Amid looming shakeup, SC Dems say state deserves early placement in presidential primaries

Leading Democrats in South Carolina made a formal pitch Friday for the state to retain its place near the start of the Democratic presidential primary, as national party leaders consider the first major shakeup to the nominating process since 2008.

“I believe very strongly that if the process is not broken, it doesn’t need to be fixed,” Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn told members of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules & Bylaws Committee, which is charged with reviewing the process.

The RBC had gathered in Washington this week to hear presentations from 17 states and territories, each vying to become one of four or five states granted special permission to hold their presidential primary before all others.

South Carolina, of course, has been an early presidential state since 2008. And state party leaders, including South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Trav Robertson, have said the state has earned a right to continue going early, pointing to its well-run primaries in the past, its relatively small size, and its diverse group of voters.

“Our state doesn’t break candidates,” said Robertson, who delivered the state’s presentation alongside Clyburn. “It gives them the opportunity to gain momentum as they march toward the nominating process.”

Notably absent from Robertson’s and Clyburn’s remarks was any argument that the state, which went fourth in 2020, should go first in the nominating process. That approach was different than the one embraced by other traditionally early states making a presentation this week, including Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire, all of which argued they deserved a place at the very start of the process.

Democrats are reconsidering their early state order after a primary process in 2020 that many Democrats said was poorly run and skewed too heavily toward overwhelmingly white states. It is widely expected to provide the first major shakeup to the process since 2008.

Most of the scrutiny is focused on Iowa, where a long delay in reporting the results of its caucus in 2020 produced frustration and confusion among party members.

Clyburn said Friday that if another state has had problems, the committee should vote to remove its privileges. But it shouldn’t, he added, redo the whole order because of one state’s mistakes.

“If there is a weak link, we need to strengthen it,” the congressman said.

“Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” he continued. “I think we’ve demonstrated in South Carolina that we can provide the venue as necessary for a candidate to hone his or her skills and do it in an affordable way and then go on to capture the rest of the country.

South Carolina has bolstered its reputation as an important battleground in recent Democratic presidential primaries.

In 2008, it gave eventual party nominee Barack Obama a key victory over Hillary Clinton. Eight years later, Clinton’s decisive victory over Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was widely seen as proof that she retained the strong support of Democratic Black voters, an essential part of her own primary victory that primary.

But the state was perhaps never more influential than it was in 2020, when then-candidate Joe Biden soundly defeated Sanders and revived his once flailing candidacy. The victory effectively made Biden the race’s new front-runner overnight, paving the way for him to win the party’s nomination and, eventually, the presidency.

The Rules & Bylaws Committee will meet again the first week of August to make a formal recommendation to the whole DNC about which states should be included in the exclusive early primary window, and in what order they should go.

The DNC will then decide in September whether to ratify the recommendation, which its members are widely expected to do regardless of what the committee recommends.

This story was originally published June 24, 2022 at 1:11 PM with the headline "Amid looming shakeup, SC Dems say state deserves early placement in presidential primaries."