For the first time, South Carolina will kick off the Democratic presidential primary season in an effort by the party – and urged by President Joe Biden – to center Black voters.
After decades of New Hampshire being the “first in the nation,” the Democratic National Committee voted last year to change its presidential primary calendar to better reflect the diversity of the United States and reward the party’s most loyal voting block.
“This is a really, really big deal. Something that no other president ever had the gumption, or even the notion to modify or change,” Jaime Harrison, chairman of the DNC, told theGrio.
“This president did, and that’s because he sees Black folks, understands Black folks, and understands that we matter,” he added.
Black South Carolinians, who make up more than 50% of the Democratic Party’s electorate in the state, were consequential to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2020 win, resurrecting their then-struggling campaign after a critical endorsement by longtime South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn.
Clyburn told theGrio that South Carolina’s new status as the party’s first primary state in the nation “shows that the coalition of voters that Democrat needs to win in November exists in South Carolina.”
As Democratic strategist and Clyburn senior advisor Antjuan Seawright puts it: “The same bloodline of those who once picked cotton will now have the first say so in picking who the leader of our party will be and, ultimately, who the president of the United States will be.”
Seawright said it’s also “ironic” that 40% of enslaved Africans came through South Carolina’s port of Charleston, making this historic primary meaningful for Black voters across the country who are descendants of America’s enslaved ancestors.
Black voters across the nation played an outsized role in the historic election of Biden and Harris, so much so that Biden…
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