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 had long seen as his firewall. His 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.
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, who had been hoping to overtake Biden as the candidates of the party’s center, again proved unable to win nonwhite voters.
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.
For Biden, though, Saturday night brought 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 60%, far better than Sanders’ 17%.
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.
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In South Carolina, Biden also confronted an unlikely threat in 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 appeared to be falling far short of the breakthrough his advisers believed was possible.
Steyer’s cash could not overcome two more powerful assets that Biden possessed in South Carolina: long-standing relationships and a direct connection to former President Barack Obama, who is beloved by black voters.
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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 60% of the Democratic electorate is African American.
“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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .