Hillary Clinton didn’t need much help from rural voters in her 3 to 1 victory over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in Saturday’s South Carolina presidential primary.
But she got it anyway.
Former Secretary of State Clinton won each of South Carolina’s 46 counties in the Democratic primary.
Her landslide lead among metropolitan voters (71% to 29%) only got bigger as the contest moved to the states small cities and rural areas. In micropolitan counties (counties with a city of between 10,000 and 50,000 residents), she won by a margin of more than 4 to 1. And in the state’s most rural counties, her advantage grew to nearly 7 to 1.
The South Carolina primary was the first southern contest for Democrats. Southern voters become a much more prominent part of the contest this week on Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states hold their primaries or caucuses. About half of those states are in the South.
Turnout for the 2016 South Carolina contest was off by a third from the 2008 primary, the last time there was a contested Democratic presidential primary in the Palmetto State. That year, then-Senator Barack Obama beat Clinton by a margin of 2 to 1 en route to winning the Democratic nomination and the White House.
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