The big story this week has been the nine lives of Newt Gingrich, as the repeatedly-left-for-dead ex-Speaker is now a narrow favorite to win Saturday's South Carolina primary. This makes South Carolina a much more interesting election than New Hampshire (where part-time resident Mitt Romney was the heavy favorite, and won accordingly). Romney now has to be worried that he's at risk of losing the second of the three early states. With that in mind, here are our county benchmarks, to make it easier to see how the candidates are on pace with where they need to be, as results trickle in county-by-county.
As with New Hampshire, choosing a Mitt Romney target is a difficult one. Right now, his projected percentage (according to Nate Silver) is about 33%, to Newt Gingrich's 35%. So, 35% seems like a good target for Romney to beat the spread -- and to have a shot at squeaking past Gingrich, unless Gingrich is also able to inflate his own numbers not out of Romney's column but out of Rick Santorum and Ron Paul's share (and win, say, a 37-35 victory over Romney).
With that in mind, here's a chart similar to the one I did for New Hampshire earlier in the month, with one column showing what Romney got in 2008, and another showing what he should be getting in 2012 for a result that he'd probably want. (Big thanks to Greg Giroux for compiling these numbers in their raw form.)
Town |
% of 2008
statewide vote |
Romney vote
share in 2008 |
For Romney
to hit 35%
in 2012 |
McCain or
Huckabee? |
Statewide |
100.0 |
15 |
35 |
M |
Greenville |
13.3 |
17 |
37 |
H |
Lexington |
7.7 |
16 |
36 |
M |
Charleston |
7.7 |
19 |
39 |
M |
Spartanburg |
6.8 |
13 |
33 |
H |
Richland |
6.4 |
19 |
39 |
M |
Horry |
5.7 |
19 |
39 |
M |
Anderson |
4.7 |
12 |
32 |
H |
York |
4.7 |
11 |
31 |
H |
Beaufort |
4.4 |
26 |
46 |
M |
Aiken |
4.1 |
14 |
34 |
M |
Berkeley |
3.4 |
15 |
35 |
M |
Pickens |
3.3 |
10 |
30 |
H |
Dorchester |
3.0 |
17 |
37 |
M |
Florence |
2.5 |
13 |
33 |
H |
Oconee |
2.1 |
14 |
34 |
M |
Sumter |
1.7 |
11 |
31 |
H |
Kershaw |
1.5 |
13 |
33 |
M |
Greenwood |
1.5 |
12 |
32 |
H |
Georgetown |
1.5 |
20 |
40 |
M |
You might notice I've also added another column that has an M or an H in it, depending on whether John McCain or Mike Huckabee won that county in 2008. (Romney didn't win any counties, or even come close.) There is a correlation, though, that you might notice: the better that McCain did, so too the better Romney did.
If you break out a map, there's also a geographic pattern to all this. The counties where McCain (and, accordingly, Romney) did better tend to be the ones on or near the coast, where the low country white residents are likelier to be English-American descendants of the gentry and be more cavalier about social issues (and also where there are increasingly large numbers of country-club-type northeastern retirees, especially in Beaufort County, home of Hilton Head Island and not coincidentally Romney's best stronghold). That means Charleston (and its exurbs, in Berkeley, Dorchester, and Georgetown Counties), and Horry, home of Myrtle Beach... and to a lesser extent, the area around Columbia (Richland and Lexington Counties) smack in the state's middle. The counties where Huckabee did best (and where Gingrich and Santorum will do best) are the upstate ones, a heavily Scots-Irish area which is one of the most fervently evangelical parts of the country. That means Greenville and Spartanburg in particular, but also Pickens and Anderson Counties.
With that in mind, what are your predictions for Saturday? Does Romney edge out a win, and survive this last major bump on the road to the nomination? Does Gingrich put some distance between himself and Romney, turning it back into a two-man fight?
Polls close at 7 PM Eastern time. Also worth remembering: unlike New Hampshire, South Carolina uses a hybrid "winner take all" system, where the winner of the state gets 11 delegates and the winner of each of the state's seven congressional districts gets 2 delegates (and, yes, it looks like they're using the new district lines; hence the seven districts), for a total of 25 delegates up for grabs. Given Gingrich and Romney's regional strengths, they both probably start out with at least two CDs in hand.