Edwards assembled winning coalition

Black voters turned out in big numbers in Tuesday’s South Carolina Democratic presidential primary — but it was the overwhelming support of white voters that propelled John Edwards to a double-digit win.

According to surveys of voters as they left the polls Tuesday, Edwards trounced runner-up John Kerry among white voters while squeaking by for the win among blacks.

“Edwards’ victory comes almost entirely from white Democrats,” said Southern political scholar Earl Black of Rice University in Texas.

Those white voters — especially the men — would be crucial for Democrats to challenge Republicans in November.

Whites made up 51 percent of those voting Tuesday; blacks, 47 percent. Edwards’ margin over Kerry among whites was 52 percent to 27 percent. Among blacks, Edwards won 37 percent to 34 percent.

Overall, Edwards won with 45 percent to 30 percent for Kerry.

“John Kerry basically put together a biracial coalition, but Edwards did it by winning a (bigger) coalition,” said Black, formerly a professor at USC.

That’s a testament to Edwards’ “undoubted skills as a retail politician,” Black said. “The problem now for him is to take this into much larger, more expensive states where he won’t have time to do it the way he’s done it in South Carolina.”

Edwards, a Seneca native and senator from North Carolina, will continue challenging for Southern votes by campaigning heavily in Virginia and Tennessee, both of which have primaries Tuesday. Edwards will pay less attention to Michigan and Washington state, which vote in caucuses Saturday.

If Edwards does well in Virginia and Tennessee, Black said, his campaign certainly would be boosted — but it also would further his reputation as a regional candidate.

Edwards’ staff, however, say it is wrong to pigeonhole him as a Southern phenomenon. He missed winning Oklahoma in the Midwest over Wesley Clark by a razor-thin margin.

Tuesday “was about showing that John Edwards has very strong support in rural states, in states with diverse populations,” his spokeswoman, Jenni Engebretsen, said. “He’s a national candidate and will continue to take this campaign forward.”

Edwards’ success here among white voters should not be taken as a sign the Democratic Party is reversing the erosion of support from white, moderate to conservative men, Black said.

Over the past generation or more, those voters have increasingly supported Republicans in South Carolina.

Exit polls showed white men cast 24 percent of Tuesday’s ballots, compared with 27 percent for white women; 30 percent for nonwhite women; and 19 percent for nonwhite men.

That means white men were only the third-largest group of voters, and “that’s a pattern that is part of the source of the Democratic Party’s problem in South Carolina,” Black said.

But it’s a beginning, former state Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian said.

He argued that the number of white and moderate or conservative voters who participated in Tuesday’s primary would be enough to put a crack in the Republican’s grip on the state, at least in presidential elections.

For that to happen, those who voted Tuesday would have to vote Democratic again in November.

“The people who make the argument for me are Karl Rove and George W. Bush. They’re coming here tomorrow,” Harpootlian said of the president’s visit to Charleston today.

“They’re not coming to a state they think is a lock. If they didn’t think it was a threat, why are they coming here?”

Reach Gould Sheinin at (803) 771-8658 or asheinin@thestate.com.