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For decades, ambitious politicians with eyes on a future presidential run made pilgrimages to Iowa and New Hampshire, casually popping in at fairs and local fund-raising dinners as if they just happened to be in the area.
When President Biden pushed Democrats to place South Carolina first on their presidential primary calendar, the geography for the party’s political strivers changed. They are now working to build support not in mostly white Northern places but in a Southern state with a predominantly Black primary voting base that better represents the modern Democratic Party.
So when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived on Friday in Orangeburg, S.C., for her ninth visit to South Carolina since taking office, she came as a known quantity. While she and Mr. Biden are running for renomination without serious challengers, the relationships she has developed in the state are expected to play a part in lifting their ticket to a comfortable triumph on Saturday in the party’s first recognized primary election.
Ms. Harris’s trip, as well as her college tour last year and an ongoing circuit to defend abortion rights and promote the Democratic agenda, also served two larger purposes: working to shore up Mr. Biden’s lingering vulnerabilities with Black voters and young voters, and keeping the first woman and first woman of color to serve as vice president at the forefront for the next presidential contest in 2028.
Perhaps the most influential Democrat in South Carolina is already on board with Ms. Harris as a future White House candidate.
“I made very clear months ago that I support her,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, whose 2020 endorsement of Mr. Biden before his state’s primary election helped rejuvenate the former vice president’s struggling campaign and carry him to the nomination. “That’s why we got to re-elect the ticket. Then you talk about viability after that.”
Ms. Harris, who ended her 2020 presidential campaign months before the South Carolina primary, has sought to deepen her ties here.
“There is an unspoken language between the vice president and African American women in this state,” said Trav Robertson, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. “She doesn’t have to go into a room and say things — because they already know they have a shared experience.”
Ms. Harris was part of a parade of Biden campaign surrogates who have trekked to South Carolina to stump for the president in a primary whose result is hardly in question. Mr. Biden’s competition is Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is little known and has spent nothing on television ads in the state, and the self-help author Marianne Williamson, who attracted minimal support in the New Hampshire primary even without Mr. Biden on the ballot.
No one has energized more voters in South Carolina than Ms. Harris, who is positioned as a natural successor to Mr. Biden but tends not to surface at the top of Democratic wish lists for 2028 presidential candidates. On Friday in Orangeburg, S.C., she met with a group of local pastors, some of whom she has yearslong relationships with; stood for a photo line that included supporters of her 2020 campaign; and spoke at a final rally before the primary.
Her local connections were clear. Jaime Harrison, an Orangeburg native who serves as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called her “our M.V.P.” Mr. Clyburn, from the stage, affectionately called her “my girl.”
“In 2020, it was South Carolina that put President Joe Biden and me on the path to the White House,” she told the crowd. “It is because of that work that Joe Biden is president of the United States and I am the first woman and first Black woman to be vice president of the United States.”
The Biden campaign has hired a local staff of four people and encouraged visits by supportive politicians, ranging from the well known (Gov….
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