Will SC Democrats' Record Turnout Change State Politics?

Sen. Barack Obama's landslide victory in the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary wasn't the only surprise to come out of Saturday's voting. In a Republican stronghold state, more people voted in the Democratic presidential primary than in the Republican presidential primary one week earlier.

According to the state Election Commission, 532,468 people voted in the Democratic primary compared to 445,677 in the Republican primary.

State Democratic Party chair Carol Fowler is excited about what the turnout could mean. "I don't think for a minute that this state has moved overnight from red to blue," she says. "But I think that that kind of movement will come in increments and I think this was an incremental step toward that."

State Republican Party chair Katon Dawson says the difference in the weather between the two primaries may have played a part. For the Republican primary on January 19th, there was snow and sleet in the Upstate and rain across all of South Carolina. Just one week later, the Democrats had weather that was sunny and mild.

"Certainly in the Upstate it was a real lousy day to vote," Dawson says. "But, with that being said, we still had a good day, 440-something thousand people came and voted."

Fowler downplays the weather's impact. "I don't put a bit of stock in that. Democrats, if we had had floods on Saturday, Democrats were gonna turn out and vote for our candidates because they like our candidates. The Republican base is dissatisfied with the slate of candidates they have so they didn't make much effort to get out."

Dawson says another factor is that the Democrats had an additional week to focus on campaigning in the state and their get-out-the-vote efforts. He says one presidential primary does not change the make-up of the state.

"As much as the Democrats and (U.S. Congressman) Jim Clyburn are talking about great successes, I would caution them to remember 2006, when the Republican Party won 8 out of 9 statewide elections, with some margins as much as 20 percent," Dawson says.

University of South Carolina political scientist Dr. Blease Graham doesn't think the weather played much of a role in the turnout, but was surprised by the Democratic turnout.

"It's hard to imagine, I mean it really is astonishing that there are that many Democrats in South Carolina and, if there are, it is a new era. Although, as you think back on it, it may be the cap of Democratic participation," he says.

He points out that, while the Democrats got more than 532,000 votes in their primary, there will likely be 1.4 million to 1.5 million voters in the general election in November and South Carolina has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976,

"I think it's a one-time thing," he says of the Democrats outnumbering Republicans in the primaries. "But the critical part is going to be for the state Democratic Party to follow up on it. I mean, if it is a new era of politics, if these Obama supporters represent a post-Boomer generation, a lot of participants for the first time, it could be the first wave of a whole new generation of Democratic Party identifiers."