The Memo: Biden seeks revival in South Carolina

CONWAY, S.C. —  Former Vice President Joe Biden was the headline attraction here at a Thursday evening rally, but it was a celebrity supporter, actress Vivica Fox, who cut to the heart of the matter.

“We are counting on you guys to start to get the 2020 election back on track,” Fox told the audience at Coastal Carolina University, shortly before introducing Biden.

Right now, Biden’s fate lies in the hands of Palmetto State Democrats.

Winning the South Carolina primary is, at this point, the whole ballgame for the former vice president. 

The firewall that his supporters have talked about for so long needs to hold in Saturday’s primary. If it does not, Biden’s campaign is as good as over.

Front-runner Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has two first-place finishes and one near-tie for victory from the first three contests. Biden, who led national polling averages for months, has come fourth, fifth and a distant second in those three races, respectively.

The polls in South Carolina give grounds for both reassurance and nervousness for Biden supporters.

By some measures, Biden’s support in the state remains robust. But the polls are troublingly volatile. The four most recent surveys in the state, all conducted within the past week, have measured Biden’s lead as high as 20 percentage points and as low as 4 points.

Sanders is making a serious play in the state, drawing almost 2,000 people to a rally in Spartanburg on Thursday night and planning another, likely larger event in the state capital of Columbia on Friday afternoon.

Biden has long relationships in the state to buttress his chances — the most conspicuous example being his endorsement by House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), a political icon in the state, who announced his support for the former vice president on Wednesday.

“I know Joe. We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us,” Clyburn said. 

Biden made sure to mention having been “friends for so long” with Clyburn at the start of his remarks here.

The clash between Biden and Sanders in South Carolina is a window into a much larger struggle in the Democratic Party. 

If Sanders were to win, it would not just deal a final blow to Biden’s bruised presidential hopes. It would also show that Sanders is expanding his constituency and that his left-wing platform can take over the party from the center-left forces that have dominated it since Bill Clinton was president.

On the other hand, a big margin of victory for Biden would revitalize his chances and reestablish him as the main centrist alternative to Sanders. This claim has been challenged of late by the exorbitant campaign spending of former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and by the strong early results posted by former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Furthermore, if Biden were to outperform expectations and relegate Sanders to a poor second, it could call into question how well Sanders might do in some of the southern states that vote on Super Tuesday, March 3.

Alabama and Arkansas are among the states voting then, in addition to the two biggest prizes of California and Texas where Sanders is stronger.

Biden, speaking at this university 10 miles from Myrtle Beach, took aim at Sanders only a handful of times, and rarely with real anger. 

The closest he came to aggression was asserting that he felt resentful of Sanders for reportedly considering a primary challenge to President Obama in 2012. He also hit Sanders’s record on gun control.

Biden’s brand has never been that of an attack dog, however. He prefers to paint himself as the candidate who can reach out to opponents and bring normalcy back to the White House after what he sees as the aberrational nature of President Trump.

He extolled the virtues of “decency,” as he often does, insisted that he was the candidate who could produce “results” and said — in response to a question that got perhaps the single loudest cheer of the evening — that he would consider Michelle Obama as his running mate “in a heartbeat” if he thought there was any chance the former first lady would say yes.

That was enough for some voters.

Don Yonce, an 82-year-old former business owner, told The Hill that it would be foolish to push “a rookie” toward the presidency and that Biden “knows the ropes.” 

The former vice president, Yonce insisted, was “the only one on the Democratic side” who has the requisite experience to hold the nation’s highest office.

Coleman Randall, a 65-year-old retiree from the nearby town of Little River, said that he had decided to vote for Biden only within the last week. 

He said he had at various times considered supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and that he had been interested in Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) before they dropped out. In the end, he said, he had greater “trust” in Biden.

Biden needs to depend on voters like those if he is to hold the Sanders tide at bay.

Right now, it is not certain that he can do so.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage, primarily focused on Donald Trump’s presidency.