Bakari Sellers On the South Carolina Primary and Joe Biden's Last Stand

Joe Biden’s last stand will be in South Carolina, where he is still expected to retain support from a large number of African-American voters despite his poor showings so far in Iowa and New Hampshire. Black voters make up about 60% of the Democratic primary vote in South Carolina. If Biden can perform well in Nevada, and then win South Carolina — both of those things being tall orders — that may give him a chance of a surge on Super Tuesday on March 3, when 14 states will hold primaries just four days after the South Carolina primary.

I spent some time in the Palmetto state this week. I saw Joe Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, speak at events in Charleston. And I recorded this episode in the state capitol, Columbia, where I interviewed Bakari Sellers inside the capitol building in an auditorium. The episode ended when a tour group came in to watch a movie.

Sellers is a South Carolina Democrat who’s been active in state politics here for a while. He is 35 now, which might seem young. But he was elected to the state legislature at only 22 years old. He ran for lieutenant governor in 2014, and lost. But he will run for office again, and soon. 

Sellers is a frequent political commentator on CNN now, and we talked about the state of the race nationally, and about the South Carolina electorate specifically. He made some interesting predictions about President Trump’s chances of winning reelection, of former President Barack Obama’s potential role in trying to unite the Democratic Party if the primary becomes too fractious, and explained why African-American voters are expected to stay loyal to Biden. 

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