Feel the burn? Clinton’s huge margin of victory in South Carolina marks a turning point

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David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

As South Carolina goes, so goes the nation. Or so Donald Trump hoped last week, and so Hillary Rodham Clinton hopes this week, as both candidates look toward Super Tuesday victories they hope will erase any doubts about their eventual nomination – and possibly erase some of their competitors from the contest altogether.

Tucked inside the arms of North Carolina, which looks north, and Georgia, which looks south, South Carolina is a peculiar little Petri dish of American politics. The Civil War started there – three out of five residents of the state were slaves on the eve of the War Between the States – but the march toward peaceful racial integration in the South began there, too. The passage of Old Confederacy states from the solid Democratic South to the reliably Republican South began two decades earlier in the state than it did in the rest of the region. Much of the movement of northern-based industry – textiles, automobiles, now jetliners – started in South Carolina as well.

So the Palmetto state's unambiguous verdict in its Democratic primary, a rollicking three-to-one victory by former secretary of state Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders, is almost certainly a signal, and a very strong one indeed.

Mrs. Clinton is now poised to sweep through Super Tuesday contests, which in the Democratic column account for more than a third of the delegates required to win the nomination at the Philadelphia nominating convention in late July. The only real barriers to a Clinton clean sweep are Mr. Sanders's state of Vermont, where he has a lead of about eight to one, and perhaps Massachusetts, where he trails by a single-digit margin but where strong liberal-leaning voters sometimes turn out for primaries in large numbers. Still, those two New England states are likely to be near-pointless asterisks in a night of Clinton triumphs by margins of large numbers of percentage points.

Mrs. Clinton's strong appeal among the black voters who accounted for her devastating loss to then-senator Barack Obama of Illinois in their 2008 contest gave her an almost eight-to-one advantage in 2016. That was a bigger margin than Mr. Obama, the first mainstream black Democratic presidential contender, won eight years ago. It is, moreover, a significant indicator of Mrs. Clinton's political power as she moves to the states of Texas, Georgia and Alabama, where half of the Democratic primary electorate is black. She holds massive leads in all three states, an advantage of about 30 percentage points in Texas, reaching to about 40 points in Georgia. The black population in Mr. Sanders's home state is below 1 per cent.

As a result, Mr. Sanders, his campaign now seriously endangered, has basically abandoned his Super Tuesday campaign in the South. His advertisements are now appearing in the more congenial (and frosty) venues of Colorado, Minnesota and the two New England states. He actually appeared on the weekend in Pittsburgh, where voters do not go to the polls until late April, which at this rate of growing support for Mrs. Clinton may be a meaningless contest.

But in the general election in early November, most of the states where Mrs. Clinton has prevailed, and likely will prevail, will be meaningless as well. Her chances of winning Electoral College votes in South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Alabama and Oklahoma are almost nil, even if businessman Donald J. Trump is the Republican nominee. South Carolina, Oklahoma and Alabama, for example, have voted Democratic only once in the last half-century, and that was when a Southern native, former governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, was on the ballot in 1976.

Even so, the weekend's South Carolina victory, and the triumphs to come on Super Tuesday, may hold considerable meaning for Mrs. Clinton and may indicate how strong are her prospects in the general election. Along with Jews, blacks are the most reliably Democratic voters.

And yet in some ways, the most telling indicator to come out of South Carolina was not her strength among black voters, nor her cumulative margin of victory – nor even the notion that she prevailed in a state she lost by 29 points to Mr. Obama eight years ago. It was the fact that in 2016, she captured seven out of 10 of the South Carolina voters who considered themselves moderates, according to network exit polls.

These moderate voters will almost certainly be the margin of victory for the winning candidate in the general election, and it was clear even in her victory remarks on Saturday night that Mrs. Clinton is already pointing toward November.

"Despite what you have heard, we don't need to make America great again," Mrs. Clinton said, a clear allusion to the Trump campaign slogan, prominent on his lawn signs and on the blue baseball cap the Republican front-runner often sports in campaign appearances. "America never stopped being great." Then she launched into what almost surely will be one of the animating motifs of her campaign: an argument that while Mr. Trump wants to erect walls, this likely first female nominee of a major political party wants to tear down barriers.

That may be the metaphor of this moment. The barriers to her own selection by the Democrats began to fall in South Carolina, and she may be approaching a Jericho moment on Super Tuesday, when yet more walls to her nomination very likely will come tumbling down.