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COLUMBIA, S.C. — Over the weekend, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore quoted Martin Luther King Jr., ate fried fish with hot sauce, and thanked the Democratic voters — most of them Black — whose primacy in Democratic politics is part of Joe Biden’s ambiguous legacy to his party.
But while Biden’s Democratic National Committee put South Carolina first, in part to shut down any possible challenge to the aging president, the state may not fight to keep the privilege.
“We had nothing to do with being No. 1,” Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told Semafor at his “world-famous fish fry,” flanked by Moore and Walz in matching CLYBURN T-shirts. “That’s something that Joe Biden decided to do, for whatever reason.”
Democrats won’t set their next calendar for more than a year, but the move to put South Carolina first had been pitched as a tribute to Black voters. Moore and Walz were embraced by party activists, most getting their first in-person look at one of the country’s first Black governors and at the Minnesotan who shared a ticket with their first Black female nominee.
“Even if you have no moral courage in your body at all, if you want to see us survive economically, you’re damn sure we’ve got to start investing in Black communities,” Walz told delegates at the party’s convention on Saturday.
But Democrats weren’t sure that the state needed to stay first on their calendar, a source of internal friction during Biden’s presidency. Moore said he “hadn’t put enough thought into it,” while Walz said it was “important” to keep South Carolina at the front.
“I don’t know why we would move it,” state party chair Christale Spain told Semafor. “If we’re serious about keeping our base, why wouldn’t we keep the primary that we moved up because of our base?”
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South Carolina, which has not voted for a Democratic president since Jimmy Carter, has played a powerful role in picking that party’s nominees. Clyburn was part of that, lobbying to ensure that the state got one of the “first four” primaries in 2008 along with Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
For Republicans, the “first in the South” primary empowered conservatives and evangelical Christians, canceling out the New Hampshire independents who liked to boost more liberal candidates. For Democrats, it empowered Black voters who tended to be less ideologically progressive than Iowa caucus-goers — and more loyal to the party than white New Englanders.
“We haven’t heard from the most committed constituents in the Democratic Party, the African American community,” Biden said at a rally here the night of the 2020 New Hampshire primary, betting correctly that a South Carolina win would vault him to the nomination. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent — that’s the percentage of African American voters who haven’t had the chance to vote in America.”
Jaime Harrison, a former state party chair here who presided over the schedule change as DNC chair, recalled how Biden fought for it. At an early meeting over the primary calendar in 2021, when DNC leaders briefly brought up South Carolina, Biden chimed in and said it deserved a bigger role.
“I go all over the country, and I meet Black folks in this state or that state, but they all have family in South Carolina,” said Biden, according to Harrison.
During his last days in office, when Biden flew Air Force One to Charleston to thank Black voters and Clyburn for their loyalty, he told Harrison that the new schedule should stay in place.
“He said to me: Listen, I’m proud that we chose to put South Carolina first,” said Harrison. “He said, that’s gonna be a part of my legacy, and I’m gonna fight like hell to make sure it works.”
The View From democrats
Harrison, like many Democrats here, believed that some of the party’s post-2024 problems could be fixed in South Carolina. Harris lagged recent Democratic nominees with Black men, and Trump made gains with working class voters of all races. Campaigning in South Carolina would put candidates right in front of them.
“Who is really the influential bloc here?” he said. “It is older, middle-aged African American folks who’ve been through something in life, who’ve not always had everything that they wanted but have worked hard to provide for themselves and their family. They take that pragmatism, that seasoning that they’ve gotten from life, and they apply that to looking at who can actually win. Not who delivers the fanciest speeches.”
In South Carolina, those voters are also used to losing. Democrats have not elected a governor here since 1998 — Jim Hodges, who Walz shouted out from the stage at Friday night’s fundraising dinner. Republican-drawn maps have locked Democrats into one safe House seat, Clyburn’s, and Donald Trump’s coattails reinforced the GOP supermajority in Columbia. The state’s largest cities, which had Democratic mayors when Biden took office, are now led by Republicans.
Walz and Moore framed all this as a temporary setback, and a reason for Democrats to fight harder and act faster. They put special emphasis on the needs and histories of Black voters and poor people.
“Right now, the Trump administration is actively divesting in Black communities, actively dismantling our minority business programs, and actively banning books about our history,” said Moore. “If Trump can do so much bad in such a small amount of time, why can’t we do so much good? Now is the time for us to be impatient, too.”
Moore’s speech was boycotted by a Black state legislator, John King, angered by Moore’s veto of a bill to study reparations for the descendants of slaves. In an interview, Moore ticked off programs that he’d already expanded to help Black Marylanders.
“This would be the fifth study in 25 years. What are we studying?” said Moore. “We have got to stop being the party of bureaucracy and multi-year studies on things that we know the answers to, and be the party of action.”
It would be a while before Democrats decided that the voters who heard this message would get the first vote on their 2028 nominee, or a later vote. Clyburn was less concerned about that than Biden had been.
“The most important hitter on a baseball team is a clean-up hitter,” Clyburn said on Friday, “and he comes in fourth place.”
David’s view
To riff on Harrison’s remark, the modern role of South Carolina’s primary has been a Democratic gut check. White liberals get their say in Iowa, secular white moderates vet the candidates in New Hampshire, and multiracial progressive unions set their terms in Nevada.
When Biden won the primary, Black voters made up 56% of the electorate, and 83% of all voters said they attended church at least once a week, compared to 48% in New Hampshire. Half of the electorate called itself “moderate,” or “conservative,” groups that were in the deep minority in Iowa and New Hampshire. Biden thrived once he got away from protesters asking about “Medicare for All” and deportation moratoriums.
That wasn’t Biden’s stated reason for rewarding that state. He cited its debt to Black voters, and other Democrats cite its rich, painful civil rights history, as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Ca.) did after he saw chatter about South Carolina moving down the calendar. But the remarks Moore and Walz gave, and the receptions they got, demonstrated why Democrats like campaigning here. They talked almost entirely about economic results and messaging and how their party would build out the safety net — the sweet spot that Republicans and protesters knock them off of.
They did not talk about Biden, whose legacy here is complicated. “The one thing about Black voters that you should understand: They’re pragmatic and they’re loyal,” Harrison told me. No Democrat would benefit from criticizing Biden here, and the ongoing media/GOP study of the former president’s choice to run again was seen as pure distraction.
Still: Biden described his choice to put South Carolina first as a legacy project. His defeat strengthens the negotiating power of New Hampshire Democrats, who expect to vote first again, and other state parties that want to bid for an early calendar spot.
Notable
- In Politico, Brakkton Booker talks to Democrats who worry that the Biden hangover might give another Southern state the plum primary spot: “Some people just need to get over themselves and whatever issues they have with Joe Biden.”
- For CNN, Arit John and Jeff Simon ask South Carolina Democrats what they really want from the next candidate: “I think South Carolina is looking for a person of the people, that can speak to the people without lowering and debasing themselves, like the current administration seems to be doing.”