COLUMBIA, South Carolina — Joe Biden won the first primary of his 30-plus year quest for the presidency on Saturday, in very decisive fashion. At his victory celebration here in Columbia, the former vice president thanked Rep. James Clyburn as if Clyburn had saved his life, and indeed, that appears to be what happened. With Clyburn’s endorsement, Biden scored a huge win among black voters and was on his way to victory.
Biden’s win was no doubt enormously satisfying for him and his supporters. But at the same time, it could prove unsettling for the Democratic Party and could end up turning the presidential race into a bitter and protracted regional conflict.
Biden won because he assembled a multiracial moderate coalition. For months, Democrats have pointed to South Carolina as the first test of the presidential field that truly reflects the influence of African-American voters, a critical part of the Democratic electorate. That was indeed a huge factor in Biden’s win: Blacks made up 57% of the electorate for Saturday’s primary, and Biden won a whopping 64% of their votes.
But Biden also struck a chord with white Democrats, who were 38% of the electorate. By a margin of 34% to 25%, Biden won the white vote over Bernie Sanders among an electorate whose political memories go back to party stalwarts such as Sen. Ernest Hollings, whom Biden eulogized on a trip to South Carolina last year. Theirs is a different type of centrism, but still strong in the state. And both the black and white Democrats who chose Biden were more moderate than the woke, progressive Democrats who powered Sanders to victory in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Nor is that centrism exclusive to South Carolina. The factors that led to Biden’s win here all apply to other states with similar mixes of black and white voters. Looking ahead to Super Tuesday, Biden appears strong in North Carolina and has a chance to finish well in Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and possibly even Texas. If, as expected, Sanders wins California and other non-Southern states, the results of this primary, combined with Super Tuesday, could set up a regional showdown for the Democratic nomination, with a deeply divided party struggling to settle on a nominee.
Among black South Carolina Biden voters, there was an intense feeling that a vote for Sanders could endanger gains that have benefited blacks over the years. To them, Sanders’s promise to throw out the whole system and replace it with something new seemed fraught with risk; the promises seemed pie-in-the-sky. Better to stick with what you have. That’s why Biden said at every stop in South Carolina, “We don’t need a revolution — we need results.”
“It’s impossible for Bernie Sanders to give free education and free medical care,” a black woman, Florence Linnen, told me at a Biden event in Georgetown. “It’s impossible. The United States just don’t have that kind of money. I could see you paying something. But free? I don’t see that happening. People want to work for what they need to have. They don’t want to always have something given to them.”
Instead, Linnen saw Biden as offering incremental but realistic help that might make her and her family’s lives better. She mentioned that a Biden victory could mean her son, who worked in dredging, might find a job closer to home on a big project in the port of Georgetown. That was a lot more possible to her than free college and “Medicare for all.”
Others, too, emphasized the risk of supporting Sanders. “We saw how difficult it was to get the Affordable Care Act off the ground,” a black voter, Leo Frazier, told the Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney at a Biden rally in Mt. Zion. “So why would you want to go totally undo it and try to start from scratch?”
When Biden spoke at Coastal Carolina University, he pledged that under his presidency, the federal government would create, over 10 years, a $70 billion endowment for HBCUs, or historically black colleges and universities. Big government grants often go to universities with big endowments, Biden said, leaving smaller schools behind. His endowment plan would, he claimed, help level the playing field. As Biden spoke, black members of the audience nodded along in clear approval. Biden wasn’t promising the world — he was giving them a plan to make things better.
White Democrats, too, favored a keep-what-we-have approach, but they also reflected a style of Democratic moderation from an earlier era. “There is a keen awareness of spending among moderate white Democrats,” one well-connected Democratic pol said in text conversations during primary week. “This may be a throwback to the Old South Blue Dog Democratic Party which had control of politics here until Reagan — fiscally conservative and social moderate thinking with concern for working class and poor. Many white Biden voters tended to be older and harken back to this model.”
“Also, just the mention of socialism is a non-starter,” he added. “Remember — South Carolina is the birthplace of NASCAR.” Whatever NASCAR means to Southern fans, apparently, it does not mean Bernie Sanders-style socialism.
Beyond all that, for both black and white Biden voters, there were enormous cultural differences with the Sanders movement. Here is one of them, from the two candidates’ events on Thursday: The Sanders rally in North Charleston began with a warm-up speaker announcing, “My name is Emilio Vicente. I’m undocumented, queer, and unashamed.” The crowd cheered. A Biden rally a couple of hours later in Georgetown began with the Pledge of Allegiance. The crowd put hands on hearts. Different styles.
Sanders speakers like to talk about socialism. At a rally in Columbia the day before the primary, Nina Turner, the fire-breathing former Ohio state senator who introduced Sanders at many appearances, said his movement represents a singular opportunity. “We understand unequivocally that we will never get this kind of moment back, that this is a Eugene Debs moment,” Turner said, referring to the famous socialist who ran for president five times in the early 20th century.
The Sanders campaign also sent clear messages to black voters: Don’t trust centrists such as Biden. Killer Mike, the Atlanta rapper who supported Sanders in 2016 and now, told black South Carolinians to stop listening to civil rights rhetoric, and civil rights leaders, from the past. “Listen to me, black people in South Carolina,” Mike told the crowd in Columbia. “I don’t give a damn what your leaders who were radical 55 years ago have done, if they’re not doing it today. I’m talking to black people in South Carolina: If they’re telling to wait and hold on, don’t wait and hold on. If they’re telling you good enough is good enough, it ain’t good enough. If it rhymes with ‘slow,’ don’t vote for it. You understand what I’m telling you?”
Now, what might rhyme with “slow”? Perhaps “Joe?”
“If anybody’s telling you hold on, wait a little longer, they’re bullshitting,” Mike said. “Tell them we want progress, and we want it now.”
The whole thing had the feel of a rally on the Berkeley campus from the 1960s and 1970s. Just to drive that home, Sanders even brought along, as another warm-up speaker, a former mayor of Berkeley, Gus Newport, who described himself as “a former black nationalist and a socialist.” It wasn’t the sort of thing to electrify many South Carolina Democrats, black or white.
Now voters in South Carolina have passed judgment. In the past, their decision has meant a lot. With two exceptions since 1980, every candidate, Democrat and Republican, who won the South Carolina primary has gone on to win their party’s nomination. (The exceptions were Democrat John Edwards in 2004 and Republican Newt Gingrich in 2012.) But this year, Biden, the South Carolina winner, will likely face, in Sanders, a candidate who won the most votes in the first three contests and then in the biggest prize of all, California.
It is not clear how that will work out, to say the least. But Biden’s win in South Carolina has shown the Democratic Party to be divided, with no unity in sight.
