How South Carolina’s Black Vote Saved 2016 for Hillary Clinton

When the history of the 2016 presidential primary is written, if Hillary Clinton is the party’s nominee, it will show that Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign effectively ended in South Carolina, where Clinton trounced him by 49 persent, winning African Americans by an astonishing 86-14 marge. (She also won whites 54-46, a first for Clinton this primary season.)

Clinton won because she treated the state as a proxy for the African-American vote nationwide, which she will need desperately in this primary, and even more in November. South Carolina turned out to be a proxy for the black Democratic primary vote in 2008—and she lost it badly to Barack Obama in a bitterly fought contest. Her husband insulted the winner by comparing his victory to the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s powerful but unsuccessful symbolic candidacy. Her campaign hemorrhaged African-American support after that, and Clinton never recovered…Lees meer