Biden wins in South Carolina, setting him on a path to renomination

US President Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary Saturday, giving him the kind of emphatic result he no doubt envisioned when he made the state the first contest on the Democrats’ presidential nominating calendar.

The election, called by The Associated Press shortly after polls closed, gives Biden the first set of delegates required to claim the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in August.

Biden vowed that South Carolina would once again send him to the White House.

“The people of South Carolina have spoken again, and I have no doubt that you have set us on the path to winning the presidency again — and making Donald Trump a loser again,” Biden said in a statement released by his campaign.

By moving South Carolina from the party’s fourth contest to its first, Biden elevated the influence of Black voters in choosing the Democratic nominee and insulated himself from potential primary challengers in a state that saved his 2020 campaign and propelled him to the White House.

Unlike in New Hampshire, where a Biden challenger — Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. — spent millions on his campaign, the president had South Carolina virtually all to himself. The state’s voters provided only trace amounts of support for Phillips and Marianne Williamson, an author who also ran a quixotic presidential campaign in 2020.

Biden had about 97% of the vote, with more than one-third of ballots counted.

The Biden campaign has treated South Carolina’s primary as an important contest even though the Republican-leaning state is unlikely to be a general-election battleground. The campaign hired four paid staff members — devoting resources to a noncompetitive state before it does in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Campaign officials used the state to test turnout messages aimed at Black voters, who typically make up about two-thirds of South Carolina’s Democratic primary electorate.

The Biden campaign has sought to downplay expectations about its South Carolina turnout. The state’s open primary system means voters are free to choose which primary to vote in, and the stakes are far higher in the Republican contest pitting former President Donald Trump against Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor.

But in the hours before polls closed and from the stage at the primary night watch party Saturday, Democrats flaunted one statistic that they gleaned from the state’s early voter turnout data: A 13% increase in the share of Black voters compared with 2020.