“It’s all about South Carolina,” said Dick Harpootlian, a former state South Carolina Democratic Party chair who is helping steer Biden’s efforts in that state.

At his campaign launch party in Columbia, S.C., both Biden and his wife, Jill, downplayed the former vice president’s lackluster performances in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“We just heard from the first two of 50 states. Two of them. Not all the nation, not half the nation, not a quarter of the nation, not 10 percent — two,” Biden said to a standing-room-only crowd made up mostly of African Americans. “Where I come from, that’s an opening bell.”

Biden told the crowd that 99.9 percent of African Americans and 99.8 percent of Latinos had not yet cast a primary vote. “It ain’t over, man,” Biden said. “We’re just getting started.”

However, polls are showing Biden’s African American support is already starting to slip.

The South Carolina event offered a stark contrast to what the Bidens left behind in New Hampshire. Here, the former vice president’s election night party was a somber event, marked by the absence of a candidate who left the state long before the race was called.

Scott Spradling, a top New Hampshire consultant and former top political reporter in the state, said he can't remember a major candidate not being in the state on election night. And Biden’s announcement that he would leave before the polls closed probably damaged his campaign in the state further.

"He's shooting himself in the foot in the last few hours at a time when he's already shot himself in the other foot," Spradling said. "New Hampshire is about being front and center. So, I think he could very well have hurt himself even more."