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      Biden is betting on South Carolina’s Black voters. But does he still have their support?

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      Jonathan Fields and Taj McClary, two college freshmen, were chatting on Monday after class at a South Carolina State University snack shop. Both are young Black men from rough neighborhoods in North Charleston. They’ve made it out. But only so far.Fields is a mechanical engineering major with a 3.2 GPA, which isn’t enough to keep his state scholarship, he said. He’s looking at getting a job, but not just so he can afford a basket of chicken tenders after class.“I have an interview tomorrow at Wendy’s, just so I can send money back home and still get stuff,” Fields said. He’s not sure who he’s voting for in the Democratic primary on Saturday.“You don’t just succeed. You actually work for everything. Nothing is never handed to you. So when you come down here and you look at politics, you actually have to watch it.”On Saturday, South Carolina voters will head to the polls in a Democratic primary contest that is as much a coronation of Joe Biden as the Republican race here two weeks later appears to be of Donald Trump. But the common anxieties of Black voters lie beneath the placid surface of Biden’s re-election campaign, even after he chose to eschew tradition and launch his primary season in the state.There’s a contrast between Biden’s rhetoric and the lived reality of many Black voters in South Carolina who propelled him to the White House four years ago. That leaves some pointing to signs of improvement, but many people keenly aware of how far away equality remains, and how easily these gains can be reversed.Four years ago, Biden recovered from stumbles in Iowa and New Hampshire to win a resounding victory in this state – his first primary victory in his third run for the White House.Two Black senators – Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey – were on the ballot in 2020, hoping to capture the magic of Barack Obama’s victorious run of 2008. It didn’t matter. An early endorsement by James Clyburn, dean of the Black congressional caucus and the state’s only Democratic congressman, galvanized the Black vote for Biden, who went on to win nearly half of South Carolina’s Democratic voters and a first-place finish in every county in the state.Biden has been plain in acknowledging his political debt to South Carolina, and specifically to South Carolina’s Black electorate. According to 2020 exit polling, about 60% of Democratic voters in South Carolina are Black and about 90% of Black voters here cast ballots for Democrats.“I wouldn’t be here without the Democratic voters of South Carolina, and that’s a fact,” Biden said on Saturday at a celebratory dinner in Columbia. “You’re the reason I am president.”Democrats are celebrating South Carolina’s new status as the first Democratic primary in the nation, both a political gift by Biden and an acknowledgment by the Democratic party that something had to change, said Marlon Kimpson, a former state senator.“There was a large push by the party leadership to hold the first-in-the-nation primary in South Carolina, because the South Carolina Democratic party electorate mirrors the rest of the country,” he said. “The challenge with that is that the president doesn’t have any meaningful opposition. It’s a double-edged sword. While we are very excited about hosting the first primary, we’ve had to start early and work extremely hard to generate enthusiasm.”View image in fullscreenIndeed, neither Congressman Dean Phillips nor author Marianne Williamson have generated much enthusiasm for their primary challenge of a sitting president. A poll conducted by Emerson College on 5 January indicated that 69% of Democratic primary voters in South Carolina intend to vote for the incumbent. About 5% support Phillips and 3% support Williamson in the poll. Twenty-two per cent were undecided.“As I drive down Highway 17, there are no campaign signs,” Kimpson said. “In 2020, not only were there campaign signs, this close to the election there were people holding handheld signs. Radio ads. Bumper stickers. Social media posts 24/7.”This is also the first presidential primary contest in South Carolina which has had early voting. So far, fewer than 30,000 voters have cast Democratic primary ballots.“Turnout is going to be low. We know that,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the Black Voters Matter activist organization based in Atlanta. Albright led a series of town halls and voter education events in South Carolina last week. “If your benchmark is what happened in a previous primary, you’re going to be confused. Certainly, you can’t compare it to four years ago. The primary turnout is not going to tell us a whole lot.”Albright said he sees tension between the local concerns of Black voters and a state government dominated by white Republicans. For example, a recent cross burning in Conway, a gentrifying suburb of Myrtle Beach, has heightened interest in passing a hate crimes law at the state level. Activists have been pressing with increasing vigor for this political goal since the 2015 murders of nine people, including a state senator, at a historic Black church in Charleston.“Without a hate crimes law, who’s the president and who’s the attorney general and who’s running the Department of Justice matters,” Albright said.As the president formally begins his re-election campaign push, his message to Black voters has been to look at the promises he has made and kept to communities of color. Biden has elevated Black women to positions of authority, choosing Harris as his vice-president, appointing Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court and a record number of Black women to the federal bench.Capping insulin costs for consumers has been one of those signature accomplishments, Kimpson said. According to the American Diabetes Association, about 11.6% of Americans are diabetic, with a disproportionate disease burden affecting Black people. One out of eight South Carolinians is diabetic, according to data from the Medical University of South Carolina. For Black South Carolinians, it’s one in six. For those over 65, it’s one in four.Betty Owens of Orangeburg is 67. She receives insulin free of charge through Medicare, she said. On a Wednesday afternoon, she picked through the crust of some fried gas-station chicken breasts. “I don’t eat the outside,” she said. “It’s not that bad if you control it.”Owens, who had to pay for insulin out of pocket before the law changed, said the new policy was an important reason she’s voting for Biden in the primary and in November. She believes her health depends on it.Owens’ son and daughter got jobs paying more than they had been earning in the Trump years, one at an automotive company, another at a bakery. Biden “put out a lot of jobs out there, and more money with the jobs. When I was working, we weren’t making $19 or $20 an hour,” she said.The problem, she said, was inflation. While the rate of inflation in the United States has been lower than in other industrialized countries, and falling now, prices are still much higher than before the pandemic. “You run through that money like it isn’t even there,” she said. “You go into a store and you buy a few items, and it’s too much money.”The Black unemployment rate in April briefly dipped below 5% for the first time in history and remains lower over the last year than any previous period in American history. With remarkable historical consistency, the Black unemployment has usually moved in lockstep at double the white unemployment rate. Labor data over the past year suggests this is starting to uncouple: Black and white unemployment rates are inching closer together, perhaps a sign that endemic discrimination is receding.In absolute terms, economic outcomes for Black voters are improving. In relative terms, however, they’re falling behind. The wealth gap between Black and white households has increased in Biden’s term. Black households remain about 30% less likely to own a home than white households, driving this gap. The average Black worker earns 76¢ to a dollar earned by the average white worker.In South Carolina, it’s 73¢ to the dollar.View image in fullscreenSolving these problems requires a programmatic response, Kimpson said. “People are looking for immediate results in their mailbox, in their zip code. When you look at the American Rescue Plan, people actually got checks.”Student loan relief – $130bn and counting – has also been a signature chicken-in-the-pot item in Biden’s re-election campaign. Black students have borne a larger burden from those loans. While student loan relief unburdens people who have previously taken out loans, it’s not doing much for people in school today such as Fields, the freshman engineering student.“In order for me to get into the profession that I want to get into, I have to go to college,” Fields said. “But it’s like: I have to struggle just to get to where I want to be. Because nobody wants to help you. They tell everybody without college you won’t be anything, but how can I get there? There’s no help.”The return of Donald Trump to the White House remains a potent, motivating threat for Democrats, regardless of anemic turnout in a primary campaign, and Biden appears to know that.“I want you to imagine the future nightmare if Trump is back in office,” Biden told South Carolina Democrats last week. “Given the nightmare when he was in office, you know what is likely to come.” His stump speech conjures threats of a national abortion ban, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, cuts to social security and an amplification of divisive politics.Biden’s rhetoric looks beyond the primary, fixated on his expected opponent in November and on repudiating Trump’s election claims. On Saturday, South Carolina voters will signal just how well that message is working.“The second Lost Cause is Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen,” Biden said. We cannot allow that lie to live either, because it threatens our very democracy. Folks, there are truth, and there are lies – lies told for power, lies told for profit. We must call out these lies with a voice that is clear and unyielding.” More

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      Nikki Haley Isn’t Going Anywhere

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      What is Nikki Haley doing? What are her real intentions? Those questions have dominated every aspect of her candidacy.So much of what’s been said about Ms. Haley the last few months has been about what she’ll do after she loses — even that the original premise of the campaign must have contained hidden ambitions or total delusion. There’s been an assumption, even from would-be allies, that there must be another angle to the campaign, that she must want the vice presidency.That’s partly because, in her speeches, Ms. Haley often resists giving her listeners satisfaction, withholding the obvious point, allowing them to fill in what they want, both to Ms. Haley’s benefit and peril. She did not make a strong moral case against Donald Trump last year.But here we are after her big loss in New Hampshire, framed by many as the definitive end. Right now, Ms. Haley’s unwillingness to publicly engage with the obvious works differently, reveals different things.For instance, in a hotel ballroom by the Charleston, S.C., airport, with people decked out in “SC ❤️ NH” stickers, cheerfully wanting something they and everybody else know they probably won’t get, she proceeded as normal, giving that homecoming crowd primarily her normal remarks. She layered in critiques of Mr. Trump that dealt with inarguable surface realities, like how he talked about her the night before rather than about solutions to the nation’s problems: “He didn’t talk about the American people once; he talked about revenge!” (When she ran through a variety of problems he could have talked about, one woman yelled, “He don’t know!”)Insofar as she engaged with the obvious, literal reason that people in the room seemed so amped — that she was still in the race — it was this: “You know, the political elites, in this state and around the country, have said that we just need to let Donald Trump have this.” That was clearly what people in the room, who dropped into a long “noooo,” had come to hear discussed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      In South Carolina, Biden Tries to Persuade Black Voters to Reject Trump

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      President Biden sought to energize his base in the state that propelled him to the White House, but some local leaders said he needed to do more to highlight his achievements.Hoping to revitalize the momentum that propelled him to the White House, President Biden told a largely Black audience on Saturday night that “you’re the reason Donald Trump is a defeated former president,” in what was effectively his first appearance related to the Democratic primaries.Mr. Biden made clear in his remarks at a South Carolina Democratic Party dinner in Columbia, S.C., that he viewed the forthcoming week as not just a contest but a pivotal moment to energize a frustrated base of Black voters across the nation. And in the run-up to the state’s Feb. 3 Democratic presidential primary, which the party’s national committee selected last year to be the first in the nation, Democrats believe they have entered an opportune time.With former President Donald J. Trump having won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary for the Republican nomination, Mr. Biden’s allies plan to emphasize not just the president’s record but also the urgency of the moment: The general election effectively starts now, they say.“He has made it known what he’s going to do if he gets back into office,” Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, said of Mr. Trump in an interview. “And to see that blooming as a possibility and see him running as well as he is in the polls, I’m concerned about it.”“Do what you did before,” Mr. Clyburn said in an appeal to the Black electorate. “Turn that election around and save this democracy.”The sense of urgency is rooted in rising concerns over polls showing Mr. Biden underperforming among Black voters in battleground states, particularly among men. Some Democrats are also concerned that the high death toll in Gaza resulting from Israel’s offensive against Hamas will fuel frustration among younger voters. Twice during Saturday’s event, protesters shouting the number of civilian casualties in Gaza were removed, as attendees chanted over them, “Four more years!”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley Was Target of ‘Swatting’ Incident in December, Authorities Say

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      A bogus account of a shooting at a South Carolina home owned by Nikki Haley sent the authorities scrambling in late December, but the Republican presidential candidate and a former governor of the state, was not there at the time, Reuters reported on Saturday.The news service published details about the Dec. 30 “swatting” incident at Ms. Haley’s home on Kiawah Island, S.C., one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response. Reuters obtained the information as part of a public records request, which included an email from Craig Harris, the town’s public safety director, discussing the incident with local officials.The email said that an unknown person had called 911 and “claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself while at the residence of Nikki Haley.” The case remains under investigation, according to the email, which did not discuss a motive for the call.The details of the incident took nearly a month to emerge, a stark contrast to a series of high-profile “swatting” attempts that targeted politicians and government buildings in late December and early January.The Haley campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. When reached by Reuters, the campaign declined to address the report.Ms. Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations in former President Donald J. Trump’s administration, is the last serious candidate battling him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. She lost to Mr. Trump in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday by 11 percentage points, and they have increasingly clashed over her decision to stay in the race.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley was swatted in December, records review shows

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      Newly reviewed records show that presidential hopeful Nikki Haley was the target of a swatting incident in late December when an anonymous person called 911 claiming to have killed his girlfriend at Haley’s South Carolina home.Authorities responded to a call on 30 December from a person who said he had shot his girlfriend and was threatening to harm himself, giving Haley’s address to the operator. It was shortly deemed a fake emergency, Reuters reported. Haley and her son were not at home during the time of the call; her husband was overseas.“The incident is being investigated by all involved,” Craig Harris, the director of public safety at Kiawah Island, where Haley’s home is located. South Carolina state police, the FBI and Haley’s security team were informed of the event.Representatives for Haley have not responded to the incident publicly or responded to the Guardian’s request for comment.The report comes after a surge in swatting – when anonymous people use the addresses of public figures when calling 911 to report fake violent incidents, like shootings – against public officials in recent months. Some experts have noted that swatting has become a prolific tool of political intimidation in recent years as people respond to inflammatory rhetoric.Earlier this month, special counsel Jack Smith and DC district court judge Tanya Chutkan, both key figures in the federal case against Donald Trump for attempts to overturn the election, were targets of swatting. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state who barred Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot, was also singled out in an incident last year.Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said that 14 police cars, a firetruck and an ambulance appeared at his home when someone called 911 about a hoax shooting.“Now I bolt my doors every night,” he told Reuters. “That’s the reality I’m living in.”Jen Easterly, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal agency that is tasked with bolstering election security, was also a target of a hoax December 30, NBC News reported earlier this week.“One of the most troubling trends we have seen in recent years has been the harassment of public officials across the political spectrum, including extreme incidents involving swatting and direct personal threats,” Easterly told NBC News. “These incidents pose a serious risk to the individuals, their families and, in the case of swatting, to the law enforcement officers responding to the situation. While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique.”Some officials have also been targets of more direct threats. On the morning of closing arguments in Trump’s New York fraud trial, a bomb squad responded to a threat directed toward the Long Island home of judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the case. More

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      A Radical Proposal for Nikki Haley: Try to Win More Votes

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      Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary but found a cause: getting under Donald Trump’s not exactly rhinoceros-thick skin. The story of the Republican primary campaign in the days since Trump’s victory has been one where the victor acts like a sore loser and the likely loser loosens up, goads her stronger rival and finds a pool of small-dollar donors to keep her in the race.Haley’s turn toward mockery and confrontation has created modest excitement in the disillusioned world of NeverTrump punditry. Maybe the remaining non-Trump Republican is giving up on being vice president or winning some future G.O.P. primary campaign. Maybe she’s ready to make Trump’s unfitness her exclusive theme. Maybe, as The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio speculates, by needling and attacking and bringing out Trump’s worst behavior, she can even bring about the long-awaited Republican crackup that would finally defeat Trump on the scale that he deserves.I don’t think this hope makes a lot of sense. The idea that there exists some form of elite Republican denunciation, combined with egregious Trumpian misbehavior, that could shatter the G.O.P. coalition and send him to a Barry Goldwater or George McGovern-style defeat, seemed plausible enough eight years ago. It’s what I expected and what Republicans deserved.But I should have heeded the wisdom of Bill Munny in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Because since then we’ve seen all kinds of terrible behavior, coupled with attempted repudiations from all sorts of Republicans, including Trump’s own aides and cabinet appointees. And yet the rule has held: Ask people if they like Trump and majorities do not, but put Trump up against the current Democratic Party, and he becomes a viable candidate for president.Maybe Haley is the right figure to change that. But she has nowhere near the pre-Trump fame of a Mitt Romney or the ideological credibility of a Liz Cheney. And based on what we saw from Chris Christie’s campaign, a pure repudiate-Trump candidacy is only likely to enhance Trump’s margins in the remaining primaries, emphasizing Haley’s hopelessness rather than her gumption.Moreover, wouldn’t there be something a little bit strange, after two consecutive primary campaigns in which Republicans desperately competed for a chance to face off with Trump one-on-one, for the winner of that prize to immediately give up on winning any more supporters? Haley’s consolidation of gentry Republicans succeeded in boxing out Ron DeSantis’s attempt to build a larger non-Trump coalition. Is she really not even going to attempt to build a larger coalition of her own?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley Looks to Home Turf to Challenge Trump

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      Nikki Haley, facing growing doubts and pressure to drop out, has winnowed the race to a one-on-one contest and is looking to make her case in South Carolina.A combative Nikki Haley brought her presidential campaign back to South Carolina on Wednesday after a disappointing defeat the night before in New Hampshire, and told a boisterous crowd in a cavernous ballroom in North Charleston that she would fight Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination.“The political elites in this state and around the country say we just need to let Donald Trump have this,” she told her supporters, who were jeering at the idea. “Listen. We’ve only had two states that have voted. We’ve got 48 more.”Nowhere is more immediately important than South Carolina, where she served two terms as governor before being tapped to serve as Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations. But just because it’s her home state does not mean it is friendly territory. As Ms. Haley looked to reinvigorate her campaign here on the ground, Republicans, as varied as local party officials and the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, stepped up the pressure on her to drop out. As she made her case for pressing on, the former president significantly consolidated his support.While she spoke, the Trump campaign blasted out a fresh list of endorsements in South Carolina that now includes the state’s two senators, most of its House members, its governor and lieutenant governor, and much of its State House — more than 150 names in all.“Welcome home to Trump Country, Nikki,” Austin McCubbin, Mr. Trump’s South Carolina director, taunted.Some of Ms. Haley’s closest allies and confidants on Wednesday continued to insist that Ms. Haley had met her own expectations: She had winnowed the field and was now in the two-person contest she wanted, with time enough until the primary on Feb. 24 to spread her message to a broader electorate and draw contrasts between herself and Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Republican who said she held Trump accountable for January 6 endorses him

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      The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.On Monday, Mace announced her endorsement, a day before the New Hampshire primary, in which Trump enjoys comfortable polling leads over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent.“I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate,” Mace said. “And until now I’ve stayed out of it. But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”Saying “it’s been a complete shit show since [Trump] left the White House”, the congresswoman said the US “needs to reverse all the damage Joe Biden has done”. Trump, she said, would be better on the economy, immigration and national security.“Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” Mace said.“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”At present, Trump faces 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection and assorted civil trials. Still, he has dominated the Republican primary, winning comfortably in Iowa last week.Observers were quick to point to what Mace made of Trump at the end of that term, in the aftermath of January 6.On that day, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden attacked Congress, seeking lawmakers to capture and possibly kill in a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.“Everything that he’s worked for … all of that, his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday,” Mace told CNN on 7 January 2021. “We’ve got to start over.”On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”While 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump, he was acquitted at his Senate trial when enough members of his party stayed loyal.Trump turned against Mace, endorsing a primary rival in her district in South Carolina. Mace fought off the challenge – with campaign help from Haley.Also on Monday, Steve Benen, an MSNBC producer, said: “Remember when Trump called Nancy Mace ‘absolutely terrible’ and tried to end her career? And when Nikki Haley scrambled to rescue her? A lot can happen in 18 months.”Mace is not the only senior South Carolina Republican to desert the former governor: the US senator Tim Scott, who Haley appointed in 2012, endorsed Trump on Friday.Jose Pagliery, a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, pointed to another widely remarked irony in Mace’s decision to endorse Trump this week, writing: “Rape survivor Nancy Mace just endorsed Donald Trump in the middle of his second rape trial.”In April last year, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mace discussed both her work to improve the processing of rape kits by law enforcement and her support for exceptions for victims of rape or incest in abortion bans passed in Republican states.She also said: “I am a victim of rape, I was raped by a classmate at the age of 16. I am very wary and the devil is always in the details, but we’ve got to show more care and concern and compassion for women who’ve been raped.”In August, a New York judge dismissed a counterclaim by Trump in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store changing room in the 1990s.Explaining why the jury decided Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but did not endorse Carroll’s claim that he raped her, Lewis A Kaplan discussed the difference, under New York law, between forcible penetration with the penis or with fingers.The jury said Trump did the latter to Carroll. Kaplan, however, wrote: “Mr Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term is commonly used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”The case has now reached a second trial, though a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed due to juror illness.A representative for Mace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Speaking to Fox News, Mace said Haley had been a “great governor” but voters in her South Carolina district were “overwhelmingly with Donald Trump”.“People want the primary to be over,” Mace said, pointing to an eventuality most pundits expect sooner rather than later, given Trump’s leads over Haley in New Hampshire, South Carolina (the third state to vote) and elsewhere.Mace also said that for voters in her district, “women’s issues” including abortion were “gonna be really important in the 2024 cycle”. More