SOUTH CAROLINA WAS THE THIRD STATE we organized. With the help of local political operative Lachlan McIntosh, Phil and I had traveled to South Carolina over the summer to begin interviewing staff. Lachlan was running a mayor’s race in Charleston at the time, so he was not available to work on the campaign full time.
He did, however, line up a group of people for us to interview in his offices. Based on those meetings, we hired Chris Covert to be our South Carolina director in August. We also hired Lawrence Moore as political director. In September, we brought on Christale Spain, the former deputy executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party. CBS News reported her hiring as a big coup for the campaign (that kind of coup I like), as she had strong ties to the South Carolina Democratic Party and to the African American community.
We knew from the beginning that South Carolina was going to be more difficult. As confirmed by our polling in October, Bernie was just not as well known there. The Clintons were. People forget that while Barack Obama ended up winning South Carolina in 2008 after his success in Iowa, Hillary Clinton led during the fall.
The Clinton campaign also had the advantage of having run a campaign in South Carolina (and in every other state in the country) before. They knew the political networks much better than we did. As was the case elsewhere, they also had many more operatives and surrogates who were tied into those networks. As NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald put it in a late November story, “It’s not that Sanders can’t make inroads into the African-American community in the primary, it’s that he now has less than 100 days to make up for Hillary Clinton’s two-and-half-decade head start.”
With our close loss in Nevada, we were not heading into South Carolina with the kind of momentum that would be needed to actually win. Our goal was to not be entirely blown away there—to keep the delegate math competitive. More importantly, exceeding expectations in South Carolina (which were low) could help with the southern March 1 primaries. They were only four days after the South Carolina primary.
That being said, our campaign had been committed to competing in South Carolina. Bernie made more trips and spent more time there, according to Democracy in Action, than did Secretary Clinton in 2015–16. He held and attended events across the state, such as Congressman Jim Clyburn’s annual fish fry, where he was mobbed by supporters. And we committed the resources beyond his appearance schedule. We had decided in the fall that it was the southern state where we would make a stand. We had a large staff and a paid canvass operation that employed dozens. As CNN’s Elizabeth Landers reported on January 25, we had gone up on TV in South Carolina at the end of January. We had run ads there on African American radio featuring the voice of House of Cards star Reg E. Cathey since December.
By the time South Carolina voted, Bernie had not yet broken through with African American voters as he would later in the campaign. With his commitment to the Senate work schedule in the summer and fall, and the heavy focus on the two earliest states, there ended up just not being enough time to build relationships in a part of the country where he was not known, and in particular with African American voters.
This was compounded by the fact that as the election in South Carolina drew near, and voters were paying increasing attention, Bernie had to try to make appearances in a dozen states. In the week between the Nevada caucus and the South Carolina primary, he not only campaigned in the Palmetto State but also made appearances in Minnesota, Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan, Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Virginia.
The Clinton campaign put on a full-court press in South Carolina, including deploying legions of surrogates. It made sense for Hillary, because she needed the big win that had so far eluded her, and after the Latino vote swung for Bernie in Nevada, she needed a proof point for her narrative that minority voters didn’t like Bernie Sanders. In some appearances, she adopted a southern accent that I’m sure none of her New York constituents had ever heard.
She also stepped up an attack line that she would fall back on throughout the campaign—that she was loyal to President Obama and Bernie was not. Her proof points were that she had served as Obama’s secretary of state and that Bernie had been critical of some of Obama’s policies. The Clinton campaign even used Bernie’s support of single-payer health care as evidence of animus against President Obama. Of course, she never raised all the acrimony of the 2007–8 campaign. The truth of the matter, as I would point out on occasion, was that if the Clintons had had their way, there never would have been a President Obama. Regardless, the Clinton campaign’s argument proved to be an effective one with African American voters in the early states.
Our dedicated cadre of African American surrogates fought valiantly for Bernie in South Carolina. State representatives Terry Alexander, Justin Bamberg, Wendell Gilliard, and the late Joe Neal; Dr. Cornel West; state senator Nina Turner of Ohio; Ben Jealous; actors Danny Glover and Reg E. Cathey; state senator Vincent Fort of Georgia; and others all stood with him. We ran radio ads with Spike Lee later in the effort. Our local endorsers in particular risked a lot politically.
On the day of the South Carolina primary, I flew down to be with our staff. We knew we were going to lose, and I wanted to be there. Scott Goodstein of Revolution Messaging came along as well. Like everyone else, the staff on the ground also knew that we were not going to win, but they were hopeful that we would have a respectable showing.
At around 4:00 p.m. I talked with a reporter and asked about the exit polling. The reporter told me that we were at 23 percent. It was a devastating number.
I called Bernie. He took it in stride.
We ended up doing slightly better, but only slightly—26 percent.
Top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and I spoke in the late afternoon. I asked her where Secretary Clinton was going to be that night, so Bernie could call after the results were announced. She said that they were likely to be traveling. I told her I wanted to make sure that Secretary Clinton was able to receive the congratulatory call that night.
“If it’s okay with you, let’s just count the call we are having right now as the congratulatory call,” she said, trying to come up with a resolution. “And if anyone asks, we will certainly say that Bernie called.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said. I was confident that if Huma had said it, it would be the case.
Unlike Nevada, which was a setback in the eyes of the media, South Carolina was a real loss. A number of factors weighed against us. Our organization in South Carolina had had some difficulties during the fall. Our ambitious paid canvass operation had to be completely retooled from scratch at one point, which set us back. The Republican primary was held a week earlier than the Democratic contest. And the Republican contest was hotly contested. Many independent voters were pulled into that primary and were therefore ineligible to vote for Bernie. Young voters were not turning out in the percentages they had in earlier contests.
But the crux of the problem was that at this point in the campaign the African American community was still firmly behind Hillary Clinton. Even though the margin was much closer, Clinton was even ahead with younger black voters, something that would change once the campaign progressed. And among older black voters in South Carolina we had done very poorly. Bernie himself summed it up this way on CBS’s Face the Nation: “No question, let me be very clear: we did really, really badly with older African American voters. I mean, we got decimated.”
The result in South Carolina made March 1, like many that were to follow, a do-or-die day for the campaign. The poor showing in South Carolina, where we had spent millions, strongly suggested that we would not do well in the states where we had not committed substantial resources.