Follow along during the South Carolina Democratic debate — the last before South Carolina votes this weekend, and before Super Tuesday on March 3.
What To Expect
- The debate gets underway at 8 p.m. ET, and will be broadcast on CBS. It's also available to stream online on various platforms.
- The debate is expected to last two hours.
- A number of CBS journalists will be moderating: Norah O'Donnell, Gayle King, Margaret Brennan, Major Garrett and Bill Whitaker.
- Seven candidates will be on the stage: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.
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Follow along during the South Carolina Democratic debate — the last before South Carolina votes this weekend, and before Super Tuesday on March 3.
Interesting…
Dayum. This IS going to be interesting.
Bernie winning SC would be a tsunami to the Dem Establishment. How the tears would flow.
Well, let’s first see if it happens.
I’m still expecting Biden to eke out a victory, to be clear.
Average of all South Carolina polls taken since Jan 1:
Biden 29.4%, Bernie 19.5%, Steyer 14.7%, Warren 9.2%, Pete 7.9%, Klobuchar 4.3%. I think taking the average of all polls since Jan 1 allows for more data points and an ability to smooth out the volatile IA/NH cycle which was Biden’s low point.
Steyer underperformed his NV polling going from 15% in the average to 9% in the first alignment and then down to 4.7% on delegates.
In other words, Steyer is a paper tiger and his numbers will drop by a larger margin in SC than they did in NV because black voters will move to Biden. There are also signs in the PPP poll that Biden is slightly ahead of Pete among white voters and only a few points behind Bernie in that demo. Given Pete/Amy’s general weakness, it’s a more consolidated field for Biden so he will perform much better in SC than he has in the first 3 contests.
With a solid debate performance tonight and some help from Bloomberg in putting the focus on Bernie, Biden has a good chance to get up to 35% or higher and win SC by a solid margin. That will shift the Super Tuesday races to a 3 way contest between Biden, Bloomberg and Bernie, with each of them getting into the 20% range. That appears to be happening already in the Southern contests (NC, TX are examples). With a clear win in SC, Biden can make the pitch to registered Dems that he’s the moderate candidate they should choose. He should be able to get more votes from Pete/Amy supporters in the key states as he will be more viable than either of them following a win in SC.
I will be curious to see if Warren, Klobuchar, or Pete have any juice against Bernie in CO, ME, UT, MN and MA. I would think Klobuchar should be able to win the MN primary and Warren the MA primary, but it’s not a given.