial quotes from the Book of Mormon. Fliers dropped on South Carolina doorsteps have told people the wrong date to vote; this is where political rivals have bantered openly with racial slurs and innuendo about sexual trysts.

The state has earned its reputation the hard way: It’s where the late GOP operative Lee Atwater was born, the man who made negative campaigning into an art form in the 1988 race, starting with his home state. While Iowa and New Hampshire tend to get a year’s worth of up close and personal attention from the presidential field, South Carolinians usually experience the race in a quick burst of attention once the national spotlight shifts their way, forcing the campaigns into the quickest, often nastiest tactics they can think of to shape the race. And with a larger and far more diverse electorate than the first two states, there are more people with sensitivities to exploit.

“South Carolina on the Republican side is a viper’s nest,” said Neil Sroka, the head of Barack Obama’s digital team in the state during his 2008 campaign.

While the entire slate of candidates is susceptible to attacks from left field, one name running in 2016 repeatedly rises to the top as the most likely to face the kinds of dirty tricks South Carolina is known for: Donald Trump. The real estate mogul has so far weathered months of media scrutiny and survived a seemingly endless run of political obituaries based on the words that have come directly out of his mouth. But for a desperate field of rival Republicans now serious about blocking him from being their nominee, the intense days leading up to the GOP primary represent the last, best chance to come up with a smear that sticks.

“No one has talked about the three marriages yet. No one has talked about the casinos. I suspect we’ll see that come Monday,” said Katon Dawson, a longtime GOP operative in South Carolina. “Someone has to take the bark off of him or he’s going to take this primary walking away.”

This presidential campaign has already seen its share of ugly moments. In Iowa, Ted Cruz staffers spread the false rumor as the caucuses were just kicking off that Ben Carson’s campaign was finished. There were also reams of paper scattered into the air outside of a Chris Christie town hall in Ames featuring the New Jersey governor’s 2009 statement supporting Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. In Manchester, NH, last weekend, copies of a Boston Herald front page with the headline “Choke!” somehow found their way onto the dashboards of cars parked outside a Marco Rubio rally, according to a Washington Post reporter.

Now comes South Carolina. As far back as December, one popular local political blog began reporting that a “mistress bomb” was about to rock one of the GOP campaigns. The Post and Courier’s “Whisper Campaign” site has already collected eight suspect submissions from its readers — five unusual phone calls, one strange mailer and two cases of stolen yard signs. It goes into detail on some of the reports but warns that the information has “not necessarily been vetted for accuracy.”

Political insiders in South Carolina say it’s only a matter of time before the rumor mill really starts churning. “There are real stakes involved, so naturally elbows would come out and they have come out in South Carolina,” said GOP Rep. Mark Sanford. “It is a contact sport and on a variety of occasions, there are at times unethical things. It’s a full contact sport.”

While he said he so far wasn’t aware of anything major about to drop, Sanford predicted that if “tradition holds true we’ll start hearing about them” before the primary.

As the machinery kicks into gear, one big question hangs over the campaigns this year: Does dirty trickery have quite the same punch in the age of social media? While it can be amplified by Twitter, and spread quickly on Facebook or Instagram, the huge variety of info-streams can also dilute the impact of any single stunt. It can even come back to bite the candidate in question. When Cruz’s campaign started incorrectly circulating word of Carson’s premature exit on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, based on a faulty reading of the first in a series of CNN reporter’s tweets, Carson’s campaign quickly complained — and Cruz was forced to apologize and play defense. The Texas senator also got stung when his campaign sent out official-looking letterhead warning of “VOTING VIOLATIONS” if residents didn’t get to their caucus site. It’s actually a familiar tactic from previous years, but this time the campaign lit up Twitter when pictures of the mailers surfaced.

“It’s dangerous territory,” said Chip Felkel, a Greenville-based GOP operative not affiliated with a 2016 candidate. “There’s enough volatility and visceral anger and cynicism with the process…if they get found out before the primary it can bite them seriously.”