South Carolina win

5 takeaways from Clinton’s crushing South Carolina win

As Sanders looks just about done, Clinton turns to Trump.

By Glenn Thrush

Saturday was the best night of Hillary Clinton’s political life — a crushing, better-than-expected rout that just might have cracked the back of Bernie Sanders’ momentum-driven insurgency.

It’s hard to believe that barely a month ago, Clinton staffers were ruefully refreshing their screens in disbelief as her lead in Iowa shrank from 2, to 1, to 0.5 to the ultimate hairsbreadth victory margin of 0.2 percentage point. From the minute the polls closed here on Saturday night, Clinton’s lead oscillated between insane and incomprehensible, finally settling in at 47 percent, double what most polls had predicted.

This is what a wave looks like — she won black voters by a jaw-dropping 87-to-13 percent margin and dominated among all but the youngest voters — reinforcing her campaign’s argument that the Vermont senator is a no-sale in all but the whitest, smallest or most liberal states.

The Palmetto State massacre, coupled with Clinton’s surprisingly strong 6-point win in Nevada the previous week, doesn’t spell instant doom for the Vermont senator (who has parlayed his anti-Wall Street message into online-donor gold). But it has, more or less, reset the race to where it began last summer, with the former secretary of state as the odds-on favorite to win her party’s nomination.

With that in mind, here are five takeaways.

It might be over Sanders is still a viable candidate — with the capacity to raise millions online in a few hours — but he’s fast falling victim to the merciless electoral math that doomed Clinton in 2008. His strength with younger voters provided the rocket fuel for his rise this winter — but his weakness among blacks and Hispanics is likely to sink him in the spring.

He trails Clinton by 50 points to 60 points among African-American voters — and he’s likely to be obliterated, as he was Saturday night, in the six delegate-rich Super Tuesday states where black voters represent 40 percent to 60 percent of the primary electorate: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Virginia and Tennessee. Clinton’s current lead in Virginia and Texas — which account for a combined 363 delegates — ranges from 17 points to 30 points.

Sanders’ campaign has basically conceded those states — while pouring resources into Oklahoma, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado and Vermont. He could win most or all of those states, but the polls (aside from his home state) are pretty close, so he’s likely to eke out just a few delegates. And these would be Clinton 2008-type victories: They look good on a news release, but are a wash when it comes to delegates. Meanwhile, Clinton continues to run the table when it comes to establishment-loyal superdelegates.

Then comes March 15: Current polling shows Clinton leading by roughly 25 points in the winner-take-all Florida primary, which brings 246 delegates. Tad Devine, Sanders’ top strategist, told me the week before last that Michigan is the “linchpin” of his candidate’s strategy, but recent polls there show Clinton up from the high teens to more than 30 points.

Barring some unforeseen sea change, it’s hard to see a path forward for a momentum-driven candidate who has just lost the biggest state to vote so far by nearly 50 points.

The Trump effect? Call Mexicans rapists, suggest you’ll support judges who roll back civil rights laws (while saying super-sensitive stuff like “the African-Americans love me”), spend years demanding to see the first black president’s already-produced birth certificate and allegedly forged college records — oh, and retweet white supremacists — and guess what?

Overall turnout was way down in South Carolina from the high stakes Obama-vs.-Clinton primary in ’08, in part because polls have been predicting a Clinton landslide for weeks and Democratic turnout has been lagging in a less-than-scintillating Clinton-Sanders contest all over the country.

But a record percentage of black voters in South Carolina turned out on Saturday: 62 percent of the Democratic electorate. That might be a function of white voters sitting it out, but recent polls suggest that black and Hispanic voters feel under siege and are more energized this year than in the past — and Clinton has a decisive advantage with both groups.

Clinton’s strategy increasingly involves looking past Sanders to the bombastic developer turned reality-TV star. “Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again,” she said, mocking Trump’s campaign slogan. “America has never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again.”

Heal the Bern Clinton’s big win in South Carolina (coupled with her race-changing victory in Nevada the previous week) gives her time to solve some of the more vexing problems of the campaign — messaging, online fundraising, etc. — but it can’t remedy her worst defect, an inability to connect with younger voters that first plagued her in ’08. Democratic operatives, Clinton allies and staffers think she can’t do much to alter the dynamic in the primaries (although she did much better in South Carolina with blacks younger than 50 than with younger whites in Iowa and New Hampshire). But there’s an obvious answer in the general election: an electrifying 74-year-old democratic socialist who took her to the brink with his anti-Wall Street, anti-Hillary crusade.

The battle against Sanders has been a bitter one, closely following Team Obama’s 2012 strategy against Mitt Romney in 2012: define your opponent early and often. Democrats relentlessly tagged Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy, and Clinton’s aides have gone all Brooklyn against Bernie, consistently labeling him a “one-issue” candidate who couldn’t hope to pass the commander in chief test. (Sanders has reciprocated by walloping Clinton for her links to Wall Street and her plutocratic speaking fees.) There are tests yet to come — and Sanders could mount a comeback on Super Tuesday, and there’s always the simmering email scandal — but expect Clinton to soften her tone toward the Vermont senator. Youth must be served, even if a septuagenarian is the waiter.

Take this olive branch from happy Clinton warrior Paul Begala (via my colleague Annie Karni): “I don’t want him to go away. He’s exciting young people, which is a vital part; he’s making Hillary a better candidate,” he said.

White is wrong If he loses, Sanders’ failure to counter Clinton’s dominance among black voters will likely be remembered as a fatal flaw in an otherwise inspirational and brilliantly executed campaign. While he was hammering away at his core issue of income inequality — which he viewed as a fundamental societal flaw that has undermined African-American progress — the Clinton campaign was, ever so cleverly, undermining him with black voters week after week after week.

Seemingly broad policy attacks on Sanders’ position on gun control and other issues served double-duty as a dog whistle in a community decimated by gun violence. But it was Sanders’ inability to understand that his criticism of President Barack Obama, though often mild and respectful, served to sour his relationship with black voters who are deeply invested in Obama’s legacy and keenly suspicious of white politicians who don’t give the president his due.

Clinton masterfully painted Sanders’ careerlong advocacy for single-payer, government-funded health care as an attack on Obamacare, and he made a major blunder by offhandedly suggesting the former first lady was embracing Obama’s achievements simply to win black votes. “I think that a lot of people resented that,” the Rev. Al Sharpton recently told me in an interview.

He’s still drawing the crowds — a biracial rally in Chicago early last week drew more than 6,000 people. But another event, held at a historically black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on Friday, drew dozens of people to a gym that could hold hundreds.

Bubba, redeemed Bill Clinton has the worst poker face in politics, and his relaxed, (mostly) happy-go-lucky tour of western South Carolina last week had a joyful, triumphant quality utterly absent from his bitter battles on the rope lines of Charleston, Columbia and Spartanburg eight years ago.

In 2008, he wagged a bony, disapproving finger when a pack of us reporters asked whether he thought the Obama campaign was playing “the race card” in the Palmetto State — and he rasped “Shame on you!” in our direction, even though we were an innately shameless lot. Recrimination has yielded in 2016 to relief: The black voters who had abandoned the Clintons have flocked back, and few even remember a humiliating loss that has lingered with the former “first black president” for years.

When I accosted him on a rope line in the Charlotte suburb of Rock Hill a few days ago, he smiled and clutched my forearm when I asked whether he was having more fun this time around. “I feel good; we both feel good. It feels good, like I’ve come home,” he said — and the voters proved him right.