On the whitest presidential debate stage since the Democrats’ last one, billionaire Tom Steyer decided to strike Joe Biden at the flailing front-runner’s last strong point, his support among black voters.
“We have not said one word tonight about race,” the billionaire said at the onset of his diatribe against Biden. “Not one word. Are you kidding me?”
Steyer isn’t hiding the ball anymore. He’s a private prison investor who has bet his political future on supporting slavery reparations and smearing the Biden campaign as tolerating racism. He’s going all-in on winning the South Carolina primary, and he might just tank Biden’s presidential dreams and hand the nomination to Bernie Sanders.
Steyer has no path to the presidency, and he knows it. His best return on his investment of burning his Democratic Party credentials is scraping a few delegates and making it to a contested convention, where he can hypothetically leverage his crumbs for a Cabinet appointment promise. A cursory glace at Steyer’s spending clearly shows that he wagers his best path to this prospect is through South Carolina, the stronghold of Biden’s electoral firewall in the first stage of the primary.
Since the start of the election cycle, Biden has held his most decisive early-state lead in South Carolina, long seen as his buffer between the states demographically unfavorable to Biden, Iowa and New Hampshire, and plenty of Super Tuesday states demographically favorable to Biden. With Biden’s anemic performance in Iowa and crumbling polls across the country, South Carolina has become crucial to his campaign’s survival, but Steyer has flooded the state with enough cash that he might just crash Biden’s firewall and lifelong dreams.
Steyer has spent tens of millions of dollars on local ads in South Carolina, making heavy inroads in state polling and narrowing his second-place gap with Biden. Winning the fourth Democratic contest could keep Steyer’s campaign viable until the case of a contested convention, in which the primaries end without any candidate having received a majority of delegates. So, then, Steyer knows he has everything to gain and nothing to lose but his dignity in attempting to pander and patronize black voters. His gambit resulted in Friday’s unfortunate fracas impugning Biden’s campaign as racist and declaring his administration would create a “formal commission on race.”
Steyer’s stupid performance wouldn’t be remotely scary if it weren’t working. In just one month, the Post and Courier poll found that Steyer has catapulted from 5% to 18% support, now fewer than 10 points behind Biden. Last summer, Biden was receiving the support of half of the state’s black voters, with nobody even close. In the latest poll, Biden was down to 30% among the group, with Steyer up to 24%. Steyer’s investment seems to be paying off, and his shameless pandering on race showed that he’s increasingly confident in his odds of playing spoiler.
