Winning South Carolina, Biden Makes Case Against Sanders: 'Win Big or Lose'

Propelled by an outpouring of support from South Carolina’s African American voters, Biden easily overcame a late effort by Sanders to upset the former vice president in a state he has long seen as his firewall. The victory will vault Biden into Super Tuesday, where polls open in just over 48 hours, as the clear alternative to Sanders for establishment-aligned Democrats.

Biden, in an exuberant victory speech Saturday night, looked ahead to a long, ideological struggle and made repeated arguments against Sanders, though not by name.

He said voters faced a momentous choice in the coming days. Democrats, Biden argued, wanted results rather than revolution, improvements to the Affordable Care Act rather than a disruptive transformation of the health care system, and a candidate who would “take on the NRA and gun manufacturers and not protect them.”

“If Democrats want a nominee who’s a Democrat, a lifelong Democrat, a proud Democrat, an Obama-Biden Democrat, join us,” Biden said, adding, “We have the option of winning big or losing big. That’s the choice.”

As much as the results here offered new life to Biden, the one-time front-runner before he faltered in the fall, they dealt a perhaps fatal blow to two moderates, Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Both had been hoping to overtake Biden as the candidate of the party’s center, but again proved unable to win nonwhite voters; Buttigieg received only 2% of support from black voters, according to early exit polls.

Perhaps even more consequentially, Biden’s triumph here also increased pressure on Michael Bloomberg to best Biden in the 15 states and territories voting Tuesday — or consider exiting the race.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a progressive rival to Sanders, also showed no strong appeal to African American voters in the Republican-leaning state. But unlike the moderate candidates, Warren was unlikely to face similar pressure to make way for Biden, and some party leaders hope she will stay in the race and complicate Sanders’ efforts to consolidate the left.

Biden also overcame a challenge from Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund investor from California who poured millions of dollars into courting black voters, and in some cases putting influential state lawmakers on his campaign payroll. But Steyer fell far short of the breakthrough his campaign believed was possible, and several hours after the polls closed he dropped out of the race.

But for Biden, the victory was a moment to savor.

Low on cash and without a victory in the first three contests, Biden desperately needed South Carolina, a state for which he has long had a personal affection, to resurrect his third and perhaps final quest for the presidency.

Facing a humiliating fifth-place finish in New Hampshire in February, Biden flew out of the New England cold before the polls had even closed there and effectively staked his campaign on South Carolina, telling supporters in Columbia that evening that he was counting on the state’s more racially diverse set of voters to offset his dismal showing in the first two states, both heavily white.

Then, after finishing a distant second to Sanders in Nevada, he came directly to South Carolina. He campaigned almost exclusively here while other Democrats fanned out across the much larger map of states that vote Tuesday.

In the debate this past week, Biden promised to win South Carolina and projected confidence that he would prevail with African Americans. He did both, claiming black voters with 64%, far better than Sanders’ 15%, exit polls showed.

The results here represented at least an interruption of what had loomed as a march to the nomination by Sanders. South Carolina was the first state where Sanders did not finish at the top, and his distant second to Biden came after he had made a late effort to score a win.

Biden has led in every poll of South Carolina, but after his Nevada landslide, Sanders decided to try to deliver a finishing blow against Biden. Sanders increased his television advertising in the state and intensified his campaign schedule with the goal of denying Biden the chance to reignite his candidacy and perhaps wrapping up the nomination fight by the middle of March.

Addressing supporters in Virginia, Sanders acknowledged Biden’s success in South Carolina and advised his audience to prepare for the ups and downs of a long campaign. “That will not be the only defeat,” Sanders said of South Carolina. “There are a lot of states in this country, nobody wins them all.”

But ticking off his victories so far, Sanders also pointed in a confident tone toward Tuesday’s primaries as the next frontier.

Warren, at a rally in Houston, also looked ahead to next week. “I’ll be the first to say that the first four contests haven’t gone exactly as I’d hoped,” she told supporters. “But Super Tuesday is three days away and we’re looking forward to gaining as many delegates to the convention as we can.”

Still, even before all the votes had been counted, some prominent Democrats were nudging other candidates toward the exits.

“This is a two-person race right now,” David Plouffe, former President Barack Obama’s onetime campaign manager, said on MSNBC.

Having carried South Carolina as a kind of favorite-son candidate, Biden is counting on that result to ripple throughout the region and help him recover some of the support from black voters elsewhere that he lost in recent months, largely to Bloomberg. He needs voters to shift back in his direction quickly if he is to edge ahead of Sanders in enough states to deliver a strong showing on Super Tuesday.

But absent an overwhelming wave of new support for Biden, the best-case scenario for his campaign may still be a daunting one: a monthslong battle against a tireless opponent with superior financial and organizational resources at his disposal, and a formidable well of support from the Democratic Party’s left wing.

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Sanders trounced Biden in all three previous contests in the Democratic race, including by a huge margin in the richly diverse state of Nevada. And he has had a weekslong head start in a number of key Super Tuesday states where early voting has long been underway, including California, which on its own could give Sanders a sizable lead in the national delegate count.

Biden is now likely to face pressure and scrutiny from his fellow Democrats of a kind he has not received in weeks, in a test of whether a candidate who has spent most of the race grasping for his political footing can achieve sustained momentum for the first time since voting began.

Even though — or perhaps because — he has been favored all along to win the South Carolina primary, Biden drew virtually no attacks from other candidates in the run-up to Saturday’s vote. In the past two debates, the former vice president was seen as handling himself with uncharacteristic confidence, as Sanders and Bloomberg absorbed the brunt of their rivals’ hostility.

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Biden wielded two powerful assets in South Carolina: long-standing relationships and a direct connection to Obama, who is beloved by black voters.

Biden was also aided immensely by his close bond with Rep. James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress and most influential Democrat in South Carolina.

After months of remaining neutral, Clyburn offered Biden a full-throated endorsement Wednesday before a bank of television cameras and photographers at a news conference outside Charleston. On Saturday, nearly 50% of South Carolina voters said Clyburn’s support was an important factor in their decision, according to exit polls.

Even more crucial to Biden was his service as vice president under the nation’s first black president, a relationship that earned him a reservoir of goodwill in a state where about 56% of the Democratic electorate Saturday was African American, according to exit polls.

“He was Obama’s vice president, and he stuck by him,” said Luther Johnson, a Columbia resident who came to see Biden at a black-owned barber shop Friday.

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Biden was noticeably more at ease as he wound his way through South Carolina’s churches, barber shops and barbecue joints than he had been in Iowa and New Hampshire. As he likes to remind people here, he has vacationed in the state’s Lowcountry for decades and, as a young senator mourning the death of his first wife, forged a close friendship with Ernest Hollings, South Carolina’s long-serving senator. Indeed, Biden eulogized both of the state’s 20th-century political titans, Hollings and the Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond.

But Biden did not last long enough in his first two presidential campaigns to make it to South Carolina — Saturday marked his first win there in his three White House bids.

His back-against-the-wall victory was in keeping with South Carolina’s tradition of turning around presidential campaigns. George W. Bush in 2000, Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 all revived their candidacies in the state after losing decisively in New Hampshire.

Biden’s victory Saturday is no guarantee he will be catapulted to the nomination in the same fashion. Even as voters were going to the polls Saturday, Clyburn offered a blistering assessment of Biden’s organization.

“We will have to sit down and get serious about how we retool this campaign,” the lawmaker said on CNN, adding: “I’m not going to sit back idly and watch people mishandle this campaign.”

Biden’s operations have been sorely lacking in Super Tuesday states, local Democrats say. Sanders is poised to rack up hundreds of delegates that day, including in large states like California, and Bloomberg and Warren are also in contention to claim delegates.

Buttigieg is also hoping to be competitive, but on a conference call Saturday, his campaign aides declined to say how many delegates he would need to win to remain viable.

“We really believe this is about limiting Sen. Sanders’ lead and making sure that it is possible for an opposing candidate to close the gap in the remaining states that become more friendly,” said Michael Halle, a senior adviser to Buttigieg.

And in a sign that Bloomberg had no intention of yielding to a potential Biden comeback, his campaign announced Saturday that it had purchased a lengthy block of airtime on multiple national networks for a three-minute commercial Sunday, styled as an address by Bloomberg to the American people about the looming threat of the coronavirus. The ad showed Bloomberg speaking directly into the camera against a backdrop resembling the Oval Office, presenting himself as a strong leader for a time of crisis.

Bloomberg’s campaign manager, Kevin Sheekey, responded to the South Carolina primary with a statement stressing that the candidate had not yet appeared on any primary ballot, and nodding toward the national scope of the primary Tuesday.

“Mike is the only candidate to campaign in all 14 Super Tuesday states over the last two months and we look forward to Tuesday,” Sheekey said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .