Bernie Sanders

COLUMBIA, S.C. — With just a few days left until the South Carolina Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders is all but writing the state off.
He hasn’t said that, of course, but his schedule reflects it.

Sanders was in Massachusetts Monday night and Virginia Tuesday morning. While he attended a televised town hall in South Carolina Tuesday night and followed with an early-morning press conference, his itinerary Wednesday consisted of events in Kansas City, Missouri, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. After that, his schedule called for a trip to Ohio Thursday -- with stops in other March-voting states likely to be added, said an aide.

A candidate’s time is a campaign’s most precious resource, so by spending so much of it somewhere other than South Carolina, the Sanders campaign is engaging in the cold calculus of primary politics – making the tough decision to send the senator to the states where he figures to be the most competitive.

It’s a reflection of the cloudy outlook in South Carolina – where Hillary Clinton currently holds a double-digit lead in every poll ahead of Saturday's primary – but also of Sanders’ strategic map through mid-March. The campaign's goal is to project the message that he is running a durable national campaign, and central to that plan is a strong showing on Super Tuesday (March 1), followed by solid performances in big-state primaries like Michigan on March 8 and Ohio on March 15.

Sanders and his aides bristle at the idea that they’re giving up on South Carolina, partly because they’ve invested in a large local organization for months. And because of Sanders’ widely-publicized struggles courting African-American voters, they're eager to avoid the perception that his choice to effectively stop campaigning in a state where black voters make up more than half of the Democratic primary electorate implies he's ceding the black vote to Clinton all across the country.

“Bernie invested a lot of time and money, and has a sizable operation here. They’re certainly not skipping the state,” said Brady Quirk-Garvan, the chairman of the Charleston County Democratic Party. “But it’s clear their focus is on Tuesday and moving forward past South Carolina."
After barely mentioning South Carolina in his speech and communications to supporters upon losing Nevada on Saturday, Sanders was forced to face that question the next day on CBS’ Face The Nation, insisting that he was not skipping the state.

“I’m talking to you from Columbia, South Carolina, we have a major rally this evening, we’re not skipping over anything,” he told host John Dickerson Sunday, flashing some irritation at the implication. “But I think that after South Carolina, we have 11 states, we stand a good chance of winning a number of those states."

Indeed, the Sanders campaign is keeping surrogates — like actor and activist Danny Glover and former NAACP president Ben Jealous — in the state while maintaining its ads on the air and on the radio. And on Tuesday, the campaign released a new spot featuring Spike Lee, as part of its effort to grow Sanders’ share of the black vote.

Sanders himself held several South Carolina events Sunday. But in a sign of his deficit with the black voters who will likely decide the Democratic primary, the senator struggled to win attention amid a crowd of roughly 800 churchgoers at the largely black Brookland Baptist Church in West Columbia, even as Jealous tried to invoke Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign in his introduction. At his large, energetic rally in Greenville that night, the crowd was overwhelmingly white.

Meanwhile, recognizing the political opportunity presented here, Clinton is re-doubling her efforts, plastering the state with campaign appearances and surrogate events over the rest of the week. She's hoping to run up the score and come away with a considerable delegate lead.

“Not only is she spending a lot of time here, but the number of surrogates and the number of events they’re doing? You can’t cross the street without crossing a Hillary event,” said Quirk-Garvan. “They know they’re going to win, and this is about running up the score and having a decisive victory."

The former secretary of state’s team believes her plan to stay in South Carolina for the rest of the week will help her gain a big delegate margin from the state while allowing her to jump to other southern states — like Georgia on Friday — if she wants to shore up her support there ahead of March 1.

She has the added benefit of former President Bill Clinton making the rounds for her in other key Super Tuesday states — Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas so far this week, with a Virginia stop coming Wednesday.

That's a tactic that Sanders' camp recognizes, but doesn't have the luxury of pursuing. With Super Tuesday — when 11 states will hold Democratic contests — fast approaching, Sanders is merely engaging in a bit of political triage in South Carolina.

His campaign needs to perform well in the first half of March in order to stay competitive against Clinton. People close to Sanders didn't expect so much of the national media coverage following Nevada to portray Clinton as having regained her stride, and they’re now looking to Super Tuesday – where in a handful of states Sanders is ahead in the polls or is running competitively — as a means of checking her momentum, which they hope will also be limited by Super Tuesday's quick arrival on the heels of South Carolina.

Since each state in the primary process allocates its delegates to the convention proportionally, the Sanders camp figures, he'll walk away from South Carolina with some delegates no matter what. And, recognizing that the Vermont senator does better when he can spend serious time in states, aides think as long as he can claim enough delegates between March 1 and 15 from the ones he's now visiting, he can remain neck-and-neck with Clinton through the month.

If that plan works, said a senior Sanders aide, it will be because he performs well all across the country while Clinton's big wins will have largely been concentrated in the South. That would enable the underdog's camp to make the point that he's a national, not regional, candidate.

Still, with Sanders’ momentum seemingly stalled here as voting nears, one Clinton camp concern is managing expectations -- despite her wide lead in the polls, press secretary Brian Fallon sought to tamp down overconfidence with a tweet suggesting the margin could be in the single digits.

But at Sanders’ 5,200 person rally in Greenville on Sunday night, the senator made a slight concession of his own: Instead of his predicting that his host state would help spur on his political revolution, or predicting victory as he often does, he subtly lowered hopes for the crowd.

As far as making history goes, Sanders told the assembled, they simply have an opportunity.