The 2020 United States presidential election in South Carolina was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. South Carolina voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote, pitting the Republican nominee, incumbent President Donald Trump, and running mate Vice President Mike Pence against Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his running mate California Senator Kamala Harris. South Carolina has nine electoral votes in the Electoral College.
Trump carried South Carolina by a margin of 11.68%, down from his 14.27% margin four years earlier. Prior to this election, all 12 news organizations considered this a state Trump would win, or a red state.
South Carolina was the only East Coast state in 2020 to vote Republican by a double-digit margin. This was the first time that both main party candidates won more than one million votes in a statewide election in South Carolina, alongside the concurrent Senate election.
Primary elections
Canceled Republican primary
On September 7, 2019, the South Carolina Republican Party became one of several state GOP affiliates to cancel their respective primaries and caucuses officially. Donald J. Trump's re-election campaign and Republican officials have cited the fact that Republicans canceled several state primaries when George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush sought second terms in 1992 and 2004, respectively, and Democrats scrapped some of their primaries when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were seeking re-election in 1996 and 2012, respectively.
In response to the cancellation, former U.S. Representative Bob Inglis and another South Carolina Republican voter filed a lawsuit against the South Carolina Republican Party on grounds that it denied their right to vote. On December 11, 2019, a state court judge dismissed the lawsuit, writing in his opinion that the law "does not give plaintiffs a legal right to presidential preference primary". Thus at the South Carolina State Republican Convention in May 2020, the state party formally bound all 50 of its national pledged delegates to Trump.
Democratic primary
The South Carolina Democratic primary was held on February 29, 2020.
Official results show that Joe Biden won the Democratic primary with 48.65% of the vote, with Bernie Sanders coming in second with 19.77%.
General election
Polling
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Aggregate polls
Polls
Results
By county
Counties that flipped from Democratic to Republican
- Clarendon (largest city: Manning)
- Dillon (largest city: Dillon)
By congressional district
Trump won six of seven congressional districts.
Analysis
South Carolina—a Deep Southern Bible Belt state that was once part of the Democratic Solid South—has had a Republican tendency since 1964. Since its narrow vote for Kennedy in 1960, it has voted Democratic only in 1976, for Jimmy Carter, the former governor of the neighboring state of Georgia. Accordingly, it has long been the most conservative state on the East Coast of the United States, although it has not been as conservative as its fellow Deep South states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, largely due to populous and fast-growing Charleston and Richland Counties' trending more Democratic in the 21st century. As in the case of other Deep Southern states, South Carolina also has a large African-American population that helps keep the state somewhat more competitive than much of the Upper South. (The final state in the Deep South, Georgia, has become much more competitive than any of its fellow Deep South states in recent years due to the explosive growth of the Atlanta area.)
Trump performed somewhat better than polls anticipated, as aggregate polls averaged him only 7 points ahead of Biden. He flipped Clarendon County for the first time since 1972 and Dillon County for the first time since 1988. Biden became the first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 to win the presidency without Clarendon, Calhoun, Colleton, and McCormick counties and the first Democrat since Harry S. Truman to win without Dillon and Chester counties.
Per exit polls by the Associated Press, Trump's strength in the Palmetto State came from White, born-again/Evangelical Christians, who supported Trump by 87%–9%. South Carolina is entirely in the Bible Belt. As is the case in many Southern states, there was a stark racial divide in voting for this election: White South Carolinians supported Trump by 69%–29%, while Black South Carolinians supported Biden by 92%–7%.
In other elections, longtime Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham won another term in the United States Senate by 10.27 percentage points over Democrat Jaime Harrison. While Harrison lost by a double-digit margin, he still slightly outperformed Biden.