Does SC have open or closed primaries? (TLDR post)
South Carolina’s primaries are open. (If there is a runoff, a voter can only vote in the runoff of the same party he voted in at the primary, but this doesn’t apply here — it was not a runoff.)
The primaries are open, and you have to declare which you are voting in when you go to vote. This was a huge primary for the republicans, and you can bet there were likely NO republicans voting on the Dem side that nobody cared about. What you normally see are big numbers of Dems voting in republican primaries (especially presidential), not the other way around.
Open. But I can’t see there being a large Republican crossover into the Democratic primary for two reasons:
1. Demint is a solid favorite in November regardless of whether he runs against Rawl or Greene. There’s no significant advantage to be gained by putting Greene up there; in fact, Greene will run stronger among black voters and may raise black voter turnout even though he’s clearly a few bricks short of a full load. Democratic blacks will vote for a black candidate over a white candidate if all else is equal, period, full stop. That’s how Greene won.
2. With the hotly-contested Republican governor’s race (the whole Nikki Haley thing), I can’t imagine a lot of Republicans would ditch voting in that primary to cross over and cast a “tee-hee” vote for Greene.
Greene won because nobody knew who Rawl was, black voters are disproportionately active in SC primaries, and Greene is black. It ain’t rocket surgery. Clyburn and Axelrod and the political class are freaking out because the black voters in SC went off-script and didn’t vote for Rawl...which is ironic considering Axelrod was right there and saw the near-100% support that they had for Obama because he was “their” candidate. He thought they’d stay on the plantation and vote for who they were “supposed” to vote for. He was wrong.
}:-)4