SC-Quinnipiac: Biden+20

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

The south on its own is not enough to win the nomination.

He can win with the south, midwest, and mid atlantic, which seems to be the probable outcome.

Not really, I see little evidence Biden will do well in the Midwest.  Iowa is the only midwestern state where anyone is paying attention and he’s getting killed there.

[Annatar]

This isn't that good for Biden, he's only at 33% in SC, it's conceivable he could drop to around 25% by the time the primary happens there. Getting around 30% in states like SC is good but its not some kind of crushing performance, Hillary got 73% in SC by way of comparison.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Hopefully,  Biden loses in the primary

[ElectionAtlas]

New Poll: South Carolina President by Quinnipiac University on 2019-11-17

Summary:

Biden:	33%
Warren:	13%
Sanders:	11%
Buttigieg:	6%
Other:	19%
Undecided:	18%

Poll Source URL: Full Poll Details

[Adam Griffin]

The south on its own is not enough to win the nomination.

Ehh, I suppose that's true in a vacuum/strictly mathematical sense, but it's not really correct in how things tend to play out (namely, that candidates will be receiving delegates & votes from other places as well). Take Clinton in 2016: her 55-43 PV win would have become 51-47 if she had merely broken even in the core states of the Confederacy. She would have tied nationally just by breaking even in those states + MD, CA, NJ & NY (and I suspect given the inherently "packed" nature of black voters in urban areas, Sanders would have eked out the delegate win nationally in a tied PV scenario).

Given that there are still likely to be more candidates on the ballot when these states begin to vote (and therefore more outlets for protest/anti-Biden sentiment) than in 2016 and the fact that a candidate must hit 15% in a congressional district or statewide to receive delegates, it's not unfathomable to think that Biden could walk away with 90% or more of the delegates in a slew of Southern states (and something like 75-80% regionally; Clinton got a little over two-thirds by comparison) despite receiving a drastically smaller percentage of the vote.

If this poll was/is accurate, then Biden would be snagging every state-level delegate in SC, and probably all but a few at the congressional level - with 33% of the vote. If a scenario like this plays out, then it's very possible that the difference between Biden winning or losing will be in the difference between breaking even in the South versus whatever share of the delegates he gets here.

[Mr. Morden]

If this poll was/is accurate, then Biden would be snagging every state-level delegate in SC.

Except that it has 18% undecided.  If those people either ended up not voting or casting their votes in the same proportion as those who are decided, then that pushes Warren above 15%.

[Adam Griffin]

If this poll was/is accurate, then Biden would be snagging every state-level delegate in SC.

Except that it has 18% undecided.  If those people either ended up not voting or casting their votes in the same proportion as those who are decided, then that pushes Warren above 15%.

Obviously preferences are going to change between now and voting time, and yes, there are undecideds. But the broader point still stands: if 1 or more candidates are barely at or above 15% (and several below that), then Biden will be walking away with the vast majority of the delegates from the South with as little as 35-40% of the vote.

It's also worth pointing out that this is a bit of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" in that Biden stands to gain a notable amount of supporters from any other candidate dropping out, including Sanders. I haven't followed closely enough to see if there's a greater propensity for Biden to benefit from drop-offs in the South versus elsewhere, but I do imagine that to be true. That will largely just increase his PV share, which, while mainly just likely to make the vote/delegate discrepancies a bit smaller, still ends up with him winning as much or more than Clinton with a smaller vote share.


This will likely become the "superdelegate issue" of 2020 if Biden manages to seal up the nomination by winning twice as many delegates in a swath of the country as his PV suggested he should win. People could say what they wanted to about Clinton and the way the South voted in 2016, but the allocation was largely fair (66-32 in PV; 68-32 in delegates) due to the two-way nature of the contest.