What the Results from New Hampshire and South Carolina Tell us about Joe Biden's Re-Election Campaign

Joe Biden wasn’t even on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary this year but still managed to win, thanks to a low-key write-in campaign by some of his supporters there. The reason his name didn’t appear is because Democratic party leaders (at Biden’s urging) decided to bump that primary (and the earlier Iowa Democratic caucuses) out of their traditional up front places in the order and move South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary to the starting position. When party leaders in New Hampshire decided to resist that change by holding their presidential primary first anyway, the national party denied them the ability to use their primary to award delegates to this year’s Democratic national convention. Biden also refused to have his name placed on the ballot in the Granite State. The defenders of the new caucus and primary schedule pointed out that both Iowa and New Hampshire were states without a lot of racial diversity, and in today’s Democratic party didn’t seem all that representative of its most loyal supporters. Thus, South Carolina became the first official test of Biden’s appeal in 2024 when compared with such rivals for the nomination as Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips and author and spiritual leader Marianne Williamson.

Some states hold a special place in the life and career of presidential candidates. North Carolina was like that for Ronald Reagan. When he made his first all-out effort to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, he lost the Iowa caucuses and the first five primaries to incumbent Gerald Ford. And then came the North Carolina, where Reagan, having refocused his campaign on foreign policy (with the assistance of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms), finally won, and then went on to win a slew of other state contests. Although Reagan narrowly lost to Ford at the convention, the sense that the Gipper had a future in presidential politics had been restored. Among “movement conservatives” North Carolina became a kind of Holy Land, where Ronald Reagan rose from the dead.

South Carolina has similar significance for Joe Biden. In 2020 he was making his third try for the Democratic presidential nomination, having never won a single caucus or primary. Iowa and New Hampshire that year produced two more crushing defeats for him. And then came South Carolina, where Biden, lifted by a growing sense among Democrats that the pandemic’s arrival meant that the party needed a highly knowledgeable and experienced presidential candidate (and a crucial endorsement from South Carolina’s popular African American congressman James Clyburn), won for the first time, and then kept on winning in other states. And so, to Team Biden, South Carolina is special because it’s where “Middle Class Joe” finally scored a breakthrough in the presidential sweepstakes. His overwhelming victory there in this year’s Democratic primary held on February 3rd, when combined with his earlier write-in victory in New Hampshire, has done for him what Donald Trump’s wins in Iowa and New Hampshire have achieved on the GOP side. Thus, despite Biden’s advanced age and low approval rating in the polls, he is once again his party’s presumptive presidential nominee. The much bigger electoral challenge for him, as for Trump, is the one that awaits in the fall.