Filler: Tom Steyer's big bid for South Carolina
Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Steyer speaks at a town hall campaign event on Wednesday in Georgetown, S.C. Credit: AP/Meg Kinnard
CHARLESTON, South Carolina — In national polls of likely Democratic voters and the narrower polls of any state other than South Carolina, Tom Steyer would have to rise to be a blip. He is pulling 2 percent nationwide. But in the Palmetto State, Steyer has registered nearly as high as Sen. Bernie Sanders in some surveys and is at 14 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
There is an off-chance Steyer, of California, could take second place in the state, and in the Joe Biden camp, frustration at how Steyer is doing it. The billionaire businessman came to political prominence with his “Need to Impeach” ad campaign that started in October 2017, which called for President Donald Trump’s ouster. Now he’s getting press for spending nearly $20 million in the state and focusing largely on a specific community, black voters, that he and his team say Democrats have often taken for granted.
That’s the community Biden is counting on to deliver a margin of victory over Sanders in Saturday's South Carolina primary — large enough to propel the former vice president into Super Tuesday with renewed momentum.
Steyer also spent an awful lot in Iowa (7th place), New Hampshire (6th place) and Nevada (6th place), but no success meant no splash. In South Carolina, his play in the African-Amercian community has created polling momentum, and thus headlines.
“I think that black voters in this country are in a different place that we’ve never seen before,” said Steyer's South Carolina campaign coordinator, Jonathan Metcalf, a veteran political operative who has worked presidential elections since 1988. “They’re tired of being taken for granted, and they’ve never seen the acknowledgement of how important they are until Tom Steyer.”
The Steyer campaign has an astonishing 102 paid employees in South Carolina, and Metcalf says 93% are black and 70% are women. And Steyer’s campaign has spent massively on black media outlets and with black businesses — including printers, caterers and restaurants, as well as influential black political operatives.
He’s also feeding voters. Tuesday, he hosted a three-hour food giveaway for the needy in Kingstree, one of the state’s poorest communities. Wednesday evening, his meet-and-greet at Nacho Hippo in Myrtle Beach attracted hundreds of (mostly white) potential voters, who got free drink tickets and a buffet. It’s an unusual inducement in a business in which most candidates use such events to raise money, but the folks who came out to eat and drink did stay to hear Steyer, who was running late.
Asked why he had focused so hard on South Carolina and this strategy and why it might be working, Steyer said, “Because it’s an area with a lot of black people and Latinos.”
Steyer has yet to get a delegate in any state, because he has yet to hit the 15% vote threshold in a congressional district. Earning a delegate would get him nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention this summer, and increase his chances of delivering a speech from the dais. Steyer suggests it also would give him a chance to prevail on a later ballot as a consensus candidate if the first ballot were inconclusive and none of the frontrunners could build a majority coalition.
Asked whether getting that first delegate was an important goal in and of itself, Steyer said, “Of course … if I don’t do that, I cannot win.”
Steyer also said he hopes to use a strong result in South Carolina to build momentum in Super Tuesday states, adding: “We are staffing up in those states now.” But capitalizing on momentum and staffing up that fast seem like nearly impossible tasks.
And it’s not clear there will be anything on which to capitalize.
Steyer mostly underperformed the polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and the same could happen in South Carolina.
But in questioning at least 20 black voters about who they are considering, nearly all gave Steyer a mention.
And if no one else is taking Steyer’s popularity in South Carolina seriously, Biden certainly is. This week, Biden has attacked Steyer for having invested years ago in a business that ran private prisons, a hot-button issue in the black community and a decision for which Steyer has had to repeatedly apologize.
Lane Filler is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
