Posted on 07/28/2016 7:55:26 AM PDT by Gamecock
COLUMBIA Asked about the odds of Hillary Clinton winning South Carolina in this fall’s presidential election, Clemson University political scientist David Woodard replied: “It’s more realistic that we’ll be invaded by Martians.”
South Carolina has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in four decades, and pundits do not expect that streak to end in November.
Even Democrats acknowledge Clinton’s chances of beating GOP nominee Donald Trump in the Palmetto State are slim. But as Clinton celebrates her presidential nomination in Philadelphia, some within the party hold out hope she could pull off a historic upset.
“She has a chance,” S.C. Democratic Party chair Jaime Harrison said. “It’s definitely not a slam dunk, but she definitely has a chance. (President Barack) Obama got 45 percent here in 2008 and 44 in 2012, and that was without the national party putting a lot of effort into South Carolina.”
Former S.C. Democratic chair Dick Harpootlian said Clinton’s odds improved to “improbable” from “impossible” with her selection of U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate and the GOP’s nomination of controversial real estate mogul Trump.
Kaine is a Southern, moderate gun-owner who “checks all the boxes on the kind of Democrat that South Carolinians can vote for,” Harpootlian said, adding some Republicans who can’t stomach Trump likely will stay home and not vote on Nov. 8.
But political scientists and pollsters do not like Clinton’s S.C. chances.
“I don’t expect (Clinton’s campaign is) going to have much of a game plan at all to win in South Carolina,” said Scott Buchanan, a political scientist at The Citadel. “There’s just simply not enough Democratic votes or independent votes here.”
Clinton is already well known and largely disliked by many in the S.C. electorate, said Clemson’s Woodard, a sometimes GOP consultant. “They would probably rather drink poison than vote for her.”
The analytical website FiveThirtyEight projects Trump is eight points ahead of Clinton in South Carolina and gives the real estate mogul an 83.6 percent chance of winning the state’s nine electoral votes.
Those figures are up after last week’s GOP convention, where Clinton’s name regularly was dragged through the mud.
A Trump win in November would be par for the course in a state that last voted for a Democrat in 1976, when most of the South picked former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter over then-President Gerald Ford, a Michigan Republican.
GOP presidential candidates have carried South Carolina in 12 of the past 13 general elections since white Southerners’ mass migration to the Republican Party during the civil rights movement.
Breaking the link between white voters and the GOP is key to Democrats’ efforts to win back the state, but it is too tall a task for this election year, according to state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, who chairs the Democratic National Committee’s Southern caucus.
“We’ve lost white voters, so we’ve got to figure out how to get white South Carolinians to understand that Democrats are not what they have been told we are,” said Cobb-Hunter. “It’s amazing to me that people who are struggling believe that Republicans have the answer for their struggles.”
Even if Clinton can’t win South Carolina, her Palmetto State campaign could prove valuable to Democratic party-building in the state, which Republicans have dominated for nearly two decades. Democrats running for county, state and congressional seats will benefit if Clinton mobilizes enough S.C. voters to keep the state race close, Cobb-Hunter and others say.
While President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns failed to target Palmetto State voters for mailers or television ads, Cobb-Hunter and state party chair Harrison want the national party and Clinton campaign to make a strong effort in South Carolina.
Harrison said the Clinton campaign “responded positively” to a letter that he and other Southern Democratic operatives wrote, asking for the nominee to commit to a Southern strategy.
That commitment could include money, campaign stops from high-profile Clinton backers, such as the Obamas, or high-tech campaign efforts like microtargeting, Democrats say.
“It’s too tough a hill to climb to expect a Clinton victory in 2016,” Cobb-Hunter said. “But if you can close the margin, it’ll help everyone down the ballot.”
So many people like to pretend that that carpetbagging Yankee Tim Kaine is actually a Southerner, because they are desperate to win Virginia. Hardly any of the major Dems in the state are actually Virginians.
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