Hillary Clinton dominated Bernie Sanders in South Carolina’s Democratic primary on Saturday, beating the Vermont senator by nearly 50 points. It’s a colossal win in a state where Vermont senator Bernie Sanders effectively surrendered after his poor showing with black voters during last week’s Nevada caucus.
Sanders wasn’t even in the state when the vote was called. He left for Minnesota before the polls closed, refusing to give a concession speech in the state where he crumpled under Clinton’s weight. And for days his campaign has focused on other states, moving to places such as Missouri and Oklahoma and largely ceding the southern states set to vote on Super Tuesday.
The margin of Clinton’s victory is massive, easily surpassing Barack Obama’s dominant 28 percent win in 2008. It was driven predominantly by African-American voters, who made up about 62 percent of the South Carolina electorate; among them, 84 percent voted for Clinton, according to ABC. Their near-monolithic support for the former secretary of state severely undercuts Sanders’s aggressive attempts to make inroads with black voters nationwide. And coupled with this Nevada loss — where he lost black voters by more than 50 points — it could resign him, from this point forward, to what is essentially a protest candidacy.
Clinton largely wrote off Sanders in an exuberant South Carolina victory speech, turning her attention instead to the general election and her likely opponent, Donald Trump. “Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again. America has never stopped being great,” she yelled. “But we do need to make America whole again! Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers!”
#share#“I know it sometimes feels little odd for someone running for the presidency in these times to say we need more love and kindness in America,” she said later, still with an eye to the general. “But I’m telling you we do, we do. We have so much to look forward to. There is no doubt in my mind that America’s best years are ahead of us.”
The Sanders campaign insisted they would continue challenging Clinton into Super Tuesday and beyond, at times hinting they’d keep up the fight all the way to July’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia. ”In politics, on a given night, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose — tonight we lost,” Sanders said, moments after getting off the plane in Minnesota on Saturday. “I congratulate Secretary Clinton on a very strong victory. Tuesday, over 800 delegates are at stake, and I intend to win many, many of them.”
#related#But Sanders’s total collapse in South Carolina bodes poorly for the Vermont senator. Over the last several weeks, the senator has worked tirelessly to win the support of powerful African-American groups. He relentlessly courted Al Sharpton, meeting with the civil-rights leader multiple times in the run-up to the votes in Nevada and South Carolina. And he deployed black surrogates across the state, including rapper Killer Mike and Princeton professor Cornel West, in the hopes of pulling African Americans away from Clinton’s candidacy.
Now the race moves to Super Tuesday, where the southern states of Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas feature prominently in the delegate count. Sanders is unlikely to bridge the tremendous gap in African-American support in just a few days — setting up the senator for a punishing defeat as the Democratic presidential campaign moves to the national stage.
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review Online.