SC Democrats are becoming what SC Republicans once were

This news from The Hill:

… is hardly news to us in South Carolina. We knew that since Joe Biden (who had a lot of support among party regulars here) said definitively that he would not run, Hillary has had our primary pretty much sewn up.

But it made me realize something.

For a generation, South Carolina Republicans were known for always choosing their party’s eventual nominee in their presidential preference primaries. It’s one reason why the nation paid so much attention to what happened here.

Then, in 2012, they went nuts and chose Newt Gingrich over the guy everyone knew would be the eventual nominee. This year, they’re gaga over Donald Trump and Ben Carson, and if either of those guys is the eventual nominee, the national Republican Party might as well have a going-out-of-business sale.

But the Democrats in South Carolina are showing the centrist conservatism for which their rivals were once known, lining up dutifully behind the establishment candidate who is ordained to pull the sword from the stone.

Maybe in the future, the nation’s pundits will watch our endangered Democrats as closely as they have watched the GOP here in the past…

3 thoughts on “SC Democrats are becoming what SC Republicans once were”

  1. Doug Ross

    A choice between Hillary, a Jewish Yankee socialist, and a nobody isn’t an indicator of anything when it comes to South Carolina voters.

    1. Brad Warthen Post author

      Except that they’re doing what Republicans used to do — gravitating to the mainstream, most viable candidate…

      They did the same in ’08, picking the eventual nominee. They WANTED to go with the Establishment candidate, Hillary, and were slow to switch. But eventually they picked up on the Obamamania sweeping the country, and chose the eventual nominee. By that time, Obama had become the more mainstream, centrist candidate, while Clinton’s loyalists tended to be of the angrier partisan variety…

  2. clark surratt

    Brad, I believe the national Democrats also have become what the Republican Party once was. Their candidates are old white people.

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