This year’s Democratic primary in South Carolina might be the most important competition in the contest’s short history. Since first becoming a binding primary in 1988, the state’s contest has become a bellwether for an important constituency: Southern African American voters. Though most Southern states aren’t competitive in general elections, Southern African Americans form the base of the Democratic Party and are essential to its success, even if pundits more frequently focus on swing states and suburban voters.
That is why the winner in South Carolina has won the Democratic nomination every year except 1988 and 2004. If a Democratic candidate can’t appeal to these crucial African American voters, he or she is unlikely to win the nomination or the presidency.
The rise of the South Carolina primary fit into the Democratic Party’s effort to open up the nominating process. After the chaos of Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the McGovern-Fraser Commission investigated ways for the party to choose delegates through a more transparent and democratic process. They hoped that this would make the party more responsive to activists and voters. The result was the rise of a parade of single-state primaries in the 1970s and 1980s.
By 1988, Southern states pushed to have their primaries on the same day, early in the process, to highlight their significance within the national electoral landscape. With the strong support of the South, Ronald Reagan had won landslides over Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1980 and 1984, giving Southern states greater cache within a Democratic Party eager to regain the White House. As late as 1976, Carter had captured every state of the former Confederacy except Virginia. But many Americans now felt that the Democratic Party had grown too liberal, and that had been reflected by a Republican sweep of the South in 1984.
Many backers of a Southern primary day, including elected officials such as Gov. George Nigh of Oklahoma, hoped it would “increase the prospects of nominating a centrist candidate.” But they fundamentally misunderstood the Democratic base in the South. When civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who had run for president in 1984, declared his 1988 candidacy, it became clear that the South voting early might not contribute to a moderate nominee.
While the region leaned right more broadly, the large number of African American voters across the South made Jackson a front-runner in many of those contests — including in South Carolina, his home state.
And he delivered, winning South Carolina, 55 percent to 17 percent, over Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.). But while Jackson gained momentum from the win, it came after other Southern primaries, minimizing its impact. Michael Dukakis, who finished fourth in South Carolina with 6 percent — behind not only Jackson and Gore but also “uncommitted,” which “won” 19 percent of the caucus vote — eventually secured the nomination.
South Carolina wasn’t crucial in 1988, and state party operatives wanted to change that. First, they replaced the state’s caucuses with a primary in 1992. Timothy Bledsoe and Harold Birch, faculty members at the University of South Carolina, argued in the pages of the State, the state capital’s newspaper, that the caucuses had been a failure because caucuses catered primarily to activists and “ideologues” within the party, boosting Jackson, while a primary would engage “casual Democrats” — i.e. moderates.
But South Carolina’s primary evolved into something very different from what its initial backers had intended. The contest turned into a critical place for candidates to prove their strength with African American voters, who had become a core Democratic constituency over the previous quarter-century, thanks to the civil rights legislation supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Republicans’ lurch to the right, especially on racial issues.
For example, Bill Clinton’s popularity in Southern primaries during the 1992 campaign showed that the small-state governor had a viable pathway to the Democratic nomination. Not only that, Clinton’s primary campaign provided a template for his victorious general-election push. He knitted together a coalition of African Americans voters and moderates who had drifted away from the Democratic Party. This combination carried Clinton to victory in states such as Georgia and Kentucky, which had gone to Republicans in 1984 and 1988. Such success hinged on a galvanized African American turnout — and better success among moderate and conservative white voters.
The moderate Clinton’s success in the South that year boosted the Southern Democratic argument about the need to foreground Southern primaries such as South Carolina’s. Eventually, when the Democratic Party allowed states to move up their primary schedules for the 2004 presidential campaign, South Carolina took advantage to become the first contest in the South. As in the 1980s, it was assumed that such a move would favor moderate candidates for the nomination.
Yet South Carolina’s most memorable and arguably most important contest, in 2008, defied that prediction. Barack Obama’s decisive victory over Hillary Clinton came only after intense campaigning and organizing enabled Obama to overcome a sizable deficit in the two months before the primary. It proved that his surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses was no fluke.
His aggressive outreach campaign convinced many South Carolina African Americans that the senator from Illinois actually had a chance to win the Democratic nomination. The win proved that Obama was a serious contender, promising a long and bruising primary campaign. It also showed the importance of African American voters, who just months before were assumed to be largely loyal to Clinton — and showed that these voters were not willing to be taken for granted.
When Bill Clinton seemingly dismissed Obama’s landslide victory, saying, “Jackson ran a good campaign and Obama ran a good campaign here” in South Carolina, pundits quickly said he was dismissing the African American majority’s political agency by asserting that they simply voted for the African American candidate whenever one was on the ballot. The backlash was fierce: Bill Clinton’s role on the campaign trail was reduced for several weeks after the South Carolina primary, and state African Americans continued to support Obama by huge margins.
Eight years later, the South Carolina primary served as a key victory in Hillary Clinton’s second attempt to win the White House and a damaging rebuttal to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s attempts to make inroads among skeptical African American voters. Yet, even in victory, South Carolina exposed what would prove to be Clinton’s Achilles’ heel throughout the primaries and the general election. Sanders (I-Vt.) accused Clinton of being on the wrong side of history on race and crime, reminding voters of her comments about “super-predators” — mostly African American youths in the 1990s who purportedly symbolized the problem of crime in major urban centers. Such charges damaged Clinton, depressing turnout among African Americans in the general election.
This year’s South Carolina primary promises to be the most important one since 2008 — perhaps ever. With recent polling showing former vice president Joe Biden and Sanders jockeying for position in a crowded field, and with national polling showing former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is not on the ballot in South Carolina, gaining traction, the primary will go a long way toward determining who has momentum headed into Super Tuesday three days later. The need to galvanize the African American vote to give the Democratic nominee any chance in November makes the South Carolina primary pivotal. Whoever wins South Carolina not only has momentum heading into Super Tuesday, but that winner has always performed well with African American voters.
The crucial placement of South Carolina’s primary reflects how African American voters are a necessary constituency for any Democrat running for the White House. As the candidacies of Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama illustrated, capturing their support is necessary to win not only the Democratic nomination, but the presidency.