According to US television forecasts, President Joe Biden confidently and unsurprisingly won his first electoral test in his quest for a second term in the White House in the Democratic primary in South Carolina on Saturday.
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According to these forecasts, Mr. Biden, who counts on a large black electorate in this conservative southern state, won the primary with a very large majority against two other candidates.
The American president, who was himself in California on Saturday evening before traveling to Nevada (West) on Tuesday for the next vote, immediately estimated that he would beat his likely Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, in November.
“In 2024, the people of South Carolina have spoken again, and I have no doubt that you have put us on the path to winning the presidency again and losing Donald Trump again,” he said in a statement.
In this first official vote in his race for the Democratic nomination, whose victory for Mr. Biden is almost guaranteed, the turnout rate, particularly among the African-American electorate, had to be examined.
In 2020, African Americans in South Carolina, who are large in number relative to the population of this former slave state in the Southeast, allowed Joe Biden to salvage his campaign during the primaries, helping pave his way to the White House.
Facing the 81-year-old president were little-known elected officials from Minnesota: Dean Phillips, heir to a wealthy ice cream company, and Marianne Williamson, author of best-selling personal development books.
On Saturday, the president appeared at his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, in his home state of Delaware, and asserted that he was “on a mission” before heading off to campaign in California and Nevada.
“It’s not just a campaign. It's more of a mission. For the good of this country, we must not lose (…) And I say that from the bottom of my heart. It’s not about me, it goes far beyond me,” he emphasized.
The day before, he had ordered attacks against elite Iranian forces and pro-Iranian groups in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for the deaths of American soldiers in Jordan, in an already explosive context in the Middle East.
Although the black electorate in the United States traditionally leans Democratic, several recent polls show their support for Joe Biden is waning, particularly among young people who believe they have not been heard enough during his time in office.
Although South Carolina is expected to remain in Republican hands in November's presidential election, as it has since 1980, the president has made clear he sees the state as an important test. He has been there twice since the beginning of the year.
“I think the stakes are higher than ever before. You know, people are talking about our democracy being under attack,” Samuel Bias, 31, a Biden supporter, said after a public meeting Friday with Vice President Kamala Harris.
“President Biden, like me, we are counting on you (…) to vote and to encourage everyone you know to vote, text, knock on doors and make your voice heard,” emphasized Ms. Harris on Friday during an event in Orangeburg.
Ms Harris, the first black vice president in US history, also launched a blistering attack on Donald Trump.
“The former president has fanned the flames of hatred, bigotry, racism and xenophobia for years to gain his own power and personal political advantage,” she said.
In doing so, Mr. Biden is focusing his strategy on the threat to democracy that he believes the American billionaire poses.
“By the way, foreign leaders are telling me one by one, 'You have to win,'” the president said in Wilmington on Saturday.
According to a New York Times/Siena poll conducted in November, 71% of Black voters in six key states support Mr. Biden — compared to 91% in the 2020 election — and 22% would vote for Mr. Trump.
“I was a Democrat for 20 years. I even participated in the Obama campaign,” said Regina Sidik, 56, a black caregiver who attended a news conference of the former president’s supporters in Columbia, the state capital, this week.
“But today, after seeing what this world will become, I choose Trump,” she confessed.
In South Carolina, the Republican primary at the end of February promises to be more spectacular than the Democratic primary because Mr. Trump will try to deal a fatal blow to that state's former governor, Nikki Haley.