Democrats 2020

Joe Biden’s South Carolina Firewall Is Getting Whiter

With a whitening Democratic electorate and black voters not noticeably fired up (Obama’s 2008 campaign is a distant memory), the vaunted firewall could be wobbly. But Biden’s supporters aren’t worried: “The white vote here is a stop-Bernie vote,” says one.

By Peter Hamby

February 27, 2020

It’s been an article of faith throughout the 2020 presidential campaign: The South Carolina primary will be dominated by black voters, an important corrective to Iowa and New Hampshire, two states that barely reflect the diversity of today’s Democratic Party. Both states are over 90% white. Nevada was added to the early primary calendar in 2008, giving voice to Hispanic voters. South Carolina was also formally enshrined in the early state calendar in 2008, ensuring that black voters had their say. Barber shops, fish fries, and something called the Gallivants Ferry Stump became required stops on any Democrat’s itinerary. In 2008, when Barack Obama thumped Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, turnout reached historic levels, with over half a million voters participating in the primary. The steroid shot powering Obama’s blowout win was obvious: 56% of that year’s primary voters were black.

In 2016, when Clinton was the frontrunner, South Carolina turnout dipped by almost 200,000 votes, but black voters were even more influential. More than 60% of Democratic primary-goers were black that year, giving Clinton a blowout advantage over democratic socialist newcomer Bernie Sanders. Clinton won 86% black voters. According to exit poll research compiled by the Greenville News, the “typical” South Carolina Democratic primary voter in 2016 was a black woman without a college degree who makes around $50,000 per year and lives in a small city or rural community. She considers herself a moderate or slightly liberal. She goes to church weekly and cares most about the economy and health care. In 2020 terms, that means she is most likely not on Twitter—and she probably doesn’t care if you have a Super PAC or not.

This cycle, Joe Biden’s campaign has long pointed to those South Carolina voters as the guardians of his rocky campaign. “I’m going to win South Carolina,” Biden told Major Garrett of CBS News after Tuesday’s Democratic debate. “The African American community knows me, my record, they’ve known me for the last 40 years.” TV pundits riffing about South Carolina usually state as fact that roughly 60% of the electorate will be black, a number that should give Biden hope, though Sanders is stronger among younger black voters, and is closing the gap among black voters generally. Pollsters, when they’ve bothered with South Carolina, have been modeling for a turnout with a large black majority. The cable news commentary assumes the same. But the chatter among South Carolina Democrats heading into Saturday’s primary is painting a different picture: This year’s contest could actually be whiter than any statewide primary in more than a decade.

Early absentee ballot returns suggest as much. As of Wednesday, returned ballots were split roughly 55/45 between black and white voters, according to data from the South Carolina Election Commission. That ratio won’t match the eventual vote share on Election Day, but the electorate is already trending whiter, a significant departure from the 61/35 racial makeup of the 2016 primary. “I think it will probably be closer to 55% black, not 65,” said Dick Harpootlian, a state representative and former South Carolina Democratic Party chair supporting Biden. Tyler Jones, a Democratic strategist who worked on Representative Joe Cunningham’s upset victory in South Carolina’s first Congressional District in 2018, said he’s expecting white turnout to be even higher, split roughly 50/50 between black and white voters. “If two thirds of the Democratic electorate here is black this time, I should stop what I’m doing,” Jones told me. “I do not see that happening on Saturday.”

The reasons are many: None of the candidates inspire the kind of visceral excitement among black voters that propelled Obama’s first historic campaign. And only Biden has the kind of deep relationships here that helped Clinton in 2016. The Democrats have an open primary and Republicans have none, meaning independents and Republicans can vote for a Democrat on Saturday, either to make mischief or to pick a safe moderate. There’s also the state’s rapidly changing demographics, with white out-of-state professionals flocking to the state for better jobs, weather, and tax rates. Earlier this month, Iowa and New Hampshire saw turnout surges in affluent suburbs, usually favoring the more centrist candidates. South Carolina has affluent suburban precincts larger than some New Hampshire towns.

Election results so far suggest that college-educated white voters are Fired Up And Ready To Go. But South Carolina will answer the open question of whether black voters are too. “All these white liberals who formed The Resistance or whatever, you are going to see them coming into the primary,” said Jalen Elrod, the first vice chairman of the Greenville County Democratic Party. “In 2017, we had this influx of white liberals who, before [Donald] Trump came into office, weren’t really concerned about politics. A lot of black folks, we never had that luxury.” It’s not difficult to find black leaders in South Carolina who’ve been left unimpressed by the campaigns here. The candidates, their messages, and their ground efforts haven’t done much to inspire. Even with Representative Jim Clyburn’s coveted endorsement, Biden’s support feels more perfunctory than affirmative. “The reality is that none of these candidates are going to deliver the kind of excitement we saw with Obama,” said State Representative Kambrell Garvin, an early supporter of Elizabeth Warren. “They haven’t really been here. In the future, I would advise candidates to actually spend more time in South Carolina.” Elrod, in Greenville, the state’s most populous county, said the Democratic campaigns “are mostly going through the motions” with black voters.

“You just see a lot of stuff from them on social media but no real-life engagement,” Elrod told me. “Democrats seem to think that there’s this ‘fuck Trump’ mindset that will magically drive people to the polls, but there’s not a lot of excitement here. There’s not any substantive voter engagement effort, around registration or turnout. I’d be shocked if turnout isn’t whiter than it was in 2016.” Like plenty of Democrats here, Elrod predicted that total voter turnout will likely surpass 2016, when about 370,000 people voted in the Democratic primary. But he said turnout won’t come close to its 2008 peak, when 532,468 voters turned out on the Democratic side. Obama’s candidacy was enough to arouse black voters that year, especially after his campaign was ratified in mostly white Iowa. But out of view, Obama’s campaign also built a machine in South Carolina with early strategic investments. No 2020 campaign bothered to develop anything close.

In 2007, Obama deployed field organizers to every corner of South Carolina, rural and urban, secretly testing their outreach and turnout tactics in special elections a full year before the 2008 primary, exporting their learnings nationally once Obama became the nominee. His team made a show to the media of their “barber shop” strategy to reach black voters, but they also courted college students, white moderates, and church-goers of every race, with Obama even speaking at a predominantly white evangelical megachurch in Greenville. Obama’s team was so in the weeds here that when comedian Stephen Colbert joked about filing for the South Carolina primary ballot in 2008, the campaign privately freaked out to state party officials, worried Colbert would siphon the votes of Obama-leaning college kids. Obama’s campaign was a swarming and well-funded effort that out-hustled Clinton at every turn.

This cycle, there have been plenty of candidate visits, but little in the way of dedicated resources and under-the-hood turnout machinery. The campaigns directed most of their money and volunteer efforts to Iowa, mostly covering South Carolina with perfunctory advertising and social media—except for Tom Steyer, who has given generous paychecks to prominent black organizations. Only Kamala Harris and Cory Booker made the state a real piece of their strategies, before they dropped out of the race. South Carolina has since been an afterthought. When The State newspaper in Columbia endorsed Pete Buttigieg this week, the editorial noted, with barely concealed contempt, that Bernie Sanders didn’t even bother showing up for an interview.

If the campaigns are assuming that South Carolina will look like it did four years ago, they’ll be in for a surprise on Saturday. The state is growing. It appears to be becoming more affluent, and more white. In 2019, South Carolina was the sixth-fastest growing state in the country, according to U.S. Census data. Over 80% of South Carolina’s new residents—“come-heres,” as low country locals call them—have arrived from other states. Almost a quarter million people have moved to the state since Clinton won here in 2016. Plenty of them are retirees seeking golf courses and beaches. But many are white professionals moving to the coast around Charleston and Myrtle Beach, to the Charlotte suburbs in York County, and to the tech hub of Greenville-Spartanburg. “The dramatic population growth in South Carolina has changed the Democratic primary,” said Brady Quirk-Garvan, the former Charleston County Democratic Party chair. “The large growth of tech companies in Charleston and Greenville brings young progressives into the state. There’s a huge number of retirees from the Northeast and Midwest. It’s led to gains on the local level for Democrats in Charleston.”

The biggest gain for Democrats came in 2018 along the Charleston coast, when Joe Cunningham, a Croakies-wearing Democrat, picked up a Republican-held House seat in the state’s first district, a seat that had been occupied by conservative stalwart Mark Sanford. As with dozens of other Democratic pickups in the 2018 midterms, moderate Trump-era suburbanites were a key element of Cunningham’s winning coalition. “With Joe’s race, we won that seat because we brought in new voters who were repulsed by Trump and were willing to vote for a reasonable mainstream Democrat,” said Jones, the Cunningham adviser. “We still have those voters. It’s the first time we have had them since 2006, and they will be voting on Saturday in South Carolina. A lot of those voters are the same voters who nominated John McCain here in 2008, and they voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. Now they are voting for Democrats.” If white turnout is up compared to 2016, thousands of those votes will be coming from new Democrats along the coast.

Would a whiter electorate derail Biden? His supporters don’t appear worried. “The white vote will be higher, but I don’t think that dilutes Biden’s vote,” Harpootlian said. “Bernie surging has spooked the shit out of every moderate. Biden is gonna get his share of the white vote and more than his share of the black vote.” Whiter electorates buoyed Sanders during his primary fight against Clinton four years ago. But in South Carolina, his best performances came from smaller-population rural counties that normally tilt Republican. Affluent suburbs have been a weak spot for Sanders. In Iowa and New Hampshire this month, white suburban dwellers instead went to Biden, Buttigieg, or Amy Klobuchar, or to Warren, who has dependable support from white educated liberals. “Biden’s coalition here is African Americans and centrist white voters, and so far he’s been able to maintain that,” Jones said. “The only way he loses is if he loses one of those demographic groups to someone else. If whites go elsewhere, they’ll go to Klobuchar or Pete, not Bernie. The white vote here is a stop-Bernie vote.” It’s also a vote that could mean the difference between a narrow one-point win for Biden, or a big comeback victory that could reshape the race as it hurtles quickly toward Super Tuesday.