Biden poised to roll to big South Carolina win
COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Joe Biden looked for an easy victory Saturday in South Carolina’s Democratic primary that officially kicked off his party’s nominating process, validating a new lineup he championed to better empower Black voters who helped revive his 2020 campaign.
Biden is overwhelmingly favored against Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson. Yet the long and sometimes contentious process that saw the Democratic National Committee officially replace Iowa with South Carolina in its presidential primary’s leadoff spot has made what’s unfolding noteworthy.
The GOP’s South
Carolina primary is Feb. 24.
Arguing that voters of color should play a larger role in determining the Democratic presidential nominee, Biden championed a calendar beginning in South Carolina. The state is reliably Republican, but 26% of its residents are Black.
“South Carolina, you are the first primary in the nation and President Biden and I are counting on you,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday during a campaign stop at historically Black South Carolina State in Orangeburg. The president and first lady Jill Biden also recently campaigned in the state.
In the 2020 general election, Black voters made up 11% of the national electorate, and 9 in 10 of them supported Biden, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of that election’s voters.
Biden attended an open house Saturday at his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, and told supporters, “I’m feeling good about where we are.”
He said voters around the country are beginning to focus on the election and “the polling data is picking up across the board.”
“We cannot, we cannot, we cannot lose this campaign, for the good of the country,” Biden said before leaving on a weekend trip to California and Nevada. He appeared with Jill Biden, Harris and her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Earlier in the day, in South Carolina’s capital, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said Biden’s push on behalf of the state showed the president’s commitment to Black voters.
“We all know that we, because of the color of this, we, our great-grandparents, our grandparents, could not always vote here,” said Harrison, a South Carolina native who is Black, as he pointed to his own skin. “For this president to say, ‘Jaime, for the entirety of your life, we have started this process in Iowa and New Hampshire, and now, we’re going to start it in South Carolina’ — no other president before ever decided to touch that issue. But Joe Biden did, and I will always be grateful to the president for giving us a chance, for seeing us, and understanding how much we matter.”
Biden pushed for South Carolina to go first, followed three days later by Nevada. The new calendar also moves the Democratic primary of Michigan, a large and diverse swing state, to Feb. 27, before the expansive field of states voting on March 5, known as Super Tuesday.
South Carolina was also where Biden reversed his fortunes with a resounding victory during the 2020 Democratic primary after defeats in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
Many Black Democrats in South Carolina are still loyal to Biden after he was vice president to the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama. The state’s senior member of the U.S. House, Democrat Jim Clyburn, long one of Congress’ most powerful Black leaders, remains a close Biden friend and ally.
“I wouldn’t be here without the Democratic voters of South Carolina, and that’s a fact,” Biden said at the state’s Democratic Party’s “First-in-the-Nation” celebration dinner last weekend. “You’re the reason I am president.”
The DNC sponsored a six-figure ad campaign across the state and Nevada to boost enthusiasm for the president among Black and Latino voters. Nevada’s population is 30% Latino.
Black voters interviewed during the recent early voting period listed a range of reasons for supporting Biden, from his administration’s defense of abortion rights to appointing Black jurists and other minorities to the federal courts. Some echoed Biden’s warnings that former President Donald Trump, the heavy front-runner for the Republican nomination, would threaten democracy as he continues to push lies that the 2020 vote was stolen.