Biden Looks for Momentum From Lopsided South Carolina Win
Biden exceeded all expectations in his 28.5-point victory over Bernie Sanders in South Carolina.
(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden is looking to use a blowout win in South Carolina to paint the Democratic primary contest as a clear choice between his traditional centrism and Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism.
In multiple television interviews on Sunday, the former vice president touted his success with South Carolina’s diverse electorate and portrayed Sanders as a risky choice who’d lose key states and hurt other Democratic candidates in the general election because of his liberal policies.
“I can go into purple states and we can win,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I can win in places where I don’t think Bernie can win in a general election.”
Citing his record in the Senate and as vice president under President Barack Obama, Biden also argued that he’d been a more effective lawmaker than Sanders, whose plans Biden has called unrealistic.
Americans “are not looking for revolution, they are looking for results,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The former vice president said he’d had raised $5 million in the past 24 hours, a span that included the decisive win in the Palmetto State. He vowed to staff up as he seeks to head off Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who still leads the race in delegates, saying “there’s lots of changes coming.”
“We’ve now won more actual votes overall since this began, since this whole process began, than Bernie has won,” Biden said on NBC. But he acknowledged that things haven’t gone well for his campaign, which lost the three states with nominating contests prior to South Carolina. Biden also fell behind rivals in fundraising and faltered in national polls in recent months.
“I feel good about the top part of my campaign,” he told ABC. “We’ve had some difficulties across the board and in terms of field organization. That’s getting better.”
That echoed a tough assessment from South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, whose endorsement gave Biden a boost heading into the primary. Clyburn said Saturday night that the Biden campaign needed to “do some retooling” and that he was “not going to sit idly by and watch people mishandle this campaign.”
Biden had long boasted that he would win South Carolina, where more than two-thirds of primary voters are African-American. But his 28-point lead over Sanders, a margin of victory wider than polling had suggested, gave his campaign a second wind, especially among establishment Democrats eager to stave off a Sanders nomination.
Biden received an effusive reception at an historic black church in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday. While former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was seated in a front-row pew, Biden was given a spot on the dais at the event commemorating the 55th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when white police officers attacked black voting-rights marchers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965.
Biden was introduced at the ceremony at Brown Chapel AME Church by an endorser, Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama, whose district includes Selma. “He has earned the right to be in this pulpit and address you now,” she said.
Speaking of the violence decades before, Biden said, “That Sunday denied America of the last vestige of complicity. What it did was it made us all have to look and understand exactly what was happening” in the civil rights movement.
While the country has made progress, it’s also regressed, Biden said: “Sometimes I wonder whether it’s 1920 or 2020.”
Biden received a standing ovation after his comments.
Cash Infusion
Biden’s campaign said that some top Democratic fund-raisers reported that some previously uncommitted donors were now willing to give the maximum to his campaign.
More endorsements also flowed in on Sunday, including Representative Jennifer Wexton of Virginia, one of the 14 states that will hold primaries on Super Tuesday, March 3. Wexton represents a suburban district outside Washington that flipped to the Democratic Party in 2018.
Biden was also endorsed by former Senator Barbara Boxer of California, which will award 495 delegates on Super Tuesday, the most of any state. Biden “worked hard in very difficult races across the country to help take back the house in 2018,” she wrote in a tweet. “We cannot afford to gamble on this.”
Even with an infusion of cash, Biden faces an uphill battle. Sanders is ahead in polls in more than half of the states voting on Super Tuesday and commands an online army of small-dollar donors who have helped him outraise all of the candidates who aren’t self-funding.
Sanders raked in $46.5 million in February, his campaign announced, on top of the $25 million collected in January.
Though more than a third of delegates will be awarded on Tuesday, Biden said he expects to do well in other big states such as Georgia, which vote later in March. He also said on ABC that he could win North Carolina and Texas on Tuesday.
Bloomberg’s Spending
An NBC/Marist poll released on Sunday showed Biden and Sanders essentially tied in North Carolina, while Sanders held a double-digit lead in Texas.
Beyond Sanders, Biden still faces competition from Bloomberg, who’s spent more than $538 million of his own money advertising in Super Tuesday states while crisscrossing the country. Like Biden, Bloomberg has sought to present himself as a more electable alternative to Sanders.
(Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
Biden argued that Bloomberg’s money could only go so far.
“I think money can buy you a lot but it can’t hide your record or make you something you are or are not,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
He also not-so subtly criticized both Sanders, an independent who has described himself as a democratic socialist, and Bloomberg, who was elected mayor as a Republican, became an independent and then registered as a Democrat before running for president.
“I think the Democratic Party is looking for a Democrat,” he said.
--With assistance from Hailey Waller and Billy House.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Teague Beckwith in Washington, D.C. at rbeckwith3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny, Magan Crane
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