Biden, Harris Kick Off SC Primary Campaign in Three Cities

CHARLESTON, S.C. — President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are headed to South Carolina next week to kick off the public phase of their reelection campaign ahead of what for the Democrats is the first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 3.

President Biden is slated to fly into Charleston on Monday to speak at the city’s historic Emanuel AME Church. 

The visit is Biden’s first trip to the church since his vice presidency under former President Barack Obama.

In addition to being one of the oldest Black churches in the South, it is also the site of one of the nation’s most infamous hate crimes — the murder of nine Black churchgoers, who were shot and killed by White supremacist Dylann Roof in a basement church meeting room in June 2015.

Biden’s trip will be sandwiched between two visits by Harris.

She will be in Myrtle Beach on Saturday to speak before the Seventh Episcopal District AME Church Women’s Missionary Society, and will return on Monday, Jan. 15, to deliver the keynote speech at the annual King Day at the Dome festivities in Columbia.

The visits — Biden’s fourth to South Carolina since his election in 2020 and Harris’ eighth — underscore how critically the Democrats regard the state. They also come at a time when there is widespread talk about waning Black support for the administration.

In the face of such talk, the state Democratic Party has been working hard to ensure its voters, who in South Carolina are predominantly Black, participate in the Feb. 3 Democratic contest, rather than wait, thanks to the state’s open primary rules, and vote in the more competitive Republican contest on Feb. 24.

Biden has two challengers in the Democratic primary this year — Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and self-help author Marianne Williamson.

The Republican contest will feature former President Donald Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and, depending on how they fare in Iowa and New Hampshire, which both hold earlier contests, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

On a conference call with reporters Tuesday night, Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for the Biden-Harris campaign, played down concerns over a potentially apathetic electorate.

“The president and vice president’s trips to South Carolina are not being made from a place of worry,” Fulks said. “They are simply practicing what they preached. … I mean, the president prioritized putting South Carolina first in the nation in order to involve more people of color in the presidential process. So we’re doing just that.

“As far as worries when it comes to voters of color, our campaign has been putting in the work and doing everything we can to communicate with communities of color and make sure they turn out next fall,” he said.

Fulks then recited a list of specific things the Biden-Harris campaign has already done to turn out its vote.

“We’ve made the largest and earliest investment in a reelection campaign, ever,” he said. “And we’ve made the latest investment in constituency media, reaching [more] African Americans and Hispanics, ever.

“We’ve also engaged in early organizing efforts targeting the voters that make up the Biden-Harris coalition, and that sends a clear signal that we’re not simply going to wait and parachute into these communities at the last minute and ask them for their vote,” he continued. 

“We’re going to earn their vote,” Fulks said. “And the way we’re going to do that is by communicating to these constituencies about what this administration has done, and about the dangers the other side poses.”

The gist of the campaign’s message was articulated by Biden-Harris 2024 Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who told the reporters on the call that “the choice before the American people this November couldn’t be more clear.”

In 2020, she said, the American people voted for Biden and Harris’ “vision of more freedom, not less; of an economy that grows from the middle out and bottom up, instead of from the top down; and they voted to preserve our democracy.”

“On Jan. 6, 2021, we witnessed a very different vision of America, one defined by revenge, retribution and a rebuke of the very foundations of our democracy,” she continued. “It was the first time in our nation’s history that a president tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

“As we look toward November 2024, the threat Donald Trump posed to Democracy in 2020 has only grown more dire … and as voters prepare to cast their ballots in the GOP primary in Iowa, Donald Trump’s extreme MAGA agenda continues to define the Republican Party,” Rodriguez said.

“The 2024 field [of GOP candidates] has made that clear time and time again. They don’t just accept Trump’s anti-democratic, anti-freedom rhetoric and actions, they give it their full-throated endorsement,” she said.

“With that reality comes a stark and sobering fact: The choice for voters next year will not simply be between competing philosophies of governing. The choice for the American people in November 2024 will be about protecting our democracy and every American’s fundamental freedoms,” Rodriguez said.

When it was suggested that the campaign might be overpreparing for a run against Trump next fall and neglecting the rest of the Republican field, Michael Tyler, the campaign’s communications director, said that’s not the case at all.

“Anybody who wins the Republican nomination in this environment is going to have to do so tacking to the hard right and the most extreme positions we have seen in recent American history,” Tyler said. “Obviously, Donald Trump is out there, promising to rule as a dictator on day one, but Haley and DeSantis have taken similarly extreme positions, particularly when it comes to the issue of abortion.

“And you also have candidates on that side, who are litigating whether or not Black folks benefited from slavery and refuse to even mention slavery as a cause of the Civil War,” he continued. “So there’s not a whole lot of distance between these candidates when it comes to dangerous extremism.

“Now, obviously, with the Republican primaries approaching, they’re all getting a lot of attention, but at the end of the day, the positions and all of the rhetoric they are espousing is as dangerous and it is unpopular with the larger electorate. So we’re more than prepared to take on whoever emerges in that primary contest.”

Of the events coming up in the next week and a half, it is King Day at the Dome in Columbia that has become a must-attend event for presidential campaigns over the years.

The very first King day at the Dome was held in 2000 as a protest against the Confederate flag flying above the State House.

On the heels of that event, South Carolina lawmakers negotiated a compromise to remove the flag from the State House dome to a spot on the State House grounds, flying next to a Confederate soldiers monument.

The event continued in protest mode until then-Gov. Nikki Haley ordered the flag removed following the Emanuel AME Church murders. 

In the meantime, the rally and march caught on with presidential campaigns, with then-Sen. Barack Obama speaking at the 2008 event alongside Democratic presidential hopefuls, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former U.S. Sen. John Edwards.

In 2019 U.S. Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., spoke outside the State House ahead of their respective 2020 campaigns, and in 2020, Biden, Sanders, current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, then-Hawaii U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, California billionaire Tom Steyer, and U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, of Minnesota, and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, all attended the event.

Joining Harris this year will be House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue