S.C. win reignites Biden candidacy
Ex-VP goes into Super Tuesday as top Sanders rival
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Joe Biden scored a decisive victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday, reviving his listing campaign and establishing himself as the leading contender to slow Sen. Bernie Sanders as the turbulent Democratic race turns to a slew of coast-to-coast contests Tuesday.
Propelled by an outpouring of support from South Carolina’s African American voters, Biden easily overcame a late effort by Sanders to stage an upset. The victory in a state long seen as his firewall will vault Biden into Super Tuesday as the clear alternative to Sanders for establishment-aligned Democrats.
With almost 100 percent of the vote counted, Biden, the former vice president, had won just under 50 percent of the vote, well ahead
of Sanders, who had 20 percent. Tom Steyer, the California billionaire, was a distant third, followed by Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The victory enabled Biden to significantly narrow Sanders’ pledged delegate lead, but he did not appear poised to overtake him.
Biden, in an exuberant victory speech Saturday, looked ahead to a long, ideological struggle and made repeated arguments against Sanders, though not by name.
He said voters faced a momentous choice in the coming days. Democrats, Biden argued, wanted results rather than revolution, improvements to the Affordable Care Act rather than a disruptive transformation of the health care system, and a candidate who would “take on the NRA and gun manufacturers and not protect them.”
“If Democrats want a nominee who’s a Democrat, a lifelong Democrat, a proud Democrat, an Obama-Biden Democrat, join us,” Biden said, adding, “We have the option of winning big or losing big. That’s the choice.”
As much as the results here offered new life to Biden, the onetime front-runner, they dealt a perhaps fatal blow to two moderates, Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Both had been hoping to overtake Biden as the candidate of the party’s center but again proved unable to win nonwhite voters; Buttigieg received only 2 percent of support from black voters, according to early exit polls.
Perhaps even more consequentially, Biden’s triumph here also increased pressure on Michael Bloomberg to best Biden in the 15 states and territories voting Tuesday — or consider exiting the race.
Warren, a progressive rival to Sanders, also showed no strong appeal to black voters in the Republican-leaning state. But unlike the moderate candidates, Warren was unlikely to face similar pressure to make way for Biden, and some party leaders hope she will stay in the race and complicate Sanders’ efforts to consolidate the left.
Biden also overcame a challenge from Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund investor who poured millions of dollars into courting black voters, and in some cases putting influential state lawmakers on his campaign payroll. But Steyer fell far short of the breakthrough his campaign believed was possible, and several hours after the polls closed he dropped out of the race.
For Biden, 77, the victory was a moment to savor.
Low on cash and without a victory in the first three contests, Biden desperately needed South Carolina, a state for which he has long had a personal affection, to resurrect his third and perhaps final quest for the presidency.
Facing a humiliating fifth-place finish in New Hampshire in February, Biden flew out of the New England cold before the polls had even closed there and effectively staked his campaign on South Carolina, telling supporters in Columbia that evening that he was counting on the state’s more racially diverse set of voters to offset his dismal showing in the first two states, both heavily white.
Then, after finishing a distant second to Sanders in Nevada, he came directly to South Carolina. He campaigned almost exclusively here while other Democrats fanned out across the much larger map of states that vote Tuesday.
In the debate this past week, Biden promised to win South Carolina and projected confidence that he would prevail with African Americans. He did both, claiming black voters with 64 percent, far better than Sanders’ 15 percent, exit polls showed.
The results here represented at least an interruption of what had loomed as a march to the nomination by Sanders. South Carolina was the first state where Sanders did not finish at the top, and his distant second to Biden came even after he had made a late effort to score a win.
Although Biden had led in every poll of South Carolina, Sanders, after winning in a landslide in Nevada, decided to try to deliver a finishing blow against Biden. Sanders increased his television advertising in the state and intensified his campaign schedule, with the goal of denying Biden the chance to reignite his candidacy and perhaps wrapping up the nomination fight by the middle of March.
Addressing supporters in Virginia, Sanders, 78, acknowledged Biden’s success in South Carolina and advised his audience to prepare for the ups and downs of a long campaign.
“That will not be the only defeat,” Sanders said of South Carolina. “There are a lot of states in this country, nobody wins them all.”
But ticking off his victories so far, Sanders also pointed in a confident tone toward Tuesday’s primaries as the next frontier.
Having carried South Carolina as a kind of favorite-son candidate, Biden is counting on that result to ripple throughout the region and help him recover some of the support from black voters elsewhere that he lost in recent months, largely to Bloomberg. He needs voters to shift back quickly if he is to edge ahead of Sanders in enough states to deliver a strong showing on Super Tuesday.
But absent an overwhelming wave of new support for Biden, the best-case scenario for his campaign may still be a daunting one: a monthslong battle against a tireless opponent with superior financial and organizational resources at his disposal, and a formidable well of support from the Democratic Party’s left wing.
In South Carolina, Biden wielded two powerful assets: longstanding relationships and a direct tie to President Barack Obama, who is beloved by black voters.
Biden was also aided immensely by his close bond with Rep. James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress and most influential Democrat in South Carolina. After months of remaining neutral, Clyburn offered Biden a full-throated endorsement Wednesday before a bank of television cameras and photographers.