South Carolina's Firewall Rests on One Man, and He Is 86
On May 29 this year, on the grounds of the Edventure Children's Museum in Columbia, Jim Clyburn held his fish fry, as he has most years since 1992. Ro Khanna stood on one side of him. Andy Beshear stood on the other. Both men understood exactly what they were auditioning for. Two months later, on July 24, the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee made official what everyone eating fried catfish that afternoon already suspected: South Carolina will lead the Democratic primary calendar again in 2028, voting January 22, ahead of Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia.
The case for putting it there is stronger than its skeptics on the party's institutional wing want to admit. South Carolina's Black residents make up just over a quarter of the state, roughly double the national share, and Black voters remain the most reliable bloc in the Democratic coalition — the one, as Nebraska party chair Jane Kleeb put it to the committee, that "didn't just show up for this party in 2020. They saved us." That argument carries more weight this year than usual, coming months after the Supreme Court's Callais ruling gutted a chunk of Voting Rights Act protection and set off fresh redistricting fights across the South. A party that wants to say something coherent about voting rights has an obvious reason to hand its opening act to the region where those rights are most contested. Nevada's own bid collapsed partly on a duller point: committee members raised doubts about how fast the state could actually count its ballots. Carol Fowler, one of South Carolina's DNC members, closed with the line that mattered most in the room: "We have demonstrated that South Carolina picks presidents."
She isn't wrong about the last one. Joe Biden's 2020 campaign was functionally dead after Iowa and New Hampshire until South Carolina revived it, and Democrats rewarded the state by moving it to first place for 2024 and now confirming it for 2028. That history is precisely why the worry now circulating in institutional circles — that a Southern leadoff state will hand the nomination to whoever can out-populist the field — gets the causal story backwards. South Carolina in 2020 didn't produce an insurgency. It killed one. Bernie Sanders had won Iowa's popular vote and New Hampshire outright; South Carolina's Black electorate, older, more churched, more tied to the state party's own apparatus, was the wall the insurgency broke against. The mechanism wasn't spontaneous grassroots energy. It was Jim Clyburn, three days before the vote, standing at a podium and telling that electorate who to trust.
That is the part of this year's decision that should worry the establishment more than it seems to. The endorsement machine that made South Carolina an institutional firewall in 2020 has one operator, and he is eighty-six years old. Nothing in the committee's public reasoning depends on Clyburn's continued presence in that role. The VRA argument, the Nevada tabulation concerns, the diversity case against Iowa and New Hampshire: none of it requires him. The DNC voted to keep the state. It did not vote to keep the man whose personal authority made the state's outcome predictable.
And if he is diminished, retired, or simply less commanding by January 2028, the arithmetic flips. The same electorate that delivered a top-down verdict for Biden becomes available to whoever builds the deepest direct organizing operation among South Carolina's Black voters — churches, sororities, county chairs, the whole retail infrastructure — without needing anyone's blessing first. That is not a hypothetical grassroots candidates dream about. It is the exact skillset the ms.now opinion desk's own framing celebrates: a "grueling" early test that "weeds out" candidates who can't handle organizing pressure, which is another way of saying it rewards whoever shows up first and works hardest, not whoever Washington prefers.
Put the actual trade on the books, because the committee didn't. Iowa's pitch to stay early wasn't about diversity at all. It was about retail politics, affordability, and the unglamorous work of finding out whether a candidate can run a real campaign before the stakes get large. That test is now gone from the top of the calendar, replaced by a state chosen substantially for what it represents rather than what it measures. Representation is a legitimate value. So is finding out, cheaply and early, whether a candidate can actually organize voters rather than just address them. The DNC picked the first without much public reckoning of what it cost to lose the second, and that cost belongs on the ledger, not folded into the diversity argument as if it came free.
None of this means South Carolina will nominate a socialist. It means the party has built a system whose stability depended, in practice if not on paper, on one man's ability to hold a coalition still, and has now renewed that system for another cycle without asking who does that job when he can't. Virginia's addition to the early window may blunt the effect, giving establishment-friendly candidates a second Southern proving ground later in February. But South Carolina votes first, alone, on January 22.
Clyburn will hold his fish fry again next May, most likely. The candidates will line up on either side of him for the photograph, same as this year. Whether the picture still means what it meant in 2020 is the question the committee never had to answer, because on paper they weren't voting on him at all.