Clinton crushes South Carolina
Presidential election in South Carolina, 2016
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 Date: November 8, 2016 |
Winner: Donald Trump (R) Hillary Clinton (D) • Jill Stein (G) • Gary Johnson (L) • Vice presidential candidates |
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This page was current as of the 2016 election.
February 27, 2016
She crushed it. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won an overwhelming victory in the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary on Saturday. With more than 90 percent of the precincts reporting, Clinton was beating Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 74-to-26 percent. She carried all 46 counties in the state.
Clinton’s landslide was propelled by a huge advantage she had among black voters. The television networks’ exit poll, the representative sampling of South Carolina primary voters as they left their precinct voting stations, showed Clinton beating Sanders among black voters by a margin of more than 70 percentage points. The exit poll also showed that black voters made up roughly three out of every five voters in the primary. When absentee and early votes are factored in—the exit poll only surveyed primary day voters—that black share could actually climb a bit. (In the 2008 South Carolina Democratic primary, black voters cast 55 percent of the ballots.)
The victory was a sweet one for Clinton. Not only did she build more momentum for her campaign on the eve of Super Tuesday when several other southern states with significant black electorates, she reversed the verdict from the state’s presidential primary eight years earlier, when then Sen. Barack Obama defeated Clinton, 55-to-26 percent. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards received 18 percent of the vote in that primary.
There were few encouraging signs for Sanders in the South Carolina balloting. The exit poll showed Sanders carrying white males. Sanders edged Clinton among the youngest cohort, those aged 17-to-29, but that fell far short of the advantage he held among millennial voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
The turnout in the Democratic contest was down from the high mark set in 2008, when 532,151 voters cast ballots in the primary. When all the precincts report, it’s expected that fewer than 375,000 people will have voted.
| Color Key |
|---|
| Winning candidate |
| Hillary Clinton |
James A. Barnes is a senior writer for Ballotpedia and co-author of the 2016 edition of the Almanac of American Politics. He is a member of the CNN Decision Desk and will be helping to project the Democratic and Republican winners throughout the election cycle.
See also
- Presidential election in South Carolina, 2016
- Presidential candidates, 2016
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Presidential election, 2016/Polls
- 2016 presidential candidate ratings and scorecards
- Presidential election, 2016/Straw polls
