Thanks to South Carolina’s unusual decision to have their Republican primary one week and their Democratic primary the next week, now we’re on to the sequel, SOUTH CAROLINA II: VOTE HARDER. The Democratic primary will take place on Saturday, Feb. 27, with polls closing at 7 pm ET … and at this point, it doesn’t seem to offer much suspense as to who’ll take first place. Hillary Clinton is currently leading Bernie Sanders by a 58-34 margin according to Huffington Post Pollster’s aggregate.
If you’ve been paying close attention, though, doubtlessly you’ve had it hammered into you that this is a race about accruing delegates, not simply about who wins the most states. South Carolina is the biggest prize so far … we’re finally up into the realm of the “medium-sized” states … though it only pales compared with some of the truly big states that’ll be contested next week on Super Tuesday. South Carolina has 53 pledged delegates that will be decided on Saturday (compared with 44 that were awarded in Iowa).
All the delegates in South Carolina are awarded proportionately … the “winner-take-all” dynamic is limited to the Republican side … and while there’s a 15 percent viability threshold, with only two candidates, neither of them will fail to hit that mark. Thirty-five of the delegates will be allocated at the congressional district level, meaning the remaining 18 are statewide: 11 at-large and 7 pledged PLEOs (“party leaders and elected officials” … those, however are different from the "unpledged PLEOs," whom you better know as "superdelegates").
So, if we’re expecting some sort of Clinton victory here, the real question becomes: what are the break points for those statewide delegates? For the 11 at-large delegates, the most likely split is 7 Clinton, 4 Sanders, if we naively extrapolate that 58-34 margin up to a final result of 62-38. If Clinton’s total percentage climbs all the way up to around 68 percent, then she’s crossed over to an 8/3 split. And if it drifts down to only 59 percent, it's only a 6/5 split.
For the seven PLEOs, the most likely split is 4/3. But if Clinton can push past 64 percent statewide, then that split will widen, to 5/2.
South Carolina has seven congressional districts. (You might remember it having only six, but it gained an extra one in 2012 thanks to reapportionment.) For purposes of the Democratic primary, though, one district looms over the other ones: SC-06, represented by Jim Clyburn. This is South Carolina’s lone black-majority district, linking the African-American portions of Charleston and Columbia, along with a number of rural, mostly black Low Country counties in between. And given the racial polarization of South Carolina’s electorate, many of the states’ Democrats are crowded into the 6th. In 2012, Barack Obama got 71 percent of the vote in SC-06, while only getting 44 percent statewide.
You can see that with the delegate allocation: SC-06 gets 8 delegates. The two Upstate districts, SC-03 and SC-04, are the state’s reddest districts, with Obama getting only 34 and 36 percent, respectively; as a result of having so few Democrats, they get only 3 and 4 delegates. The remaining districts each get 5 delegates each.
SC-01, -02, -05, and -07 are likely to go 3/2 each, unless Clinton really pours it on and tops 70 percent in any of them (in order to get to 4/1). SC-03 will almost certainly go 2/1, unless Clinton somehow tops 83 percent in what’s easily the state's whitest district. SC-04 offers at least some tension, though: if Clinton falls below 62.5 percent, the district splits 2/2, but if she goes above 62.5 percent, she’ll go up 3/1.
So, SC-06 is the real prize. If Clinton is running between 56.25 percent and 68.75 percent in the district, she’ll get a 5/3 split. To push it to a 6/2 split, she’d need to top 68.75 (and if she somehow topped 81.25 percent, she’d go up to 7/1). Bear in mind, though, that if Clinton is running in the low 60s statewide, she’s still likely to be in the high 60s or even the 70s in SC-06, seeing as how many of the state’s African-American voters are in this district. (By contrast, she might run down in the 50s in the whiter districts.)
Now the problem is, as the election results roll in, they won’t be reported by congressional district; in South Carolina, they’re reported at the county level. Even more problematically (unlike Iowa, where the CD map neatly follows county lines), many of the state’s biggest counties are split. This is especially a problem when you’re looking at Charleston County, where the white part of the county is in SC-01 and the black part is in SC-06, and in Richland County (where Columbia is), where the white part is in SC-02 and the black part is in SC-06. A 65 percent result for Clinton in Charleston County might actually mean, for instance, that she’s getting 55 percent in the SC-01 part of Charleston County and 80 percent in the SC-06 part of Charleston County.
Nevertheless, to help you know how to slot what county into what district, we'll close with a handy table. I’m also including two other pieces of data for each congressional district; one is race data (though keep in mind that’s for the entire district population, not the Democratic electorate in the district; considering that the Democratic electorate in South Carolina as a whole is majority-African American, the black percentage of the Dem electorate in each district will be significantly higher than the black percentage in each district overall).
The other is age data, but that will probably be a considerably less important factor than in Iowa, where age was a strong predictor of the vote. Sanders supporters might be somewhat heartened, though, by the fact that the delegate-heavy SC-06 is noticeably the state’s youngest district (with a median age of only 35.0, and where 24.3 percent of the population falls into the 20-34 bracket), thanks in part to the presence of the University of South Carolina in the SC-06 portion of Columbia. Outside of the cities, though, most of the millennials in SC-06 will be African-American millennials.
SC-01 (5 dels.): 71 percent white/18 black/2 Asian/7 Hispanic; median age 38.7
Large counties to focus on: Beaufort, Berkeley, Dorchester, part of Charleston
SC-02 (5 dels.): 67 percent white/23 black/2 Asian/5 Hispanic; median age 38.1
Counties: Aiken, Lexington, part of Richland
SC-03 (3 dels.): 75 percent white/18 black/1 Asian/4 Hispanic; median age 40.3
Counties: Anderson, Greenwood, Laurens, Oconee, Pickens
SC-04 (4 dels.): 68 percent white/19 black/2 Asian/8 Hispanic; median age 37.8
Counties: Greenville, Spartanburg
SC-05 (5 dels.): 66 percent white/27 black/1 Asian/4 Hispanic; median age 39.9
Counties: Lancaster, Sumter, York
SC-06 (8 dels.): 36 percent white/56 black/1 Asian/5 Hispanic; median age 35.0
Counties: Orangeburg is probably the best indicator; also Charleston and Richland, but remember they’re split along racial lines
SC-07 (5 dels.): 64 percent white/29 black/1 Asian/4 Hispanic; median age 41.9
Counties: Darlington, Florence, Horry
Statewide: 64 percent white/27 black/1 Asian/5 Hispanic; median age 38.8