Joe Biden decisively won the South Carolina primary today, delivering the former vice president a much-needed victory that he hopes will mark the beginning of a comeback for his presidential campaign.
Biden’s victory is his first since voting began in the Democratic nominating contest earlier this month.
It follows lackluster finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as a distant second-place showing in Nevada last week that eroded his standing in polls and raised questions about his electability.
Biden and his allies argued heading into Saturday that a victory in the Palmetto State would effectively act as a reset for his campaign and prove him to be the best candidate to assemble a diverse coalition of voters needed to recapture the White House in November.
With his win in South Carolina, Biden sought to blunt Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) momentum in the race, following the senator’s victories in New Hampshire and Nevada and his close second-place finish in Iowa.
Sanders’s series of wins allowed him to wrestle the front-runner mantle from Biden, who was viewed as the most likely Democratic presidential nominee for most of last year.
In a sign that the Vermont senator was not anticipating a victory in Saturday’s primary, he spent the day campaigning in Virginia, one of 14 states that will hold a primary on Super Tuesday, March 3, and that polls have suggested is more competitive for him.
Biden’s win in South Carolina wasn’t entirely unexpected.
He has long led polls in the state, often by double digits, and his campaign has pointed to South Carolina from the beginning as a firewall for the former vice president, given his strong support among black voters, who make up a majority of the Democratic primary electorate here.
Despite his win, Biden faces several challenges in the days and weeks ahead.
With Super Tuesday just three days away, he will have to ramp up his efforts quickly if he hopes to compete with Sanders, who is leading polls in some of the most delegate-rich states that vote that day, including California and Texas.
Biden was relatively slow to step up his efforts in Super Tuesday states, and his campaign has spent significantly less in those states than most of his top rivals for the Democratic nomination.
He is also competing with several candidates, including former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), for the support of moderate voters, who have yet to coalesce behind a single alternative to Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who is campaigning on a message of radical change.
One more factor adding to the unpredictability of the race is the candidacy of former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
He only entered the nominating contest in November, but has gained polling strength in several Super Tuesday states after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal fortune into advertising and other operations.
Whether Bloomberg’s competitiveness in polling will translate to votes, however, is unclear.
He notably skipped the first four nominating contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and there are signs that a bungled performance in a Democratic debate in Las Vegas earlier this month may have taken a toll on his support.
Biden’s win in South Carolina may help him in other southern states with large proportions of black voters, such as Alabama and North Carolina, both of which vote Tuesday.