Joe Biden cruises to victory in South Carolina

The US President had little trouble dispatching Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson in first official Democratic contest.

US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. Picture: AFP

Joe Biden achieved a resounding victory in his first primary contest for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, scoring more than 96 per cent of the vote in South Carolina and in effect dispelling any possibility his candidacy would be subject to serious challenge within the ruling party.

With around 70 per cent of the vote counted, the US President left his two challengers, author Marianne Williamson and Democrat congressman Dean Phillips a distant second and third respectively, suggesting increasing speculation about the president’s declining popularity nationwide hadn’t gained traction among the party faithful.

“The people of South Carolina have spoken again, and I have no doubt that you have set us on the path to winning the presidency again — and making Donald Trump a loser again,” Mr Biden, who was in Los Angeles at a campaign event host by leaders in black entertainment, said in a statement soon after the results came in at 7pm on Saturday (11am Sunday AEDT).

Mr Biden shook up the traditional order of Democrat primaries last year, replacing New Hampshire’s traditional ‘first in nation’ role in the Democrat presidential selection calendar with South Carolina, at state with a large black population whose primary he won convincingly in 2020 against Senator Bernie Sanders, setting up his path to the presidency.

The president nevertheless easily won the New Hampshire contest a week earlier, even though his name wasn’t officially on the ballot, winning around 64 per cent of the vote courtesy of an enthusiastic ‘write in’ campaign conducted by local Democrats.

The Australian found more election officials than voters at two of the main booths in downtown Charleston by mid-afternoon, where a total of 97 people had voted combined according to officials, reflecting the lower turnout to be expected at a primary for a sitting president.

Around 150,000 votes were estimated to have been cast in the primary in total across the state of 5.2 million people, well down from the 540,000 who voted in in 2020 in what was a contested race where Mr Biden won 48 per cent of the vote.

A few dozen diehard Biden fans crowded into the Nippitaty Distillery in north Charleston on Saturday night to watch the results, where local officials regaled the party faithful of Joe Biden’s

Eduardo Curry, 61, a local lawyer, berated the media for “over magnifying” the age gap between Mr Trump, 78, and the president, 81.

“It’s an overwhelming mandate of the people who say we want Joe Biden. Yep. We don’t care how old he is, we all got grandparents and grandparents,” he told The Australian.

“He’s demonstrated he has an even temperament, he is reasonable in his thought, and he has a modicum of morality too,” he added.

Bartender Don Maynard, 26, said he thought the media treated Mr Biden worse than Mr Trump.

“I feel it’s like because of his age, something that he can’t control, people like to make fun and make jokes, whereas Trump is, he’s just, he’s attacked because of the things he does,” he said.

“Here’s a man that actually genuinely loves this country, it’s not just because he wants to be in the media, but because he genuinely wants to help us out”.

Attention will again turn to the South Carolina on February 24 when the Republican party holds its fourth contest for its presidential nomination, pitting Mr Trump against the state’s former governor Nikki Haley, who is trailing the former president by around 20 percentage points in most polls.

Mr Biden achieved a similar level of overwhelming support to that of Mr Trump in his first primary contest in 2020, where the then incumbent president won 97 per cent of the vote in Iowa’s caucuses.