LIVEBLOG: South Carolina Democratic Debate

Notable Replies

jonney_5 says:

February 25, 2020

CNN

This new South Carolina poll is very bad news for Joe Biden

Bernie Sanders just might win the South Carolina primary on Saturday.

Interesting…
Kinney says:

February 25, 2020
Dayum. This IS going to be interesting.
1. Roughly 1 in 3 Biden backers in the poll (32%) said they might vote for another candidate on Saturday. Just more than 1 in 10 Sanders supporters (12%) said the same. That’s broadly consistent with what we’ve seen throughout this primary to date; Sanders has the most committed support, while Biden’s has been among the least committed.
Bernie winning SC would be a tsunami to the Dem Establishment. How the tears would flow.
cervantes says:

February 25, 2020

Kinney:

Bernie winning SC would be a tsunami to the Dem Establishment.

Well, let’s first see if it happens.
Kinney says:

February 25, 2020

I’m still expecting Biden to eke out a victory, to be clear.
khyber900 says:

February 25, 2020

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.