Joe Biden aims to build on recent momentum on Saturday, when South Carolina officially launches the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The US president received a boost last month when he won an unsanctioned primary election in New Hampshire without even appearing on the ballot. A grassroots write-in campaign ensured that he brushed aside his challengers Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson.
Biden also enters South Carolina buoyed by positive economic news. The economy added 353,000 jobs in January while average hourly earnings rose 0.6%. The unemployment rate stands at 3.7%.
It was Biden’s victory here in the 2020 Democratic primary that rescued his broke and flailing campaign, convincing rivals that he was best positioned to win with Black voters and defeat the incumbent, Donald Trump.
“In 2020, it was South Carolina that put President Biden and me on the path to the White House,” Vice-President Kamala Harris told an audience in Orangeburg on Friday.
But buzz and turnout is sure to be lower this time, as is typical when an incumbent president is running without serious competition. Republicans do not hold their primary in South Carolina until 24 February, after nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
An Emerson College poll last month found that three in 10 South Carolina voters intend to take part in the Democratic primary. Nearly seven in 10 said they plan to vote for Biden compared with 5% for Phillips and 3% for Williamson, while 22% were undecided.
Among them on Saturday was Villa Middlesex, 72, a retired certified nursing assistant from North Charleston.
“I didn’t want to vote for him because he was too old, but I would rather vote for him to cut Trump’s percentages,” she said of Biden. “And what’s the girl’s name? Nikki Haley? I would not vote for Nikki Haley in a dog fight. I’d vote on the dog.”
Middlesex added that she sees Biden as having cleaned up “the trash … left off from” his predecessor.
“He’s not doing what everybody wants him to,” she said. “But we can’t do everything everybody wants us to do. He only can do what they allow him to do.”
Ab Abercrombie, a 79-year-old retired college professor from North Charleston, said he hoped to see a good turnout for Biden even if the primary wasn’t contested. While Abercrombie said he would have liked Biden to pressure the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, into a less devastating military campaign in Gaza, the retired professor was pleased with the president’s performance.
“I’m about a year younger than he is, and I couldn’t even begin to do that,” Abercrombie said of Biden’s job.
Meanwhile, 65-year-old Silvia Smalls – who works part-time cleaning classrooms – said she would like to see Biden prioritize immigration reform if he wins a second term in the Oval Office.
“You’ve got to give us a chance,” Smalls said, referring to people in the US who were already struggling to find places to live before additional competition resulting from the immigration crisis. “I mean – we’ve been struggling all these years.”
Gloria Alfandis, a 60-year-old caregiver in North Charleston, said the general public didn’t understand Biden’s success with the economy. But she said she would also like to see Biden more aggressively defend voting rights, saying he should be “compassionate – and not just for one bracket of the United States”.
With polls open from 7am to 7pm, it could be a momentous day for Democratic voters in South Carolina, as the state takes on a new role as host of the party’s first official primary election.
Last year, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) – encouraged by Biden – rewrote the presidential primary process and put South Carolina first on the calendar, arguing that the state’s racial and economic diversity was more representative of the Democratic party than Iowa or New Hampshire, which are about 90% white.
Speaking before a “First in the nation” banner in Orangeburg on Friday, Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, told supporters: “All eyes – not only in America but all over the world – all eyes are on South Carolina right now and I hope you are fired up!”
Harrison, who hails from South Carolina himself, noted the state’s long association with slavery and that, for all 48 years of his life, Iowa and New Hampshire had always gone first in picking presidents. “But this president came to this state and he saw us, he heard us, and he said: ‘You know what, you matter.’”
He added: “For too long we’ve been relegated to the back of the bus, but now we’re driving the damn bus!”
Come November, however, Biden is unlikely to compete hard in South Carolina. The state last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1976. In 2020, it went to Trump, a Republican, by nearly 12 percentage points.
