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I'm Carrie Dan. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, don't read in too much to one single poll. But sometimes one poll, say in one state or of one race, really crystallizes something that we're seeing nationally, and we can extrapolate a lot about it. And that's something we noticed about our latest poll in South Carolina, released yesterday in conjunction with pollsters at Marist College.
To review that poll showed Joe Biden narrowly leading Bernie Sanders in South Carolina with Tom Steyer in third place. And there were a few candidates who were notably doing very, very poorly with minority voters. Now, I could tell you more about this poll, but let's spice it up instead, shall we? Let's do a thought experiment.
Let's say it was one year ago today. Do, do, do, you're just going about your business and the 2020 race is just getting underway. You know, you're just getting excited for the new season of Game of Thrones. It's 2019 when suddenly the lights go out and there's a strange noise.
And in the darkness, an eerie unfamiliar voice speaks to you from the future and says this, here are the winners of the first three Democratic nominating contest of 2020. It's Pete Buttigieg in Iowa and Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire and Nevada. And then the lights come back on and this NBC News Marist South Carolina poll is just lying in front of you. You would be rightfully extremely confused.
And not just because you were hallucinating about the future. Wait, you might think after reading this poll, what's going on with Joe Biden? He did end up running, but he did so poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire. But now he's hanging on this late in the game in South Carolina.
And what happened to that overwhelming black support that was supposed to be his firewall? And you might have also thought, wait, didn't Bernie Sanders lose every county in South Carolina in 2016? It's crazy that he's doing that well now. And then you might think, wait, who's this who's Pete Buttigieg again?
Also, the person who won Iowa is now at just 4% with black voters in South Carolina. That's barely a pulse. It's like a reverse Obama, an Iowa performance that did absolutely nothing to prove any kind of electability case to minority voters. And then you might think, wait, there's so many people still left in the race?
That is a lot of candidates sticking around. And then you might think, wait, Tom Steyer? What? See, it's all very bouldering, right?
And wait until I tell you about Michael Bloomberg, past version of you. Here's the deal. This South Carolina poll really beautifully sums up the state of the race and why Sanders is so well positioned right now. Biden seems to be barely holding on to what was once towering support with black voters, which at least in theory should have been worth a dominant win in South Carolina, rather than what's really looking like a margin of error contest right now.
Biden is also leaching support to a series of centrists who aren't going anywhere, at least for the moment. That includes Pete Buttigieg, who's doing great with moderates, but very, very poorly with black voters, and Tom Steyer, who has spent $20 million on ads in South Carolina, which has notched him a decent third-place standing and an overperformance with black voters. That's, guess what? Bad news for the former vice president.
The same is also true of big spender Mike Bloomberg, but he's not on the ballot in the Palmetto state. All of this is pretty good news for Bernie Sanders, who has, short up, what used to be a significant problem with black voters, and is instead now building a coalition that's way broader than what his 2016 performance would have indicated. I say all of this to say that if you had this particular series of events all predicted out in your mind a year ago, you were either visited by a mysterious political junkie from the future, or you should really stop eating so much spicy food right before bedtime. For the rest of us mortals, though, we're all just going to have to wait to look at the scoreboard on Saturday when polls close in South Carolina.
By Sunday, though, maybe all of this will just seem like a distant memory. That's a lid for us. If you'd like to hear more of this free audio briefing, you can always download us on your favorite podcast app.