Thread by @PJverhagen

#SouthCarolinaPrimary results breakdown!

Here are my main take aways:

1. #BidenIsBack
2. #BlackVotesMatter
3. Looking towards #SuperTuesday

Lets get into it!

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Context first, as I described yesterday, the majority of voters in SC are black 1/15

in this case 56% of voters, which is down from 2016 (61%). What wasnt down was turnout, over 527k people came out to vote, just shy of the 2008 record.

1. Biden is back

Huge night for Biden. With his back against the wall, Biden pulls of an enormous victory, winning with 2/15

a margin of nearly 30% over Sanders! Just like Nevada was about as good as it could be for Sanders, SC was close to the perfect outcome for Biden.

He won 61% of black voters, beating Sanders by a 44% margin. He won every age group except for 17-29 year olds, and won 3/ 15

handily among everyone older than 45. He won very liberal voters (42%), somewhat liberal( 42%) and moderate or conservative (54%). He won on every single issue, including healthcare.

Biden's firewall did not only hold, it will give him a springboard to come roaring back 4/15

as reflected in the endorsements that came flooding in last night.

2. #BlackVotesMatter

I talked about this yesterday as well, but black voters are by and large pragmatic. They know a viable candidate when they see it, and they are quite averse to 'wasting' votes 5/15

remember some of these folks walked in the civil rights movement to even get the right to vote!

Not only are black voters typically moderate, they are also wary of platitudes aimed at getting their votes. Black voters are quite religious, so if a candidate hasn't been to a 6/15

black church they will probably not vote for you.

Besides the ideological matters, black infant mortality in SC is 9 out of every 1000 live births. That means that nearly 1% of all black babies die, nearly double that of white babies. This combined with large average 7/15

family sizes means that many black households will have had a child die.

This is something that they share with Biden, and he gave an impassioned speech in SC last week on dealing with loss. Biden has lost his first wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972 and his son to 8/15

a brain tumor in 2015. That personal recognition matters in SC, as reflected in the vote with 61% for Biden.

Moving on to Sanders, he trailed Biden with only 17% of black voters. This is pretty bad news for Sanders, because his weakness in 2016 was with black voters. He 9/15

was routed in 2016 by Clinton among black voters, winning only 14%. This year Sanders has made outreach to minority voters a focal point of his campaign, but moving from 14 to 17% is not exactly massive growth.

Finally there is Steyer who dropped a huge amount of money 10/15

on SC and got 13% of the black vote. He probably took that from Biden, but it was a disappointing finish and Steyer dropped out hours after the polls closed.

Nobody else got more than 5% of the black vote. (Drop out???)

3. Looking towards #SuperTuesday

So where does that 11/15

leave us going forward? I will write a much longer thread on this on Monday, but a lot of momentum swings back to Biden. He will get a bunch of good media cycles out of this, not to mention fundraising and endorsements.

But is it too late? Biden has weak ground game 12/15

compared to Sanders and has less money. Biden has more or less given up on California which has 400+ delegates. While Biden is running first or second in a lot of states, Bloomberg could act as a major spoiler.

I would expect to see some of Bloombergs support come back 13/15

to Biden and there will be a lot of pressure on Bloomberg to drop out. Problem is that Bloomberg is already on the ballot and there is not much time left before Tuesday, not to mention that many states have early voting.

Biden's blowout victory has absolutely changed the 14/15

dynamics of the race, and its likely to be a tight one. Odds are right now that it'll end in a contested convention, but if Bloomberg drops out before Tuesday Biden might just clinch it.

Stay tuned for my #SuperTuesday analysis, and please send me your questions!