COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Joe Biden easily won South Carolina’s Democratic primary on Saturday, clinching a state he pushed to lead off his party’s nominating process after it revived his then-struggling White House bid four years ago.
Biden defeated the other long-shot Democrats on South Carolina’s ballot, including Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and author Marianne Williamson. His reelection campaign invested heavily in driving up turnout in what it saw as a test drive of its efforts to mobilize Black voters, a key Democratic bloc central to Biden’s chances in a likely November rematch against former President Donald Trump.
“In 2020, it was the voters of South Carolina who proved the pundits wrong, breathed new life into our campaign, and set us on the path to winning the presidency,” Biden said in a statement. “Now in 2024, the people of South Carolina have spoken again and I have no doubt that you have set us on the path to winning the Presidency again — and making Donald Trump a loser — again.”
The Associated Press declared Biden the winner at 7:23 p.m. based on an analysis of initial vote results showing him with a decisive lead in key locations throughout the state. He won all 55 of the state’s Democratic delegates.
The victory comes following the president leading a Democratic National Committee effort to have South Carolina go first in the party’s primary, citing the state’s more racially diverse population compared to the traditional first-in-the-nation states of Iowa and New Hampshire, which are overwhelmingly white.
South Carolina 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 pushed for a revamped primary calendar that will see Nevada go second and the Democratic primary in Michigan, a large and diverse swing state, to Feb. 27, before an expansive field of states voting on March 5.
New Hampshire rejected the DNC’s plan and held a leadoff primary last month anyway. Biden didn’t campaign and his name wasn’t on the ballot, but still won by a sizable margin after supporters mounted a write-in campaign on his behalf.
Biden was aided by longtime South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn whose 2020 endorsement served as a long-awaited signal to the state’s Black voters that Biden would be the right candidate to advocate for their interests. Clyburn remains a close Biden ally and said Saturday night that he believed New Hampshire’s delegates should be seated at the party’s convention this summer and that Democrats should avoid any further infighting.
Campaigning in the state last week, the president said South Carolina was “the reason Donald Trump is a loser. And you’re the reason we’re going to win and beat him again,” framing the likely general election matchup with the GOP’s current frontrunner.
