S.C. Democrats head to the polls; Clinton, Sanders head out of state
S.C. Democrats head to the polls; Clinton, Sanders head out of state
(about 2 hours later)
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Democratic presidential contest has moved to South Carolina, where voters began casting their ballots Saturday in a primary that serves as two starkly different milestones for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Democrats are still voting in South Carolina, but the Democratic candidates were already moving beyond this state on Saturday — both literally and figuratively — as a victory seems nearly certain for former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Clinton is looking for her expected victory here to prove her strong support among African American voters — and to cement her status as the presumptive front-runner heading toward Super Tuesday three days later, when six of 11 Democratic contests will take place in Southern states with large populations of black voters.
In South Carolina itself, Clinton sent surrogates including Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) — the top-ranking black Democrat in the House — to polling places to make one last pitch. In many places, it seemed that the voters didn’t need it: black voters, seen as key to Clinton’s victory here, praised Clinton’s long experience in Washington.
Sanders is looking ahead to contests where he has more chance of winning — and a chance, he says, to hang onto the momentum and enthusiasm that his strong liberal message has generated in this unusual election year.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in the last eight years, and Hillary is the best person out there to continue the progress,” said Al Tucker, a 67-year-old African American in Columbia. “You look at South Carolina and we’re at the the bottom in anything you can think of: education, poverty. I think Hillary would be good because she’s gonna look out for us.”
For South Carolina Democrats, Saturday is there chance to decide who best reflects their goals and beliefs.
But Clinton herself had already left the state, planning to return only for Saturday night’s party. Clinton had changed plans to visit Alabama, and changed her focus to another key contest, three days ahead.
There was a steady flow of cars coming and going into the Bluff Road Park recreation center’s parking lot by 11:40 a.m. Saturday in Columbia. Voters were primarily older, African American and Hillary supporters.
“I need your help on Tuesday,” Clinton told a supporter at the Urban Standard coffee shop in Birmingham. Alabama is one of 12 states where Democrats will vote on “Super Tuesday” next week, and black voters there will also be key to Clinton’s success.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in the last eight years, and Hillary is the best person out there to continue the progress,” said Al Tucker, a 67-year-old African American. “You look at South Carolina and we’re at the the bottom in anything you can thing of, educations, poverty. I think Hillary would be good because she’s gonna look out for us.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Clinton’s main rival, also left South Carolina early on Saturday, to speak to crowds in two other Super Tuesday states, Texas and Minnesota.
Jenice Richardson, 58, another African American resident of Columbia, said she supports Clinton because of her experience: “She knows about keeping the country safe because she’s been doing it a long time.”
But unlike Clinton, he did not plan to return to the Palmetto State. In fact, when polls close in South Carolina — at the moment when the race might be called for Clinton — Sanders did not even plan to be on the ground. His itinerary calls for him to be in the air – on a plane with no Internet access – at the time the polls close. It wasn’t clear Saturday how or when Sanders might acknowledge the South Carolina results.
Both Clinton and Sanders are girding for a long primary fight that seemed far-fetched only a few months ago, and they spent at least part of the day outside South Carolina, as they tried to rally voters for Super Tuesday.
On Saturday morning, Clinton left South Carolina for a rally in Birmingham, Ala., but she will return to Columbia later in the day as polls close. Her husband, former president Bill Clinton, was spending the day campaigning in Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama — all Super Tuesday states. Meanwhile, her surrogates in South Carolina, including Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state’s highest-ranking Democrat, plan to fan out to polling locations across the state.
Sanders spent much of the past week campaigning in other states — and attacking Clinton on an array of issues with new gusto. On Saturday morning, he flew to Texas, one of the delegate-rich Super Tuesday states, with planned stops in Austin and Dallas. And later in the day, he will be at a rally in Rochester, Minn., another Tuesday ballot.
In an interview this week, Sanders acknowledged that South Carolina is a “hard state for us, no ifs, buts and maybes.”
“She has names of many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who supported her. You start off with that, you have those votes in the bank, and you go on,” Sanders said.
“You know what? I started off without one person voting for us. We have to earn every bloody vote, and that’s hard stuff. Hillary Clinton has very strong roots in the African American community. We have had to build those roots.”
[Sanders unloads on Clinton during raucous speech in Chicago]
Clinton began a barnstorming tour of South Carolina on Tuesday. She and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, crisscrossed the state on separate itineraries, hitting a total of about a dozen events over three days, speaking to predominantly African American audiences of a few hundred in cities and small towns. Each drew on decades of experience with the powerful church- and civic-based black voting turnout machine.
Although neither Clinton mentioned Sanders much, the nature of the events and the supporters who attended them illustrated how hard it will be for the socialist senator from Vermont to break a bond with black voters forged first by Bill Clinton.
“There are a lot of barriers, aren’t there?” Hillary Clinton said to nodding heads in tiny Kingstree, S.C.
In Florence on Thursday, W.B. Wilson, a member of the local county council, shook his head when asked about Sanders.
“I am not familiar with him at all,” Wilson said.
Joyce T. Marshall was shut out of the Florence event when the crowd grew too large. Along with about 50 others, she shivered in a chilly wind outdoors to hear Hillary Clinton on a speaker.
“Hillary has done a lot for us, and her husband has done a lot for us,” Marshall said.
[What happens when Hillary Clinton crashes a bachelor party? She’s in the photos.]
[What happens when Hillary Clinton crashes a bachelor party? She’s in the photos.]
Sanders insisted that he has not written off South Carolina, despite expectations that he will lose by double digits in a red state where black voters are likely to make up a majority of the electorate in the Democratic contest Saturday.
Sanders had hoped to make inroads in South Carolina, to demonstrate that he could undermine Clinton’s “firewall” of Southern states with large populations of black Democrats.
But after a news conference Wednesday morning in this capital city, Sanders left South Carolina for a 48-hour whirlwind through Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota. He returned Friday afternoon for a final push before voting begins at 7 a.m. Saturday.
But that didn’t happen: recent polls showed him 25 or more points down here. And in Texas — where Sanders drew more than 10,000 people at a rally in Austin — he did not actually mention South Carolina’s primary at al.
Sanders drew large, enthusiastic crowds along the way, including close to 9,000 in Tulsa, more than 7,100 in Kansas City, Mo., about 3,600 in a suburb of Cleveland and more than 6,500 in Chicago.
Instead, Sanders recounted the more successful parts of his upstart challenge to Clinton: his near-tie in Iowa, his big win in New Hampshire and his come-from-behind 5-point loss in Nevada.
Sanders bristled when asked this week whether his travel schedule was a de facto acknowledgment that he cannot win here.
“And now we come to Super Tuesday,” he said, predicted with a big turnout in Texas.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said, as two African American state lawmakers who joined him at a news conference shook their heads.
For Clinton, a big win in South Carolina would reestablish her as the presumptive Democratic front-runner. And it could be a favorable sign going into Super Tuesday, when when six of 11 Democratic contests will take place in Southern states with large populations of black voters.
“We are fighting here in South Carolina as hard as we can,” he said, adding that Clinton just spent two days in California raising money. “I mean, she is not writing off the state.”
[Sanders unloads on Clinton during raucous speech in Chicago]
During her tour, Clinton billed herself as a unifier who would address the problems of South Carolina’s impoverished and undereducated. She name-checked local issues, trashed the Republican governor and wrapped her arms around locally prominent African American leaders.
Sanders is looking ahead to contests where he has more chance of winning — and a chance, he says, to hang onto the momentum and enthusiasm that his strong liberal message has generated in this unusual election year.
A black pastor welcomed her to his church. A black woman in braids warmed up the crowd at an appearance to which Clinton arrived very late. The black mayor of Columbia introduced her at an event Wednesday and starred in an evocative television advertisement for Clinton, done in the form of a letter to his young daughters.
He has said he is prepared for a drawn-out battle for the GOP nomination. But Super Tuesday could test whether voters will let Sanders go that far.
Five black women from around the country who lost children to gun violence or in police custody came to South Carolina to campaign for Clinton this week. The mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and others sat alongside her on Tuesday for an emotional discussion of gun control and police misconduct.
He will win his home state of Vermont, of course. But Sanders is also hoping for victories in states like Oklahoma and Massachusetts, where polls show Clinton may be more beatable. Sanders also seems to believe he has a chance of success in Texas, given his campaign schedule there on Saturday. But recent polls have shown him down significantly.
Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said Sanders began legwork in the state in 2014 and attended a state party function last year that Clinton did not.
In South Carolina, it seemed that Sanders’ efforts had not been nearly enough to overcome Clinton’s long connections here — which stretch back to her husband Bill Clinton’s first run for the presidency in 1992.
“He’s trying to figure out ways to break into, sort of, your middle-aged, senior citizen, African American community,” which is the mainstay of Clinton’s support, Harrison said.
“She’s far and away the most qualified but she has some real issues,” said Roger Blau, 70, of Columbia, S.C., who voted for Clinton. “She’s very intelligent, very qualified, very experienced. But I don’t know if she’ll get a lot done with a Republican congress.”
“His challenge is nobody knew who Bernie Sanders was,” Harrison said. “And second, once he sufficiently has name ID, convincing people he’s the best person to carry water for them.”
At Shandon Baptist Church in the city of Forest Acres, S.C., 96 year-old Harriet Pooley had come to vote for Hillary. She said she was ready for a change in Washington.
Even Sanders’s biggest boosters in South Carolina are not defining a win as beating Clinton.
“I voted for Hillary because I want women power, and I want the women to take over,” Pooley said. “The men have made a mess. It’s about time we took over.”
Justin T. Bamberg, one of six black South Carolina state lawmakers supporting Sanders, said that a loss by 10 to 15 percentage points would send a message that Sanders was competitive.
Still, some cast their ballots for Sanders.
“There is one candidate on the Democratic side who has to win here: Hillary Clinton,” Bamberg said. “Bernie Sanders just has to do fairly decent here.”
“He sees drastic change, and I don’t see anybody else seeing that,” said Amber Lee, 28, at the Sims Park neighborhood center, where voters were scarce, but decidedly for Sanders. “I see my father, and he’s been a staunch Republican all his life. And Bernie is saying what he’s saying, only differently. And that’s what I agree with — let people do what they want to do and give them the means to do it. And that’s what I think Bernie’s trying to do.”
Bamberg, who also serves as the attorney for the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed black motorist who was shot to death last April by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer, said Clinton had a huge head start in the state.
John Mucklebauer, 46, is an English professor at the University of South Carolina, so Sanders’ stance on higher education affordability hits home: “He’s someone who actually cares about education and wants people to have access to it.”
“Bill Clinton had a certain swag that was attractive to voters,” Bamberg said.
And Emily Drucker, 28, said she supports Sanders because: “He sounds like how I feel. He seems uncorrupted.”
Scott’s family is not among those campaigning for Clinton.
Anne Gearan and freelancer Hannah Jeffrey in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.
Sanders’s boosters have been running full throttle even as the candidate divides his time among other key states, Bamberg said. He pointed to a large phone-banking effort Thursday afternoon featuring Killer Mike, an Atlanta rapper who has been a frequent Sanders surrogate.
Other Sanders backers active in the state in recent days include Benjamin T. Jealous, the former NAACP head, who accompanied him to an African American church in Columbia earlier in the week.
Several of Sanders’s events this week, including those in other states, were aimed at least in part at the black vote.
On Thursday, Sanders visited Flint, Mich., the majority African American city suffering from a contaminated water crisis. Clinton visited Flint this month, just before Sanders beat her soundly in the New Hampshire primary.
Sanders said that he has the potential to do better with African American voters elsewhere as the campaign continues and he becomes better known. At an appearance Thursday in a packed basketball arena at the historically black Chicago State University, he was introduced by a series of African American supporters, including Jonathan Jackson, son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
At the rally, and at another Friday morning in Hibbing, Minn., Sanders attacked Clinton on several fronts, including her acceptance of campaign contributions and speaking fees from Wall Street interests. He also criticized her support, as first lady and as a New York senator, of welfare reform, free trade, an anti-gay rights bill and the Iraq War — all measures he opposed in Congress.
“I don’t go to Wall Street in the morning and talk to the unions in the afternoon,” he said in Hibbing.
The unusual broadside was part of an a stepped-up effort in the wake of Sanders’s loss to Clinton in Nevada to draw distinctions more aggressively.
Several of Sanders’s destinations this week were states with contests on Tuesday. Some hold contests later in March. Sanders’s advisers are hoping to pull off five victories in the 11 states that hold primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, all of them with relatively small black populations.
Abby Phillip, Anne Gearan and freelancer Hannah Jeffrey in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.
