Editor’s note: This story was updated Sunday morning with new vote percentages and delegate counts.
Former Vice President Joe Biden swept the South Carolina primary Saturday, slowing Sen. Bernie Sanders’ momentum after the Vermont senator dominated the first three contests for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Biden’s victory was expected, but his margin was larger than predicted by recent polls. He more than doubled Sanders’ second-place finish and claimed the bulk of the state’s 54 pledged delegates.
As of Sunday morning, with 100% of precincts reporting, the Associated Press had Biden leading with 48.4%. Sanders was second with 19.9%. Billionaire Tom Steyer who spent $22 million on advertising in the South Carolina, was third with 11.3%, and announced he was dropping out. Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar were in single digits. Candidates needed to reach 15% to win any delegates.
Biden’s win stopped Sanders’ streak in the first three presidential contests and breathed life into his struggling campaign.
“We’ve just won and we’ve just won big,” Biden said Saturday night in Columbia, South Carolina. “We are very much alive.”
He described the presidential contest as a race for “the soul of America.”
Just after 7 p.m., as the polls closed, the race was called for Biden and the former vice president claimed victory, thanking supporters and poking at Sanders.
“Together we will win this nomination and beat Donald Trump,” Biden said.
In a speech, he described himself as a “lifelong” Democrat and highlighted his work with former President Barack Obama. Biden had appealed heavily to South Carolina’s significant African American population.
He said Americans didn’t want “the promise of revolution, but results.”
The former vice president had portrayed South Carolina as a must-win state after Sanders won the most votes in the first three presidential contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
Biden’s win comes in advance of Super Tuesday March 3 where 14 states, including California and Texas, and American Samoa will vote on the same day. A third of the delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination are up for grabs on Tuesday.
Sanders congratulated Biden on the victory in South Carolina at 8:30 p.m. during a campaign rally in Norfolk, Virginia.
“You cannot win them all,” Sanders said in Virginia. “A lot of states out there. Tonight we did not win in South Carolina and that will not be the only defeat. There are a lot of states in the country — nobody wins them all.”
“And now we enter Super Tuesday and Virginia,” he added, beaming. He predicted victory, saying he was leading “a movement, not a campaign.”
As of Sunday morning, 145 delegates out of 1,991 have been declared. Sanders has 56, the highest number so far, followed by Biden with 48, Buttigieg with 26, Elizabeth Warren with 8 and Amy Klobuchar with 7.
Going into South Carolina, Sanders led the way with 45 pledged delegates, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg had 25 and Biden had 15. (Warren and Klobuchar’s numbers remained static.)
According to CNN early exit polling Sanders’ core base of support —17-29 year-olds — only made up 10% of the total people who voted in South Carolina and people in the 45-64 age range made up 43% of the vote.
Sixty percent of the African American vote in South Carolina went to Biden while 17% of the black vote went to Sanders, according to other exit polling.
Polls had Biden leading the Vermont independent by more than 18 points and showed him to be the clear frontrunner.
In the final months of 2019, barely polling above 10%, the Sanders campaign had all but written off South Carolina as a lost cause. But the campaign’s messaging changed earlier this month after Sanders won in New Hampshire and ended up in a virtual tie with former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in Iowa.
In the runup to Saturday, polling around 25%, Sanders began saying he believed he could do “very well” in the southern state.
In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton trounced Sanders in South Carolina, winning 73.5% of the vote while Sanders only managed 26% — a loss blamed in part on his inability to connect with a voting base that is predominately more moderate and older voters of color. The Vermont senator only managed to claim 14% of the African American vote four years ago.
This election cycle, Sanders went out of his way to correct some of his missteps from four years ago.
The state campaign staff was more than 70% people of color and Sanders opted for a strategy that prioritized putting more than 20,000 volunteers in rural areas with large African American populations.
The campaign also scheduled a number of breakfast events in an effort to allow voters to get to know Sanders on a more personal level.
But as the results from the first contest in the south rolled in, Sanders had already turned his focus towards key Super Tuesday states. The Vermont senator had left national campaign co-chairs Nina Turner and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., in South Carolina to get out the vote while he had moved on to other states.
Saturday morning, as people in South Carolina trickled in and out of the polls, Sanders held a rally in Boston, Massachusetts, drawing a crowd 13,000 strong in Warren’s home state, according to the campaign.
In a Medium post, which was later edited, Daniel Moraff, Sanders’ Massachusetts field director, said the “the Democratic primary may well pivot” on the state and that a victory for the Vermont senator “would fundamentally alter the dynamics of the campaign,” Politico reported.
Recent polling of the Bay State is forecasting a tight race between Sanders and Warren but with an edge to the Vermont senator.
After the Boston rally, Sanders traveled to Virginia for campaign events Saturday afternoon and evening.
While Bernie Sanders was in Massachusetts and Virginia, Jane O’Meara Sanders, a senior adviser and surrogate for her husband, was in Nashville, Tennessee — another Super Tuesday state — meeting with local business leaders.
In the next three days, Sanders will be holding rallies in California, Utah and Minnesota before returning to Vermont where he will cast his vote in the state’s primary and hold an event in Essex Junction.
