President Joe Biden wins South Carolina’s Democratic primary as he gears up for his reelection bid
Updated: 6:32 p.m.
President Joe Biden has won South Carolina’s Democratic primary, notching an overwhelming 2024 victory in the state that vaulted him to the White House four years ago.
Biden on Saturday defeated the other longshot Democrats on South Carolina’s ballot, including Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and author Marianne Williamson.
The president’s campaign had invested heavily in driving up turnout for Biden, aiming to test-drive efforts to mobilize Black voters, who are a key part of the Democratic vote in South Carolina and central to Biden’s strategy for victory in November.
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The GOP’s South Carolina primary is Feb. 24.
Arguing that voters of color should play a larger role in determining the Democratic presidential nominee, Biden championed a calendar beginning in South Carolina. The state is reliably Republican, but 26% of its residents are Black.
In the 2020 general election, Black voters made up 11% of the national electorate, and 9 in 10 of them supported Biden, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of that election's voters.
Biden was in Delaware — not South Carolina — on Saturday before leaving for a trip to California and Nevada. He attended an open house at his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, telling supporters, “I’m feeling good about where we are.” The president said voters around the country are beginning to focus on the election and "the polling data is picking up across the board.”
“We cannot, we cannot, we cannot lose this campaign, for the good of the country,” Biden said before leaving on a weekend trip. He appeared with first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Biden also called into four Black radio stations to talk up the importance of South Carolina's primary, telling WJMZ Radio in Greenville, “We have a large African American population in America, they deserve to have a say – particularly in the Democratic Party – a say in who the nominee should be.”
Earlier in the day, in South Carolina's capital of Columbia, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said, “We all know that we, because of the color of this, we, our great grandparents, our grandparents, could not always vote here.” A South Carolina native who is Black, Harrison pointed to his own skin.
“For this president to say, 'Jaime, for the entirety of your life, we have started this process in Iowa and New Hampshire, and now, we're going to start it in South Carolina' — no other president before ever decided to touch that issue," Harrison added. "But Joe Biden did, and I will always be grateful to the president for giving us a chance, for seeing us, and understanding how much we matter.”
Biden pushed for South Carolina to go first followed three days later by Nevada. The new calendar also moves the Democratic primary of Michigan, a large and diverse swing state, to Feb. 27, before the expansive field of states voting on March 5, known as Super Tuesday.
South Carolina was also where Biden reversed his fortunes with a resounding victory during the 2020 Democratic primary after defeats in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
Many Black Democrats in South Carolina are still loyal to Biden after he was vice president to the nation's first Black president, Barack Obama. The state's senior member of the U.S. House, Democrat Jim Clyburn, long one of Congress' most powerful Black leaders, remains a close Biden friend and ally.
The DNC sponsored a six-figure ad campaign across the state and Nevada to boost enthusiasm for the president among Black and Latino voters. Nevada's population is 30% Latino.
Black voters interviewed during the recent early voting period listed a range of reasons for supporting Biden, from his administration's defense of abortion rights to appointing Black jurists and other minorities to the federal courts. Some echoed Biden's warnings that former President Donald Trump, the heavy front-runner for the Republican nomination, would threaten democracy as he continues to push lies that the 2020 vote was stolen.
“We can’t live with a leader that will make this into a dictatorship. We can’t live in a place that is not a democracy. That will be a fall for America,” said LaJoia Broughton, a 42-year-old small business owner in Columbia. “So my vote is with Biden. It has been with Biden and will continue to be with Biden."
Some voters said they were concerned about the 81-year-old Biden's age, as many Americans have said they are in public polling. Trump is 77. Both men have had a series of public flubs that have fueled skepticism about their readiness.
“They’re as old as I am and to have these two guys be the only choices, that’s kind of difficult,” said Charles Trower, a 77-year-old from Blythewood, South Carolina. “But I would much rather have President Biden than even consider the other guy.”
New Hampshire held a primary last week that defied the new calendar and wasn't sanctioned by the DNC. Still, Biden won the state via write-in and a big South Carolina victory could begin to allay the concerns of a majority of voters, as even most Democrats don’t want him seeking a second term.
In the meantime, the Democratic establishment — and even potential presidential hopefuls who could have competed against the president from the left or middle — have lined up behind Biden. The DNC also isn’t planning primary debates, while Phillips has challenged his name not appearing on primary ballots in Florida and North Carolina.
The president's reelection campaign says it's already focusing on November’s general election. Trump has in turn accused Biden of threatening democracy, while downplaying his role in promoting falsehoods about election fraud embraced by the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Biden’s campaign, the DNC and its other fundraising arms announced raising $97-plus million in the final three months of last year and entered 2024 with $117.4 million in cash on hand. Trump amassed about $130 million in 2023's final quarter and had $42-plus million to start the election year.
Why does South Carolina have the first primary?
At Biden’s urging, the Democratic National Committee rearranged the 2024 primary calendar and slotted South Carolina as the first contest of the campaign season, citing in part the state’s far more racially diverse electorate than the traditional first-in-the-nation states of Iowa and New Hampshire, which are overwhelmingly white.
New Hampshire held a leadoff primary anyway in defiance of the DNC, but without the president’s or the national party’s backing and no delegates at stake, the contest amounted to little more than a non-binding beauty contest. Biden won New Hampshire by a sizable margin nonetheless after supporters mounted a write-in campaign on his behalf.
How does South Carolina’s primary work?
South Carolina has an open primary system, which means any registered voter may participate in any party’s primary. Voters may only participate in one party’s presidential primary, so those who vote on Saturday may not vote in the Republican contest on Feb. 24.
There are about 3.3 million registered voters in South Carolina. Voters do not register by party. Turnout in the 2020 Democratic primary was about 16 percent of registered voters. It was about 13 percent in the 2016 primary.
Saturday’s event will be the first presidential primary held in the state since a new early voting law was enacted in May 2022. The law allows voters to cast ballots in person up to about two weeks before Election Day without an excuse. As of Monday, nearly 24,000 voters had already cast their ballots.
South Carolina’s 55 pledged Democratic delegates are allocated according to the national party’s standard rules. Twelve at-large delegates are allocated in proportion to the statewide vote, as are seven PLEO delegates, or “party leaders and elected officials.” The state’s seven congressional districts have a combined 36 delegates at stake, which are allocated in proportion to the vote results in each district.
Candidates must receive at least 15 percent of the statewide vote to qualify for any statewide delegates and 15 percent of the vote in a congressional district to qualify for delegates in that district.
Looking back at Biden’s 2020 win
Biden’s decisive victory in the 2020 South Carolina primary offers some useful benchmarks in determining the winner on Saturday night as votes are being counted.
In 2020, then-candidate Biden carried all 46 counties in the state. His strongest geographic regions were in the Pee Dee and Waccamaw River valley areas in the state’s eastern region and in central South Carolina, including the state capital of Columbia. He received about 54 percent of the vote in both areas. He was also the top choice among Democratic primary voters in the state’s Democratic and Republican strongholds, as well as in the more moderate areas in between.
But the key to Biden’s 2020 win in South Carolina was his strength among the state’s Black voters. AP's VoteCast survey of 2020 South Carolina primary voters found that 64 percent of Black voters supported Biden, compared with 33 percent of white voters. Black voters made up about half of the Democratic primary electorate that year, according to VoteCast.
If Biden matches or outpaces his performance in counties with large Black populations in initial results throughout the state, it is a strong indicator of another decisive win in the Palmetto State.
One notable difference is that Biden faced a much more competitive field in 2020, which included Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who were the top two vote-getters in both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary that year. Biden received 49 percent of the vote against six other active candidates, as well as five former candidates who were still listed on the ballot. He more than doubled the 20 percent that second-place finisher Sanders received.
This year, Biden faces fewer and less competitive challengers and enters South Carolina as the overwhelming front-runner, coming off a 44-point victory over his nearest competitor in the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 23.