Harpootlian: SC makes candidates appeal to ‘someone other than old white people’

In February 1992, several other South Carolinians and I flew to New Hampshire to campaign for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in the presidential primary. It was a critical vote for the untested, virtually unknown Southern governor whom all of us had met through former S.C. Gov. Dick Riley.

We attended rallies, went door to door and stood in the snow at busy intersections holding Clinton signs on primary day. It was a carnival atmosphere with national media histrionics that began with the Jennifer Flowers scandal and ended with Clinton’s “comeback kid” speech. We went to New Hampshire because it was do or die for Clinton.

But it was also the most help we could give as South Carolina’s Democratic primary, still a month away, would be too little, too late. The candidates didn’t head south to Georgia until March 3, with the S.C. Democratic Party’s huge African-American base having its opportunity to weigh in on the seventh — several weeks after the lily-white voices in Iowa, New Hampshire and even Maine were heard. New Hampshire was the center of the Democratic political universe, and poor South Carolina was just a cornbread appetizer to the main course.

By 2008, party rule changes re-calendared our state’s primary to the immediate aftermath of Iowa and New Hampshire, thereby adding new groups of decision makers among those privileged to create early state candidate momentum and balancing the electoral calculus for non-establishment candidates.

According to the S.C. Election Commission, 31 percent of the Palmetto State’s registered voters identify as non-white, 40 percent are under the age of 45, and 55 percent are women. After facing the Iowa and New Hampshire electorates, the South Carolina Democratic primary is the first meaningful opportunity for candidates to test their message on someone other than old white people.

While primary voters tend to be a small but reliable universe of partisans, an early S.C. primary has also upended conventional wisdom concerning who will show up at the polls. For example, 2008 Republican primary voters comprised just 19.8 percent of the state’s 2.25 million registered voters. That same year, Democratic primary voters cast 87,000 more ballots than their Republican counterparts, with almost 24 percent of the state’s registered voters casting Democratic primary ballots.

In 2008, I was proud my state and party gave Barack Obama the win he needed after losing to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. While enthusiasm for then-Sen. Obama’s candidacy in part reflects the historic nature of his candidacy, Obama’s success is not attributable to race alone, as he was not the first black candidate to seek the nation’s highest office. While other candidates counted on establishment endorsements from state party leaders to deliver votes, Obama built an extensive field program that communicated directly with voters by knocking on doors and making phone calls to identify supporters and turn them out to vote. Skipping the endorsement race not only proved the right strategy, it asked South Carolinians to decide for themselves which candidate’s values and policy preferences best matched their own. I chose Barack Obama, as did 55 percent of Democrats.

In a few days the eyes of the nation again turn to South Carolina as voters choose between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ call for a “political revolution” resonated with Iowa and New Hampshire voters concerned about the influence of big money in politics, which Sanders argues has created an economy that enriches special interests while everyone else gets squeezed.

Sanders’ case is compelling — he’s won my endorsement — and casts him as the agent of change, like Bill Clinton in 1992 and Obama in 2008. Hillary Clinton, 2008’s “inevitable” nominee, won that mantle again this cycle as well as the endorsement race among party elites. As best I can tell, her thesis is “now it’s my turn.”

My old friend and Virginia Democratic operative, Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, recently mused, “I thought you could only be inevitable once.” I expect that on Saturday, South Carolina will prove Mudcat right again.

This story was originally published February 22, 2016 at 12:39 AM with the headline "Harpootlian: SC makes candidates appeal to ‘someone other than old white people’."