The problem with that explanation is that Rawl got only 54% in Charleston County.
I however can explain that easy. In Charleston County (which Obama carried in Nov ‘08) 70% of voters voted in the Republican primary. The county’s black population is around 33-34%
Now, not even when Charleston=South Carolina Republican Party did Republican candidates ever get a 40 point margin in the county save for maybe Nixon ‘72.
Simply put, white voters in Charleston voted Republican no matter their ideology or real party because the Democratic primary in that county is a black primary and in the state as a whole it’s a black primary too.
The SC GOP Primary has become the old pre 1960s Rooster primary except there is no systematic discrimination in it. 69% of South Carolinians cast a Republican ballot. Republicans only managed those margins statewide with Nixon and Campbell. Take out black South Carolinians who are around 30% of the total population and a little less of the statewide as a whole and you come up with a number saying that more than 85% of South Carolina whites cast a Republican primary ballot.
Look at the turnout maps by county. It is all driven by local elections. The only counties in which the Democrats have anything resembling turnout are black controlled counties and counties with a black population so high that whites vote in the Democratic primary lest blacks take control of the courthouse offices decided in it.
Look at the primary turnouts from this decade and then compare it to 2008 and you’ll see the differences. 2008 represented probably how the state really sees itself in partisan terms. The other primaries have heavy Republican tilts based on local elections/GOP primary’s defacto bringing back of the Rooster primary.
You might not like it but it is what it is. Rawls almost lost in Charleston. Rawls was not an unknown in Charleston. Blacks simply voted for the black candidate and that’s that and now Clyburn and them are all trying to run and hide because they know that given the history of the state and what not that this could further kill their party for another generation in the state, especially when they have somehow made inroads in areas like Charleston County.
If there was a large racial component to the Dem primary vote, then one would have expected Greene to have won much higher percentages in the Pee Dee (where whites were all voting Republican) and much lower percentages in the High Country (with very few blacks), and it just didn’t happen.
Also, if over 30% of Charleston County voters are black, and if upwards of 70% of Charleston County voters asked for a GOP ballot (partly due to the hotly contested GOP gubernatorial and SC-01 primaries), that means that almost the entire Dem primary electorate in Charleston County was black; if black voters knew that Greene was black (which does not seem possible, since polls show that neither candidate had as much as 5% name ID, although you are correct that Rawl may have been known by maybe 20% of voters in Charleston), why why would Greene only get 46% in a county in which over 90% of the electorate was black? Wouldn’t that be evidence that voters *didn’t know* who the candidates were?
I’m sure that many black voters chose Alvin Greene because they was his name and assumed that he was black, but obviously many white voters looked at Alvin Greene’s name and voted for him, and I think they did so because they pictured a white guy. It’s human nature.