Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will showcase their liberal messages in South Carolina this weekend, trying to connect with black voters and battling to secure a spot as the clear second-place candidate in the fourth statewide contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Both candidates are scheduled to speak to an expected audience of 5,000 millennials Saturday in a presidential candidate forum at the Young Leaders Conference, in partnership with The Black Church PAC in Atlanta. Warren will then stop in Aiken, South Carolina, on Saturday, and each have events scheduled Sunday in Columbia, South Carolina.
Polling for the last several months suggested that Warren had eaten into the Vermont senator’s base of support and won over a number of former Sanders supporters. She has laid out a number of liberal policy proposals, such as a wealth tax on those worth more than $50 million. But Warren, a Massachusetts senator, still calls herself a capitalist, in contrast to Sanders, who identifies as a socialist.
Now, Sanders and Warren are nearly neck-and-neck in a Post and Courier / Change Research poll of likely South Carolina Democratic voters released this week that found Warren in second place with 17% support while Sanders had 16% support. Former Vice President Joe Biden led the field with 36% support.
Sanders’ support bounced back from 9% in a June South Carolina Post and Courier poll, while Warren’s support remained unchanged.
As Warren tries to continue building her support, Sanders is expected to stick to his message and flaunt his socialist bona fides. The Vermont senator and his campaign have also sharply criticized the press in the last week, suggesting that Sanders’ criticism of Amazon leads to poor coverage in the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Both Warren and Sanders will focus on reaching black voters, who make up a majority of Democratic presidential primary voters in the state. Biden maintains a commanding lead among black voters with 45% support, three times as much support as Warren or Sanders, who each had 15%.
Warren will attend services at the Reid Chapel AME Church in Columbia on Sunday, while Sanders will have lunch at the Brookland Baptist Church before touring the Washington Heights neighborhood with the South Carolina Democratic Party Black Caucus and hosting a town hall in a Columbia gym.
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, another 2020 Democrat, will also campaign in South Carolina on Saturday and Sunday on the coastal side of the state. He sits at 5% support in the most recent South Carolina poll.
