In South Carolina, Hillary Clinton looks to win, and win big

Following her projected victory in the SC primary, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told her supporters that her “campaign goes national” starting tomorrow.

Clinton made a stop in Alabama Saturday before returning to Columbia, South Carolina’s capital, for what her campaign hoped would be an evening victory party.

Voting is underway in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary, and Hillary Clinton is looking for a big victory – and to win big over rival Bernie Sanders.

In 2008, 78 percent of black voters supported Barack Obama to 19 percent who supported Clinton.

The win for Clinton is her third in the first four contests of the 2016 campaign.

SC was long-considered Clinton’s firewall.

“I wouldn’t focus on the margin”, a campaign pollster said last week, “because it’s not going to be that close”. Equal pay for women and health care – specifically for the elderly – were the issues most important to the 58-year-old retiree. “That’s good. But now it’s time to get around one candidate and wait for the Republicans”, she said.

Bernie Sanders couldn’t have asked for a better electorate than the one he saw in New Hampshire.

But South Carolina voters appear ready to forgive.

Sanders knows his prospects with South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate are grim. Even on Friday, the last full day of campaigning before South Carolina’s polls open, Sanders began with a rally in Minnesota before heading south for a pair of events.

In a jab at Sanders campaign for income equality, Clinton said America isn’t a “single-issue country”. And in a pointed dig at Republican nominee Donald Trump, she said: “Despite what you hear, we don’t need to “make America great again”.

Sanders is also focusing on states like OH and Minnesota that vote later in March, when a whopping 45 percent of the delegates who will attend the nominating convention are up for grabs.

A win in SC over Vermont Sen.

But Whitmire says that doesn’t mean a record overall turnout, because the number of absentee votes cast in all SC elections has been increasing rapidly in recent years.

If Clinton maintains her large leads among older and minority voters, particularly black voters, exit polls from 2008 suggest she would have a demographic advantage in winner-take-all states like Ohio, Illinois, Florida, and Missouri. Thirty-five delegates are awarded based on finishes in each of the Palmetto State’s seven congressional districts, another 11 are considered at-large delegates won based on statewide finish, while the final seven are other party leaders and officials (to be named later) who are still bound by the results of the primary.

Cheers erupted at her campaign headquarters when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer announced the projection. This, you’ll recall, was the lopsided win that Bill Clinton dismissed as insignificant, since Jesse Jackson also won the state in 1984 and 1988.

Attracting white or younger voters, his biggest blocs of support, is not enough to push Sanders past Clinton. Hillary Clinton also received the endorsement of South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the influential black lawmaker who stayed neutral in the 2008 primary, but was critical of the former president’s comments.

A Democratic candidate needs 2383 delegates to win the nomination and the 11-state voting bonanza on March 1 accounts for 865 of those. “If Clinton does indeed pull down large margins among African-Americans in particular I think it gives her some momentum and some breathing room going forward and sort of beings the end for Sanders”.