Where Trump flipped blue votes, and other key takeaways on Election Day in SC
Nothing about Tuesday’s election in South Carolina was typical, except for the result.
While the coronavirus pandemic may have changed voting laws and voter behavior, the outcome in this reliably red state was a familiar one.
Forecasts of a close U.S. Senate race that drove record levels of outside spending and buoyed hopes for Democrats across the board failed to materialize on Election Day as Republicans rode a “red wave” to victory, holding the hotly contested U.S. Senate seat and flipping a U.S. House seat, two state House seats and three state Senate seats in the process.
President Donald Trump, who was polling with an advantage of between 6-9 percentage points heading into Election Day, topped former Vice President Joe Biden by nearly 12 percentage points, according to unofficial returns.
To better understand what precipitated Tuesday’s electoral results, The State dug into election data at both the state and county levels and spoke with several political experts. Here are four takeaways:
Trump gained ground in some blue counties
Donald Trump received roughly 55% of the vote in South Carolina in both 2016 and 2020 — beating Hillary Clinton by 300,016 votes four years ago and Democratic presidential nominee Biden by 289,897 this year.
While his margin of victory was slightly smaller against Biden, he actually flipped two counties he lost to Clinton in 2016.
After narrowly losing Clarendon and Dillon counties to Clinton four years ago, Trump took both on Tuesday — albeit by a combined 282 votes.
The slight turn toward Trump in those two small counties, which each has around 30,000 people, was mirrored in all the less populous counties he lost in 2016.
Trump gained vote share in all 12 of the counties he lost in 2016 that have fewer than 100,000 residents, according to unofficial results.
Danielle Vinson, a political science professor at Furman University, attributed the rightward shift in smaller blue counties to heightened interest in a competitive, high-profile U.S. Senate race where control of the upper chamber hung in the balance.
Conservatives in blue counties who normally feel like their votes don’t carry much weight may have turned out in larger numbers this cycle to ensure Republicans retained control of the U.S. Senate in what they perceived was a tight race between Lindsey Graham and Jaime Harrison, Vinson said.
“If you’re in a blue county and are a Republican, there was a reason to show up this year,” she said.
The sense nationally that a win by the Democratic party represented an existential threat to the country also stoked fear and anger in GOP voters and may have served as additional motivation for them to go to the polls, experts said.
“Trump used a message of the threat of Democrats, the threat of a Biden presidency, the threat of Black Lives Matter,” said Scott Huffmon, a political science professor at Winthrop University. “Political psychology shows that conservatives are more motivated by threats than liberals, so I think among rural and exurban whites that message took root. And we also saw it take root among suburban white women nationwide.”
While Trump gained ground in South Carolina’s less populous blue counties, he actually lost by even larger margins than 2016 in the state’s two largest blue counties: Charleston and Richland.
Urban areas like Columbia and Charleston that generally have a higher number of college-educated and minority voters are especially ripe for Democrats nowadays, Vinson said.
Just as some Republicans may have cast ballots feeling their vote was needed to secure the U.S. Senate race, Democrats in urban centers may also have been more motivated to vote by a sense that they also could affect a statewide race for a change, she said.
Turnout surpassed 2016, but did not approach 2008 levels
A record 2,521,182 registered voters cast ballots this election cycle — with several thousand provisional ballots still outstanding — and turnout eclipsed 70% of registered voters for the first time since the historic 2008 race.
The South Carolina Election Commission was reporting 71.8% turnout as of early Friday, with that figure certain to increase after the morning’s provisional ballot hearings.
It’s the second highest election turnout in South Carolina in the past 27 years, behind only the 76% turnout seen when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was first on the ballot.
Rob Godfrey, a Republican political operative who worked in former Gov. Nikki Haley’s administration, said he wasn’t surprised turnout this cycle didn’t exceed 2008 levels, but believes it nonetheless illustrates just how strongly voters felt about this election.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever see turnout as high as we saw in 2008,” he said. “People saw a real chance to be a part of history and make history, and it was an election where Americans did make history. So while this was an election where the stakes were high and people were heavily invested, I wasn’t surprised to see that we didn’t quite eclipse that 2008 mark.”
While turnout is often significantly higher when presidential races are on the ballot, several experts said they thought interest in the U.S. Senate race, more so than the presidential one, galvanized South Carolina voters this cycle.
The fact that nearly 2,000 more voters cast ballots in the U.S. Senate race than the presidential race lends credence to that hypothesis.
“I think people saw that the stakes could not be higher in the Senate race and I think the Senate race may have supplanted the president’s race on everyone’s radar in South Carolina as the most important race on the ballot,” Godfrey said.
“That’s certainly an uncommon thing in a presidential year, but it’s not surprising in a place like South Carolina where people know their senators, where they know their senators personally and they tend to send their senators back to Washington term after term.”
More people voted early than on Election Day
In a first for South Carolina, more registered voters cast ballots early than on Election Day.
Nearly 53% of the 2.5 million votes cast this cycle were done by absentee ballot, according to unofficial results.
In total, more than 1.3 million South Carolinians took advantage of the expansion in absentee voting that afforded any registered voter the opportunity to vote early due to the pandemic.
Huffmon attributed the record early turnout, which was more than two-and-a-half times higher than the previous record, to health and safety concerns about COVID-19 and outreach by Democrats who encouraged supporters to cast ballots early to make sure they were counted.
Experts said they didn’t think the surge in early voting necessarily had an impact on election outcomes, but thought it had increased participation in the election by making it easier for anyone who wanted to vote.
It also made it easier on election officials and poll managers, who on Tuesday processed fewer voters than they did in the 2018 midterms and, perhaps as a result, largely avoided the Election Day problems that have plagued counties such as Richland in the past.
“States are realizing nationwide that you can do absentee voting more widely, efficiently and safely without worries of voter fraud,” Vinson said. “It’s so much easier and cuts down on unexpected problems on Election Day.”
As anticipated, the early vote favored Democrats and the day-of vote overwhelmingly favored Republicans.
Biden beat Trump by nearly 10 percentage points in the statewide absentee vote, according to unofficial results, but got clobbered by 35 points in Election Day voting.
Both in-person and mail-in absentee voting favored Democrats, but voting by mail did so to a greater degree.
Biden received 60% of mail-in votes compared to just over 51% of absentee in-person votes, according to unofficial results.
Godfrey, the Republican operative, said he viewed the partisan split between absentee and day-of voting as indicative of the increasingly polarized world we live in.
“Everything has come to some sort of political statement on one side or another,” he said. “In that same vein, we saw absentee voting versus day off voting to be one of those political statements.”
Third-party candidates played a smaller role in 2020
While third-party candidates in South Carolina received a minuscule percentage of the vote in each of the last two presidential elections, the third party vote was even more diminished in 2020.
Third-party candidates on the ballot for president in South Carolina this cycle received only one-third the share of support they did four years ago — 1.48% in 2020 compared to 4.38% in 2016, according to unofficial results.
And despite Jaime Harrison’s best efforts to highlight the candidacy of Constitution Party nominee Bill Bledsoe, who by then had dropped out of the race and endorsed Lindsey Graham, the Spartanburg veterinarian received a smaller share of the vote in 2020 than he did when he ran for the same seat in 2016.
“Any efforts to bolster third-party candidates by one of the two major parties anywhere on the ballot seem to have fallen flat because you just had well-defined candidates from major parties,” Godfrey said. “People were bought in and heavily invested in the success of those candidates, and I think we saw that play out on Election Day.”
Vinson, the Furman professor, said she suspected support for third-party candidates was down because people viewed the election as too consequential to vote for a candidate with no chance of winning.
“You get a lot of third party voting when voters don’t like their choices, but expect one candidate is going to win, so they can afford to be grouchy and not vote for either,” she said.
In what was widely viewed as a highly competitive race between Graham and Harrison, however, a third-party vote amounted to giving a vote to the other side, she said.
The elevated third-party vote in 2016 may also have been a vestige of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Huffmon said.
“The dislike of Hillary Clinton is tough to overestimate,” he said. “There were people who were not going to vote for Trump, but who just had a deep dislike for Clinton and they made their dislike known by voting third party.”