Biden wins South Carolina Democratic primary, CNN projects

South Carolina, the state that launched Joe Biden to the Democratic nomination four years ago, will deliver the president his first official primary victory of the 2024 campaign on Saturday, CNN projects.

This year marks the first time South Carolina has appeared at the front of the official Democratic nominating calendar — a change made largely due to Biden’s urging.

To cement South Carolina’s status as the first primary of the 2024 Democratic race, Biden visited the Palmetto State twice last month, and Vice President Kamala Harris headlined a get-out-the-vote event at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg on Friday.

“You’ve had my back, and I hope I’ve had yours,” Biden told the Sunday lunch crowd at Brookland Baptist Church in Columbia last weekend.

Some context: With Biden facing little serious competition for the Democratic nomination, Saturday’s primary was important for the president nonetheless because it marked a return to the place that catapulted him to the Democratic nomination in 2020.

Biden limped into the South Carolina primary that year after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses, fourth in the New Hampshire primary and a distant second in the Nevada caucuses. However, the Palmetto State’s large Black population — and a late endorsement from influential Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn — helped deliver Biden a dominant victory that, for the first time, demonstrated strength with a core Democratic constituency that no other primary contender could rival.

Four years later, the push by the Biden campaign and its allies in South Carolina was part of a broader effort to shore up support with Black voters, a bloc crucial to the president’s reelection prospects, particularly in battleground states such as Georgia and the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The South Carolina Republican Party reacted to President Joe Biden’s projected win in the South Carolina Democratic primary Saturday night:

“Joe Biden is killing the American Dream with high inflation, open borders and a lackadaisical attitude towards terrorism and antisemitism. Let me be crystal clear, it’s not just that the American People don’t want four more years of Joe Biden, it’s that we won’t survive them,” South Carolina GOP Chairman Drew McKissick said in a news release.

“We need a Republican back in the White House in order to reverse the tailspin Biden has put us in, and that’s exactly what we will do. For South Carolinians, it all starts on February 24th with the South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary.”

As he is projected to win the South Carolina Democratic primary, President Joe Biden is attending a campaign event in Bel Air, California, per the White House pool reporter.

It appears the event is being held at a home that local outlets have previously reported has been owned by the likes of Ross Perot and George Lucas.

President Joe Biden touted his projected win in South Carolina Saturday, saying the state, which he’s credited for turning the tide in 2020, put him on a path toward victory this year.

“In 2020, it was the voters of South Carolina who proved the pundits wrong, breathed new life into our campaign, and set us on the path to winning the Presidency,” Biden said in a statement. 
“Now in 2024, the people of South Carolina have spoken again and I have no doubt that you have set us on the path to winning the Presidency again — and making Donald Trump a loser — again,” he said, later adding: “The stakes in this election could not be higher.”

Biden also reflected on South Carolina being the first Democratic primary.

“When I was elected President, I said the days of the backbone of the Democratic Party being at the back of the line were over. That was a promise made and a promise kept. Now, you are First In The Nation,” he said.

The calendar overhaul, done at Biden’s request, was also seen as a boost to the president, who placed poorly in the 2020 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary before winning by a decisive margin in South Carolina, in large part due to his strong support among Black voters.

With all of South Carolina’s pledged delegates allocated, CNN estimates that President Joe Biden has 55 delegates after his projected win in the state’s Democratic primary.

There are 1,968 delegates required to win the Democratic nomination. 

The post was updated with the final delegate allocation.

President Joe Biden will win South Carolina’s Democratic primary, CNN projects.

Democrats made South Carolina their first official primary state of the 2024 cycle, and 55 delegates are at stake.

In a result that was largely expected, Biden will defeat his two nearest challengers, Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and author Marianne Williamson, as he claims his first delegates in his quest to win his party’s nomination again.

This year marks the first time South Carolina has appeared at the front of the official Democratic nominating calendar — a change made largely due to Biden’s urging.

The post was updated with more details on the primary.

It’s 7 p.m. ET, and polls are closing across South Carolina, where 55 delegates are at stake for Democrats.

Democrats made South Carolina their first official primary state this cycle, rewarding the Palmetto State for its diverse population — especially in the Democratic Party — and perhaps, its critical support of Joe Biden in the 2020 primary.

In the 2020 Democratic primary, Biden won nearly 49% of the vote and every county in the state – setting him on the path to become the party’s nominee. In that primary, Black voters made up 56% of the electorate and Biden won 61% of those voters.

The state’s GOP primary on February 24 will be the fourth contest for Republicans. Former President Donald Trump and rival Nikki Haley are vying for the GOP nomination.

President Joe Biden will skip a pre-Super Bowl interview for the second year in a row — and his aides argue that it’s part of their larger plan, not a move to avoid having the president answer questions in front of the whole country.

Biden advisers tell CNN they see skipping the interview, which would have aired as a segment of the pregame show and not during peak viewing hours, as a strategic decision to give Americans a break from the politics of the 2024 campaign. Advisers say they’re seeing people already expressing fatigue with election news and want to avoid piling on.

“We hope viewers enjoy watching what they tuned in for — the game,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told CNN.

Some context: The pregame presidential interview is a relatively young tradition, stretching back only to Barack Obama’s first year in office, and one that Donald Trump skipped once himself.

But for Biden — who for months has complained in public and to top advisers that messaging touting his achievements isn’t breaking through to Americans — the decision means skipping out on an audience of millions.

In past years, the Super Bowl presidential interviews often drove news coverage for days. But the Biden White House has always been skeptical of the value of doing so, in part due to anxiety that a flub could become an unwanted distraction.

President Joe Biden may be the incumbent in the White House, but rather than a referendum on Biden and his policies, the coming general election is shaping up to be yet another referendum on former President Donald Trump.

But what may be more interesting than those horse-race figures in a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS is voters’ motivation, which is dominated by Trump on both sides of the political divide. Most Biden supporters (68%) said they would be casting their vote against Trump as opposed to just 32% who said it would be a vote to support Biden.

It’s the opposite for registered voters supporting Trump; 60% said it would be a vote for Trump compared with 40% who would be casting a vote against Biden. And that’s before Trump’s four separate criminal trials get underway.

Biden’s favorability dropped last year. Trump’s rose: More Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Biden than have an unfavorable view of Trump in CNN’s poll. Trump’s unfavorable rating has dropped over the past year from January 2023, when 63% said they had an unfavorable view of the former president. It’s now at 55%. Biden’s unfavorable rating during that same period has increased, from 54% a year ago to 59% this year.

Read more about the poll and possible Trump-Biden rematch.

The Democratic National Committee is shaking up the party’s 2024 presidential primary calendar.

The new calendar upends decades of tradition in which Iowa and New Hampshire were the first two states to hold nominating contests and moves up South Carolina, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan. President Joe Biden has argued the new nominating order would better reflect the diversity of the nation and the Democratic Party.

But the party’s early nomination calendar, which was approved early last year at the DNC’s winter meeting in Philadelphia, faced opposition from some impacted states — like New Hampshire, which went ahead with its primary election last week, instead of its new proposed date in February.

Since the primary was not compliant with the new calendar, Biden was not on the ballot, but won as a write-in candidate, though he won’t receive any delegates.

Under the new calendar, here are some of the changes:

More than 76% of early and absentee ballots cast in the South Carolina Democratic primary came from Black voters — which is 13% more than those who cast their vote early in 2020 — South Carolina Democratic Party Executive Director Jay Parmley announced Saturday afternoon.

Of the 51,710 early votes cast, including absentee ballots, more than 6,100 came from voters who had never before cast a ballot in a Democratic primary, according to Parmley.

When asked to compare and contrast the numbers with previous elections, Parmley said:

“We were picked to go first because our voters give a damn. And our voters have turned out repeatedly, and we pick presidents, and we have demonstrated through all of this activity and our strong early vote numbers that we were damn well deserving of this.”

Parmley and the party’s Get Out the Vote Director Lindsey Green credited the numbers to months of statewide outreach to rural counties and new voters.

“Before the polls close — and I can say this without any doubt because we felt it on the ground, and we saw it everywhere we went — this primary has been a success,” said Green, adding that “this primary is really the latest signal from our president and our national party that Democrats are not just parachuting in at the very last minute to ask for voters from communities of color.”

President Joe Biden entered the election year with an early financial edge over Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, new filings show – a bright spot for an incumbent with low approval ratings who is girding for a bruising general election rematch with his 2020 foe.

Biden had nearly $46 million in cash on hand in his main campaign committee, compared with $33 million amassed by Trump, who is still working to dispatch his lone, remaining major rival for the GOP nomination, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

But the reports underscore the challenges ahead for the president: Despite facing no real threats to his nomination, Biden has not built the cash reserves that would allow him to swamp Trump’s campaign, even as the former president faces mounting legal woes and Haley’s staying power in the race.

Trump’s available cash was more than double the $14.6 million in reserves held by Haley, according to Wednesday night filings with the Federal Election Commission.

President Joe Biden’s campaign has a message for impatient Democrats who want to see his campaign build out its operations in the battleground states more visibly and with greater urgency.

That message: Don’t expect us to be Barack Obama.

The Biden reelection campaign is rejecting the political organizing model that Obama used during his campaign for a second term in 2012, in which Obama largely shunned the Democratic National Committee and opted instead to set up his own vast electioneering machine.

Biden advisers, campaign officials and state Democratic leaders tell CNN that the president’s 2024 operation is coming together differently – and Democrats who are pushing for more hiring and more offices faster are missing the point, they say.

“State parties and local organizations were not part of the equation in 2012,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley. “The fact that the president has heavily invested in building up the strength of the state parties versus what happened in the first term of Obama – I think you’re going see the results of that.”

Here’s more about the Biden campaign strategy.

President Joe Biden’s campaign raked in the highest number of grassroots donations in January since he launched his reelection bid last year — a metric that campaign officials say indicates growing enthusiasm among the base. 

The campaign has been readying a sizable war chest to face off against a Republican opponent in November. Biden’s reelection campaign, along with the Democratic Party, ended last year with $117 million, CNN previously reported, marking the highest cash-on-hand figure for any Democratic candidate at that point in the cycle.

The uptick in grassroots contributions month by month is fueling optimism within the campaign, which views it as a sign of increased voter engagement. The number of people donating through the campaign’s website doubled in January compared to December, driving the increase in grassroots contributions, according to a campaign official.

Campaign officials previously said December marked their highest grassroots fundraising month since the reelection launch last April, breaking the record set one month prior in November. January surpassed December, according to the campaign official.

The average grassroots donation was $41.88 in the fourth quarter and 97% of all donations were under $200. The campaign official didn’t disclose the exact amount raised by small-dollar donors.

During a stop at his campaign headquarters earlier Saturday, Biden trumpeted new polling showing him with an edge against former President Trump. “Everything’s picking up across the board,” Biden said.

The public’s long-held pessimism about the economy shows signs of easing since last year, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds. But even with the uptick, many Americans’ views of the economy – and the nation as a whole – remain bleak.

Only 35% of Americans say that things in the country today are going well, but that’s an improvement from the 28% who felt positively about the state of affairs last fall. And while just 26% of Americans say they feel the economy is starting to recover from the problems it faced in the past few years, that’s also up from 20% last summer and 17% in December 2022.

Overall, 26% of Americans currently say that economic conditions have stabilized, and 48% say they believe the economy remains in a downturn.

Of those who think the economy is recovering, nearly three-quarters (73%) say President Joe Biden’s economic policies have helped to improve things. An even broader 83% of those who say the economy is continuing to devolve say his policies have instead made things worse.

Views of the nation’s economic trajectory are inflected by partisanship, with the uptick in sentiment coming mainly among Democrats (49% now say the economy is recovering, up 10 percentage points from July) and independents (24%, up 7 points). Just 6% of Republicans say they see a recovery beginning, nearly unchanged from last summer.

But within the Democratic Party, there’s also a significant age divide, with most younger Democrats less likely to see the economy on the upswing.

President Joe Biden thanked campaign staff and sought to underscore the stakes of this year’s election during a visit to his campaign headquarters Saturday, the day of the South Carolina Democratic primary.

“This is not just a campaign. This is more of a mission. We cannot, we cannot, we cannot lose this campaign, for the good of the country,” Biden said at his campaign’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, ahead of a weekend fundraising swing through Southern California and Nevada.

“I mean that from the bottom of my heart. It’s not about me,” he said. “It goes well beyond me. It’s about the country. And I think everybody knows it, and I think it’s beginning to dawn on people.”

In November, Biden said his campaign team should “be able to say, God willing, we helped save democracy.”

Running a small business has been a “special experience” for Mimi Striplin, the 31-year-old owner of The Tiny Tassel in Charleston, which sells jewelry, whimsical clothing designed by her mother, and goods made by other Black women-owned businesses. Her local community has helped uplift her business, she said, but she’s also experienced the hard times that come with entrepreneurship, especially now.

When she was invited to meet with President Joe Biden a few weeks ago as part of a small business roundtable ahead of the state’s Saturday primary, she had a simple message for him: see us.

“I wanted him to think about faces like mine when he is speaking on policies and really moving things,” Striplin, who is also Asian American, told CNN.

To win reelection this year, Biden will need Black voters like Striplin – who voted for him in the last presidential election and plan to support him again – to rebuild the coalition that helped propel him to the White House in 2020.

For South Carolina Democrats, being the first sanctioned primary isn’t just about putting Biden on the right footing, but a chance to draw attention to local topics after years of watching candidates cater to the problems facing Iowa and New Hampshire voters.

Hear more about what Black South Carolina voters are saying by reading the full story and watching the CNN report below:

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With presidential primaries underway and a 2020 general election rematch seemingly the most likely outcome, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS shows former President Donald Trump narrowly ahead of President Joe Biden in what’s shaping up to be a close contest nationally.

The poll highlights voters’ conflicted feelings about the leading candidates. Broad majorities of Democrats and Republicans say they’d be satisfied if their party’s candidate won such a rematch. Still, a sizable minority of voters express a desire for another option if Biden and Trump are the nominees.

Overall, 49% of registered voters say they would back Trump if an election between the two were held today, while 45% support Biden and 5% say they’d vote for someone else.

Those numbers are identical to CNN polling on the contest in the fall, and the demographic dynamics of the contest appear to be steady – with a wide education gap among the most notable demographic divides, and smaller differences by age or race than in other recent presidential elections.

Read more about the poll’s findings.

The first two Republican primary contests of the year have now taken place —the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

Now, on Saturday, the Democrats will have their first official primary election in South Carolina.

Here’s a look at other key upcoming primary dates:

February:

March:

Access the full 2024 election calendar.

Donald Trump’s voters get all the attention. But it’s Joe Biden’s who may decide the general election.

A historic rematch for the White House between the ex-president and the current president — which few Americans seem to relish — is coming into view given Trump’s early dominance of the Republican primary process.

Ever since Trump burst into national politics in 2015, academics, journalists and political professionals have devoted extraordinary efforts to understanding the economic, ideological, emotional and patriotic motivations of his ultra-loyal “Make America Great Again” followers. But there is a strong case that it will be the more diverse groups of voters who chose Biden in 2020 who hold the key to November’s election, depending on their level of enthusiasm and shifting political priorities.

Democratic political operatives admit Biden faces a tough mission.

The former president’s supporters are enthusiastic and up for the fight, and he’s sporting a far more formidable political operation than he did in either 2016 or 2020, which he will use to try to expand his pool of tens of millions of Republican voters. Local Republican officials are predicting that Biden’s hopes will be complicated by the return of many Republicans who were repulsed by the ex-president’s conduct in 2020, but who now view his presidency more warmly and have been repelled by what they see as the current president’s march to the left.

Read more about a possible Trump-Biden rematch.

Before Americans pick a president in November, they get to pick the candidates in a series of primaries and caucuses. It’s a wonky process that has evolved throughout the country’s history and continues to evolve today.

Here are key things to know before the polls close in Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic primary:

What is a primary? It’s an election to select candidates, usually for a particular political party, to appear on the general election ballot.

Who is running in the primaries? For Democrats, Joe Biden is the sitting president and he’s running for reelection, which makes him the incumbent candidate. Some Democrats are challenging him in the Democratic primaries, including Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and author Marianne Williamson. For Republicans, who will have their primary election in South Carolina on February 24, former President Donald Trump has long been the front-runner, but former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is still in the race.

Who can vote in a presidential primary? It varies by state. For example, some states have open primaries — including South Carolina — meaning anyone can take part in the primary, even if they aren’t registered party members. Other states have closed primaries, meaning you have to join the party in order to vote. Primaries are generally conducted in polling places like any other election. That’s different from caucuses, which are more like neighborhood meetings. People show up and lobby for their candidates.

How is the nomination ultimately determined? Voters cast ballots for candidates, but they’re really selecting delegates for the party conventions, which take place over the summer. Delegates can either be apportioned through a winner-take-all system, meaning the top candidate in a state’s primary gets all of that state’s delegates, or they can be apportioned proportionally to the primary election results.

Get up to speed on everything you need to know about presidential primaries.