Democrats in state see long-term gains

e-mail this story Dan Hoover • Edwards emphasizes race issues (02/01/04) • Democrats in state see long-term gains (01/25/04) • Kerry rebuilding his image in South Carolina (01/18/04) • Sharpton likely to be a spoiler in primary (01/11/04) • Generals at war, on paper (11/22/03)

For the winner and runner-up, it's media buzz, momentum, more money and the right to advance to the Feb. 10 round. For the also-rans, well, the bright side is they'll soon get to spend more time with their families.

But what about the home-grown Democrats who made it all possible, including Thursday's increasingly important and nationally televised debate from Greenville? What's in it for them?

Party leaders and insiders have looked at the future through the prism of one of the nation's most important 2004 primaries, and say they feel good about what they see.

Long battered at the state and local levels, the party sees the organizing done by the presidential campaigns, the millions of dollars in TV ads, the volunteers brought in to man the polls and handle debate logistics as capable of generating a cadre of new loyalists.

Democrats need them.

Republicans have won five of the last eight gubernatorial elections and four of the last five. Democrats lost the Statehouse in 1994 and the Senate in 2001, they're down to a pair of statewide constitutional officers and two of six congressmen, and longtime U.S. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings is set to retire this year, leaving his seat up for serious GOP challenge.

Silver lining

Now comes what some Democrats see as the silver lining.

Jim Clyburn, one of the two Democratic U.S. House members, views the primary and its hoopla as a means toward renewal.

"We, as a party, have been left on the sidelines for a long, long time. For once, the South Carolina Democratic Party is on the national radar screen."

To Bill Carrick, the Aiken-born Democratic consultant, "The primary should give the party new energy at the grass-roots level. The building blocks being put in place at the precinct level to organize the primary will revitalize the Democrats' infrastructure."

Courtesy of time, money and organization lavished on South Carolina by the national campaigns, a rare happening for this state, "Democrats have an unprecedented ability to communicate with South Carolina voters on critical issues like jobs, trade and health care," Carrick says.

Others see a corps of swing voters, white, strongly suburban, many of them newcomers, moderate on social issues, conservative on fiscal matters and foreign affairs. They number in the tens of thousands, but party analysts believe if they can win over 30,000 to 50,000 of them, they can win state-level elections and, maybe, make some local inroads.

There's some logic to the numbers.

Numeral logic

In 1994, newly minted Republican David Beasley won the governorship by 24,000 votes; four years later, he lost it by 86,000; and in 2002, Mark Sanford won it back for the GOP by 64,000.

Of course, we've heard things like that before, most recently in 1998, when Jim Hodges blunted the GOP tide by ousting Beasley while carrying in several contenders for lesser offices. Four years later, things were back to normal and Democrats were again on the outside looking in.

In presidential elections in South Carolina, those voters have been gone for a generation.

Dick Harpootlian, the former state Democratic chairman, said last week, "In my adult lifetime, the Democratic presidential candidates have spent little or no time or money in South Carolina, and the Republicans have. Bush Sr., Bush Jr., even Bob Dole, over the last three cycles, spent time and money here. All that focused people on who the Republican candidates were. We (Democrats) never had that here."

The party's lone presidential primary, in March 1992, provided some money, but it was late, participation was limited and its impact minimal and short-lived.

Millions at work

"What you have now is millions of dollars of television advertising denigrating Bush and promoting the qualities of these candidates," Harpootlian said of the pared-down field of seven candidates, who have been visiting the state off and on for two years and are poised to descend en masse after Tuesday's New Hampshire primary.

"That, maybe, will persuade independent voters to look at the Democrats, to question whether they're better off now than four years ago. It's done incrementally. People don't hear one speech, hear one ad, read one story and switch. You've got to do it over a period of time" and be intensely repetitious, Harpootlian says.

Gains, if any, come overnight.

What's critical is not the next two weeks, but what happens in the next few months, he said. "Are the new people who have become involved being followed up? The Republicans have done a marvelous job with this."

His successor, Greenville adman Joe Erwin, is the guy who will rise or fall on the primary's aftermath.

"There's no fantasy that we're going to suddenly become the majority party," Erwin said. "Be realistic: Republicans are the majority, we've got smaller numbers, but we can compete if we organize well, raise money, stick together. Then Democrats can begin to realize there are more of us than we thought, that we're not such a small minority after all.

"That's when you start pulling off upsets, and when you do, that's how you start to gradually change the dynamics."

Trickle-down

Erwin said, "First thing you get, if you do the job right, is you stand a chance to get a known, identifiable, reachable grass-roots army of volunteers, proven workers. That's going to help you in every county race, every congressional district race and certainly in an important, if not critical, Senate race.

"The second thing you get is the chance — not an automatic — as we've demonstrated with the primary (election financing) to raise money for a cause bigger than any single candidate."

He sees the state and county parties evolving as a rallying point where the party's philosophy becomes the unifying element. By party, the emphasis is on state, not the national party.

If Democrats are having a grand ol' time, so too is the Grand Old Party.

Republican thinking is that the more time national Democrats spend in South Carolina, the better off the GOP.

"The beauty of it is is that they seem to be going so far left to attract the liberal core of the Democrat base, they're turning off independent and moderate voters throughout the state," said Luke Byars, the party's executive director.

In fact, Byars said, if any of the Democrats can't afford to spend much time here, the party will be happy to spring for plane tickets.