South Carolina will officially be the first state to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary today, in accordance with DNC rules. This is the first election cycle where South Carolina has been officially recognized as the first in the country to vote in Democratic nomination contests, due to the stated goal of giving more voters of color a voice earlier in the nominating process.
It is also worth mentioning that President Joe Biden was able to vault ahead of other contenders in the 2020 Democratic Primaries with a strong showing in South Carolina with nearly 50% of the vote, support predominantly coming from the state’s Black population, and with the support of longtime South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, a breakthrough that came after less than stellar Biden showings in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The state’s population is just over one quarter Black, however the Black Democratic voters made up close to 60% of South Carolina’s voters participating in the party’s primary 4 years ago, and they awarded Biden with 60% of their support according to exit polls.
This cycle, while Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips and prominent author and speaker Marianne Williamson are still on the ballot contesting the nomination, polling in South Carolina has them in the low single digits, while Biden is far ahead at around 70%.
The key factors will not be who wins, but how energized the party base will be to support Biden. Since there is effectively no real contest (if polls are to be believed), turnout will likely be lower than the 550k or so voters who participated in the 2020 Democratic Primary. Since polling also shows that Biden has lost some support with younger voters and voters of color, the metrics to watch will be his levels of support (which where Biden is concerned should surpass the 63% level he received in the ‘unofficial’ New Hampshire write-in campaign), as well as where his support comes from and what the overall turnout rate will be.
In South Carolina voters do not register by party. Therefore, some Democrats might have the incentive to sit this election out and cross over to the February 24th Republican Primary, to support either Nikki Haley (in opposition to Trump) or to pad Trump’s support (who is variously seen as the weaker candidate to run against Biden in the November general election). While the DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, has disowned any such tactics, this dynamic cannot be entirely discounted, especially if the turnout levels today end up being lower but Nikii Haley ends up surpassing expectations three weeks from now.
Since Biden is polling consistently at much more than 50% nationally in the Democratic primary and is well ahead of any rivals for the nomination, and this dynamic is mirrored here in South Carolina, ericvotes.com will not make any predictions on this race. There is truly little quantitative data for ‘mildly’ contested primaries for an incumbent Democratic President – the 1996 Democratic Primary was cancelled, and the 2012 primary gave the incumbent Barack Obama nearly 100% of the vote. I would put a benchmark of relative success for Biden as being at least one half of the 2020 turnout and four-fifths of Black voters per exit polling, and 10% points higher than New Hampshire’s write-in campaign. If he fails to hit any of those numbers, that might portend sufficient disenchantment with his reelection campaign below the surface that might be problematic for a Biden victory in November.