Election Update: Biden Holds A Narrow Lead Over Sanders In South Carolina (We Think)

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With Nevada now in our rearview mirror, the Democratic nomination race quickly moves to South Carolina and its “First in the South” primary. For Democrats, the South Carolina contest is principally about the preferences of black voters, who will make up a majority of the primary electorate there. This makes the state especially important for former Vice President Joe Biden, who is counting on strong black support to shore up his position in the nomination race, though his standing among black voters has deteriorated since Iowa voted.

We’ve gotten a handful of new South Carolina polls in the past few days, and Biden now leads our South Carolina polling average with about 30 percent, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in second at 23 percent and billionaire activist Tom Steyer — who has been spending millions on ads in South Carolina — at 13 percent. But we only have one new survey of the state conducted entirely after the Nevada caucuses, so South Carolina polling does not fully take into account Sanders’s dominant win this past Saturday. (We don’t even have much polling conducted entirely after last week’s debate.)



So let’s run through the South Carolina surveys released over the past week to get a fresh look at where things stand five days out from Saturday’s contest (starting with the most recent ones):

On Monday, Public Policy Polling provided us with our first post-Nevada survey in South Carolina, and it painted a rosy picture for Biden. Biden led the field with 36 percent, Sanders was in a distant second at 21 percent, and no other candidate had more than 8 percent. After we account for house effects — the tendency for pollsters to consistently have more favorable or unfavorable numbers for some candidates — this survey entered our model as one that gives Biden 34 percent and Sanders 23 percent.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-biden-holds-a-narrow-lead-over-sanders-in-south-carolina-we-think/?yptr=yahoo