ANDERSON — The first crowd that gathered at Creekside BBQ in 2011 was small, maybe a couple hundred people.

Over offerings of catfish, sweet tea and slow-cooked pork, about 200 voters in South Carolina’s reddest and most-rural congressional district got together to talk politics with Jim DeMint, a Tea Partier re-elected to represent them in the U.S. Senate the year prior.

The gathering proved to be so popular that U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan kept hosting it every year until he left office this year. His “Faith and Freedom BBQ” grew to be the largest annual gathering of Republicans in the Palmetto State, drawing upwards of 2,000 people — a huge early litmus test where hopefuls could test their positions with an electorate of thousands in one place, and incumbents could see where they were vul

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