One day the history books will record the fact that one political event turned the lives of six national politicians upside down.
As you look back at the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary, the results changed the fate of Vice President Joe Biden, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Bernie Sanders and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Leading up to February 29, most of the combatants expected that Joe Biden would implode and that would open the door for anyone of them to move closer to being the Democratic nominee.
In a moment of great drama, Congressman James Clyburn made a historic endorsement of the vice president, which turned the tables on all the contenders. At the top of the list was Mayor Bloomberg, whose $500 million expenditure had him on the cusp of becoming the compromise candidate.
The three senators and the Indiana mayor were poised to ramp up their campaigns to capture the prize. But the smashing victory by Joe Biden forced all of them to abandon their efforts prior to Super Tuesday.
The outpouring of African American voters, who strongly backed Biden, forced most of them to quit and quickly turned the contest into a two-man race with Biden and Sanders.
Based on his big successes on Super Tuesday, Biden was propelled into another round of victories a week later in such delegate-rich states as Mississippi and Michigan. The South Carolina victory also dealt a death blow to the idea of picking future presidents at party caucuses.
There is no question that the Iowa and New Hampshire voting systems were a governmental disaster. As of this date, there has never been a final tally from Iowa and the results in New Hampshire are still being challenged. Which raises the question as to why were these states given the early primary dates?
Iowa and New Hampshire are predominantly white states with only a trace of minorities. They do not look like the rest of America and there is no logical reason as to why they should be first and second in the nation.
The Nevada election was a caucus type operation, but the results were jumbled. Senator Sanders was judged to be the front-runner, but South Carolina undermined that political guessing game.
Since 2016, the Democratic Party has been struggling with reforms that would satisfy the Sanders wing of the party. The progressives wanted desperately to do away with super delegates.
That is a type of delegate that does not have to run for the privilege. Most of the super delegates are prominent politicians in their state. The compromise won by the left was that there would be a smaller number of super delegates and they could not vote until the second ballot.
Now that we are well into the primary season, the reformers are still unhappy with most of the rules, and they will probably try to revise those rules even further in 2024.
The chances of super delegates disappearing are very remote, and the party will be battling internally for many years to come. One thing is clear; the primaries for the next presidential election will start in non-caucus states such as South Carolina or Arizona that have a fair number of minorities.
There is one other challenge for the Democratic Party and that is getting women to remain in the competition and not be eliminated well in advance of the national convention.
Senators Warren and Klobuchar ran strong campaigns and yet the two people standing at the end are older white men. There is no way that women can be given preference over male candidates if they cannot raise the money and get good polling results.
No matter what issue you want to debate, there is no question that without the historic South Carolina primary result, none of these issues would be under discussion.
