Four years ago, Democrats in South Carolina – and Black Democrats in particular – effectively cleared the field for Joe Biden’s nomination, ending what might have otherwise been a rowdy primary campaign for the right to face Donald Trump.
At a Democratic party dinner on Saturday in Columbia celebrating South Carolina’s new status as the first Democratic primary state, the US president returned to thank them for it, one week before voters head to the polls.
“I wouldn’t be here without the Democratic voters of South Carolina, and that’s a fact,” he said. “You’re the reason I am president. You’re the reason Donald Trump is a defeated former president. You’re the reason Donald Trump is a loser. And you’re the reason we’re going to win and beat him again.”
The Democratic National Committee changed its bylaws at Biden’s behest last year to designate South Carolina’s primary as the party’s first nomination contest, rankling Iowa and New Hampshire. Iowa’s botched 2020 caucuses contributed to the change, but party leaders argued that South Carolina’s voters better reflected the racial and economic diversity of the country. That, and Biden plainly wanted to reward his South Carolina supporters.
Biden specifically praised James Clyburn, South Carolina’s only Democratic congressman, long a kingmaker in South Carolina politics.
“Jim is the reason I’m president,” Biden said.
Clyburn introduced Biden, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville and citing America’s historical ability to “repair its faults” as a mark of its greatness. Clyburn also read a litany of accomplishments of the Biden administration – about the rollout of vaccines, the infrastructure bill, student loan forgiveness and the Chips Act – as an answer to “Russian bots” on social media challenging those accomplishments.
“If you go down I-26 today where it intersects with 126, you’ll see for the first time in decades,” Clyburn said. “What do we call it? Malfunction Junction being fixed for the first time in decades. If you’re driving from Columbia down I-26 on over to Orangeburg … you’ll see those four lanes, crowded for years, will soon be six lanes. Why? Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill.”
Biden also touted his economic record, with 14m jobs created so far, billions in student loan relief and capping the consumer price for insulin. And he pointedly noted political and economic gains made by Black voters, including a record number of Black women appointed to the federal judiciary, more Black Americans with health insurance and “the lowest levels of Black unemployment recorded in history”, he said. “The racial wealth gap is at its lowest level in 20 years.”
Biden’s address was also sharply partisan, as might be expected at one of his first actual campaign appearances of the 2024 campaign.
“Two months ago, my team began to work with a bipartisan group of senators to put together the toughest, smartest, fairest border security goal in history, the best one the nation’s ever seen,” Biden said. The bill would fund an additional 1,300 border patrol agents, 375 immigration judges, 1,600 asylum officers and 100 drug detection machines to stop fentanyl smuggling across the south-west border, he said.
The law would also give the president legal authorisation to declare an emergency and shut the border down.
“If that bill was a law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” Biden said.
Attendees expressed support for Biden’s posture on the border, and skepticism that Republicans would act.
“The Republicans will not pass this border bill,” said Barbara Cameron, a political activist in Orangeburg county. “They are the ones making all the noise about the border, but they really do not want to pass the border bill.”
Biden likened Trump to Herbert Hoover, one of two presidents who left office with fewer jobs at the end of his term than at its start. He also challenged Trump’s fitness, turning the former president’s tactics back on him.
“Have you noticed that he’s a little confused these days? He apparently can’t tell the difference between Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley.”
Biden’s speech was interrupted three times by protesters – twice by pro-Palestinian activists and once by a climate activist. All were quickly ejected.
While the stakes of the election in November are high, the stakes of the South Carolina Democratic primary are much lower.
Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota who is also running a long-shot campaign for president, acknowledged as much while addressing the audience before Biden’s speech, conceding that 95% of the audience was voting for Biden. “If you’re going to have a first-in-the-nation primary, you need two people on the ballot,” he said. He stopped telling a story about a difficult moment in his father’s life as background chatter swelled.
“Can I have your attention for just a minute? We’re all Democrats here,” he said, begging for some silence.
Biden’s political headwinds have less to do with partisan challenges than with a general negative sentiment toward his administration, as expressed in polling. Not that this matters to the partisans of South Carolina Democratic politics.
“I don’t care about ratings and polling,” said Charleen Smith, a retiree from Columbia. “Look at what he has accomplished. If you look at the list of accomplishments, you’d see how much more we’ve improved. It’s right in front of everybody’s face, if they will open their eyes and read it.”
• This article was amended on 29 January 2024 to correct a quote from Joe Biden, who referred to Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, not to Hillary Clinton and Nikki Haley as an earlier version said.
