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US President Joe Biden (with First Lady Jill Biden): attempt at second term in office
Photo:
Saul Loeb/AFP
It is a first exclamation point from the incumbent: as expected, US President Joe Biden easily won the first official Democratic primary in the state of South Carolina and is hoping this will give him a boost for the rest of the election campaign. Shortly after the polls closed on Saturday evening (local time), the major television networks CNN, NBC, ABC and Fox News unanimously declared Biden the clear winner in their forecasts and predicted that he would receive a share of the vote of more than 96 percent.
In addition to Biden, only a few prominent party colleagues competed. The 81-year-old wants to run for a second term in the presidential election in November. He has no serious competition within the party. The vote in South Carolina was nevertheless seen as the first major test run for his election campaign - also because many black voters live in the conservative southern US state, whose votes are of particular importance for Biden's campaign nationwide.
“Make Trump a loser”
Biden appeared confident given the outcome of the primary election. In a written statement, he said he had no doubt that the people of South Carolina had put his campaign on the path "to winning the presidency again - and making Donald Trump a loser again."
Anyone who wants to become a presidential candidate in the USA must first prevail in internal party primaries. The candidates are then officially chosen at party conferences in the summer. The actual presidential election takes place at the beginning of November.
Of the Republican presidential candidates, only former US President Trump and former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley are still there. But Trump clearly dominates the race. Everything currently points to a new edition of the election campaign between Biden and Trump, who had already competed against each other in the most recent presidential election in 2020.
At the end of January, the Democratic presidential candidate was voted on in the state of New Hampshire in the northeast of the United States. But Biden was not on the ballot there. The background is an internal party dispute: Biden and the Democratic Party wanted to move the start of the primary election series to South Carolina - because of the more diverse electorate there, for example in order to give more weight to the votes of black voters. However, New Hampshire did not want to lose its status as the first primary election state and insisted on the early voting date.
Biden still won the vote in New Hampshire in the end - because of an option that allowed voters to enter their own name on the ballot. However, his success was more of a symbolic nature, because the delegate votes secured in the state will not be taken into account at the Democratic nomination convention in the summer.
mkl/dpa