Former Secretary of State, Senator Hillary Clinton, won the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, registering her second straight win in the Democratic nominating contest and serving notice that Bernie Sanders could indeed be running into her firewall.
The victory in South Carolina will allow Clinton, a former First Lady, to re-claim the psychic mantle of “front-runner,” for better or worse, and to add to her lead in Democratic delegates. Clinton’s advantage among delegates stood at 505 to 71 before Saturday’s primary, primarily due to her advantage among “superdelegates,” the elected officials and other top Democrats, who get their own vote at the Democratic convention, along with the thousands of delegates chosen through state primaries and caucuses.
The eventual nominee will need 2,383 delegates in all.
A slightly hoarse Clinton came out to cheers of “Hillary! Hillary!” in a room full of jubilant supporters in Columbia, S.C. Saturday night
“Today, you sent a message: in America, when we stand together, there is no barrier too big to break,” Clinton said. Acknowledging that South Carolina was the end of the one-state-at-a-time early phase of this campaign, she added, “Tomorrow, this campaign goes national!”
Sanders was in the air when the race was called for Clinton, flying from one campaign stop to another. He issued a statement that congratulated Clinton, but vowed to fight on.
“Let me be clear on one thing tonight. This campaign is just beginning. We won a decisive victory in New Hampshire. She won a decisive victory in South Carolina. Now, it’s on to Super Tuesday,” Sanders said in the statement. He added: “Our grassroots political revolution is growing state by state, and we won’t stop now.”
Exit polls reported by ABC News showed that Clinton’s advantage with black voters was, indeed, decisive: black voters accounted for about six in 10 of Saturday’s Democratic electorate, and an overwhelming eight in 10 of those black voters supported Clinton. A majority of black voters also said they saw Clinton as trustworthy and honest — a marked change from New Hampshire, where she lost badly amid voter concerns about her honesty.
The same exit polls showed that Sanders had vastly beaten Clinton among white voters younger than 45, but the problem for him was that there were many fewer of these voters in the South Carolina primary than in other early states.But, according to ABC News, Clinton dominated in a demographic that Sanders had hoped to win in this state: black voters younger than 45. Clinton won that group by 3 to 1. Clinton won whites who were 45 and older by a narrow margin, and won nearly all of the vote among blacks 45 and older, according to ABC News.
Earlier on Saturday, Clinton gave an indication that – after an unexpected battle with Sanders in the early states – she is focusing again on the general election against the GOP nominee. Clinton on Saturday reiterated her criticism of the current Republican front-runner, Donald Trump.
Clinton swiped Trump without naming him in Birmingham, stressing that the country’s future president isn’t just accountable to Americans, but also the entire world. Her words seem aimed at Trump’s call for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and his proposal for a temporary ban on Muslim foreigners entering the U.S.
“When you run for president, it’s not just Americans who pay attention. And when you are president the entire world listens to every word you say. Markets rise and fall,” Clinton said. “Yes, we elect our president but that person becomes in many ways the leader of free people, free markets and opportunity around the world.”“So you do have to be careful about what you say and how you say it,” she added.
Clinton added a jab at Trump, by mentioning his slogan “Make America great again.”
“America has never stopped being great,” Clinton said, then turned to a message of healing and unity. “But we do need to make America whole again.”
Clinton’s advantage in South Carolina was so large that neither candidate bothered to campaign in the state on Saturday. Instead, both flew on to states that will vote on “Super Tuesday” next week. Clinton went to Alabama, another state where black Democrats will be a powerful force in the primary. Sanders went to Texas and Minnesota, where he hopes to attract the same kind of young voters, liberals and white working-class Democrats who helped him win in New Hampshire.
“I like Bernie Sanders, but I just don’t know Bernie Sanders,” said Howard H. Hewett, 54, an African American supporter of Clinton’s from Columbia. “I’ve been a fan since Bill Clinton.”
Ruby Hall, who voted for Clinton on Friday and was a volunteer, said that African American voters like herself liked Sanders’s message but were “really loyal to Hillary because of Obama.”
“She made more of a concerted effort to reach out to the African American voters and I think it paid off,” Hall said.
For Sanders, the race does not get much easier from here. Clinton has significant leads in polls from six of the 11 states that will vote on Super Tuesday, most of them in the Deep South. Sanders can plan on at least one sure win, in his native Vermont. In four other states – Oklahoma, Colorado, Massachusetts and Minnesota – either the polls are too close to project a favorite, or too spotty to make a prediction at all.
The South Carolina primary had been viewed for months as a test of Clinton’s “firewall” strategy, an electoral Plan B concocted after her leads eroded in Iowa and New Hampshire. The idea was that many of the things many young voters and liberals didn’t like about Clinton – her long time in Washington, her ties to the Democratic establishment, her incrementalist approach to governing – would appeal to black Democrats, who would see them as signs of realism and experience.Sanders sought to undermine the firewall by aiming to attract young black voters, and by emphasizing the need to fight police brutality and long mandatory prison sentences. He got endorsements from Atlanta-based rapper Killer Mike and from Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died in 2014 after a New York City police officer put him in a chokehold during an arrest.
“We have got to achieve the day when young black males and women can walk the streets without being worried about being harassed by a police officer,” Sanders said in Columbia, S.C. earlier this month.
He also spoke about Flint, Mich., a majority-black city where mistakes by state and local officials caused toxic lead to leach into drinking water. Throughout, Sanders sought to show that the problems of black voters called out for more than Clinton was aiming for, that they could only be solved by Sanders’ “political revolution.”
While the result in South Carolina wasn’t surprising, there was plenty going on beneath the topline numbers. Below, we break down some of the winners and losers.
WINNERS
Hillary Clinton: No, this win was not unexpected, but it is still a win for Clinton — and it appears to be an absolute drubbing. She has now won two straight states, and she is clearly the momentum candidate heading into Super Tuesday — which is, after all, just three days away. The question from here is whether Clinton can begin to put the race away in short order or if Sanders can hang around somehow — despite increasingly daunting delegate math. That’s a far different conversation than we were having after Clinton got blown out in the New Hampshire primary two and a half weeks ago.
Black voters: Eight years after South Carolina sent Barack Obama further on his way to becoming the first black president, black voters sent a message Saturday that was loud and clear: We aren’t going anywhere. Early exit poll numbers suggest the black share of the electorate could hit a new record — about 6 in 10 voters in Saturday’s primary. That would exceed even the percentage in 2008, when the eventual first black president was on the ballot. That record turnout comes after a South Carolina campaign that was focused intently on wooing black voters — even more so than in 2008. The combination of those two things mean black voters just asserted themselves as a real force in 2016.
The fight for black voters in South Carolina, explained
The media: We get a lot of guff when our analysis doesn’t match up with reality. But in South Carolina, the media theory that black voters represented some kind of “firewall” for Clinton got a big vote of confidence. In fact, we might even have understated it, for fear of missing a late Sanders surge among black voters. We’ve been surprised before, after all! Now, the black vote in other “firewall” states might not follow suit, but if it’s anywhere close, the firewall remains intact.
LOSERS
Bernie Sanders: We pretty much knew this wasn’t going to be close, but it turned into a disaster for Sanders. Yes, it’s one state, but Sanders had one task here: To beat expectations when it comes to black voters. He didn’t do that — at all. He lost their votes a whopping 87-13, according to the most recent exit polls. A while back, a top Sanders adviser mused that he could win South Carolina with 30 percent of the black vote; that proved to be a foolhardy goal. And it’s not just that black voters like Clinton better; they didn’t seem to trust Sanders either. Just 52 percent said they would trust Sanders to handle race relations. Nearly 9 in 10 said the same of Clinton.
Given Super Tuesday is heavy on Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — this is very troubling for Team Sanders. That’s four of the 12 states with the highest black populations. Louisiana follows four days later, and Mississippi will be March 15, alongside Michigan. Sanders can’t just cede all of these states and focus on the Northeast and the West.
Sanders’s single-minded income inequality message: Just 21 percent of voters in South Carolina said income inequality was their most important issue. About twice as many named the economy and jobs, while 22 percent said health care, and 10 percent said terrorism. Sanders needs more people to believe income inequality is Issue No. 1 for them — because it is for him.
Cable news: Look, this campaign has been great for the news business. It has big personalities (or rather, one big personality in particular), struggles for the souls of both major parties, and competitive primaries on both sides. What it has been short on, though, is election-night drama. Clinton’s win was called right as the polls were closing, just as Sanders’s win in New Hampshire was called immediately. The same has happened with Trump’s three straight blowout wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. The only dramatic election night, in fact, was the Iowa caucuses. Even Clinton’s not-huge win in Nevada was called before 6 p.m. Eastern time, thanks to the state’s afternoon caucuses. It’s been downright anti-climactic.
Young voters: At this rate, all future candidates might as well give up on trying to build a campaign around the support of young people. Despite tens of thousands of people showing up to Sanders rallies, and young people favoring him overwhelmingly so far, they just aren’t showing up to vote like he needs them to. Fewer than 1 in 6 voters in South Carolina were under the age of the 30. And it follows a pattern of young people just not giving Sanders the turnout he needs. In fact, young voters were less of the electorate there than in any of the first three states.
Dick Harpootlian: This is what happens when you make irrational projections. Via Bloomberg on Wednesday:
Former Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian, an avowed Clinton opponent who endorsed Sanders, made an assertion Monday that no poll has supported: that Sanders would surprise everyone and come within single digits in the primary. On Tuesday, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon on Tuesday seized on that prediction, writing in a posting on Twitter: “The man knows his state.”
*Culled from The Washington Post
