After spending several election cycles debating a change, Democrats moved the start of their presidential nominating process to South Carolina, which holds its primary today. As you probably remember, Rep. Jim Clyburn helped deliver the state to Joe Biden in 2020, and that was the tailwind he needed as he entered the Super Tuesday primaries that year. Biden won the 2020 Democratic primary in the Palmetto State with 49% of the vote, trouncing second-place finisher Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who received just 20%. It helped that Biden campaigned with Clyburn, the only congressional Democrat in the deeply Republican state.
Biden won the 2020 Democratic primary in the Palmetto State with roughly 49% of the vote, trouncing second-place finisher Sen. Bernie Sanders.
But the Democrats aren’t holding their primary there as a thank-you to Clyburn. There are multiple reasons the party has picked South Carolina as the place it will kick off its nominating contests for the foreseeable future.
Unlike Iowa and New Hampshire, which have previously gone first and second and have populations of about 3.2 million and 1.4 million people, respectively, South Carolina, with about 5.2 million people, not only boasts a more robust population, but Democratic voters there more closely mirror active participants in the party nationwide. If Black people are the backbone of the Democratic Party — and, dare I say, democracy more broadly — it should come as no surprise that the Democratic Party would hold its first primary in a state that is more than a quarter African American. Iowa and New Hampshire have Black populations of 4% and 2%, respectively.
I’ve previously argued that Democrats should have picked Georgia as their first primary because of that state’s growing Latinx and Asian populations, as well as the reverse migration of African Americans returning to the South from the North. There’s also a strong get-out-the-vote infrastructure built by former Georgia state…
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