Hillary Clinton is one bad South Carolina poll away from a full-scale embrace of radical racial insanity.

On Thursday, CNN-ORC released a new poll from Iowa. Back in December, Hillary Clinton led socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders by a margin of 54 percent to 36 percent. Today, Hillary Clinton trails Bernie Sanders by a margin of 51 percent to 43 percent.

And in New Hampshire, it’s even worse. A CNN/WMUR poll this week shows Hillary getting blown out in New Hampshire by a margin of 60 percent to 33 percent. Her national poll numbers are now dropping faster than they were in 2008, when Barack Obama grabbed the nomination from her. She’s dropping among women. She’s dropping among men. She’s dropping among leftists and so-called moderates. She’s dropping with the old and the young.

But she clings like a mollusk to one piece of polling information, desperately hoping it will be enough to save her sinking candidacy: she’s rising with blacks and Latinos.

Yes, even though Hillary is going over like the bubonic plague with her own electorate, she’s still making heavy inroads with minorities, even as she sinks like the Titanic with white voters. From December to January, her lead among whites plummeted from above 20 percent to dead even with Sanders. But in the same period, her support base among blacks and Latinos increased from just above 40 percent to 50 percent.

She’s staking everything on a South Carolina victory. In South Carolina, about half of the primary electorate is black. Should she start to lose her grip there, she will hit the panic button.

And that panic button: slavery reparations.

The groundwork is already being laid. Leftist ThoughtLeader Ta-Nehisi Coates (“essential, like water or air” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times)– has now embraced the notion that American whites must pay slavery reparations to American blacks. Never mind that a huge majority of American whites currently living did not even have distant ancestors who held black slaves (some estimates say 95%), or that a huge number of American whites had ancestors who died to free black slaves, or that black Americans made incredible progress for generations after the end of slavery before the welfare state crippled black economic growth, or that a mass transfer of wealth from non-slaveholders to non-slaves makes zero economic or moral sense, or that slavery reparations do nothing to actually increase the odds of black success in America.

Coates says the time is now, and he’s ripping Bernie Sanders for disagreeing. In the pages of The Atlantic, Coates writes, “Sanders’s radicalism has failed in the ancient fight against white supremacy….Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument.” Coates concludes, “Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy. It is the indispensable tool against white supremacy… My hope was to talk to Sanders directly, before writing this article. I reached out repeatedly to his campaign over the past three days. The Sanders campaign did not respond.”

Tough, nonsensical words.

But they’re gaining credence, because we know that Ta-Nehisi Coates is an intellectual. We know he’s an intellectual both because Toni Morrison likes him and because thanks to his rough upbringing (his Black Panther dad fathered seven children by four women), he watched 9/11 while slightly stoned, feeling nothing. Deep, man.

Fortunately, guilty white leftists are there to push Coates’ slavery reparations agenda forward. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews paused long enough from slurring his words to moan, “I do believe in reparations.” Jeff Guo of The Washington Post writes today, “Anyone who professes to be a socialist must confront America’s legacy of racial oppression.”

And now, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is slamming Sanders for not endorsing reparations. Seriously. Brian Fallon just told CNN, “When it comes to something like reparations, he dismisses it as completely unfeasible.”

So here we go. If Hillary feels her grasp slip just a little further, look for her to embrace the most radical racial proposal on the table in order to enshrine herself as the minority pick for the Democratic nomination. She’s been out-raced once by the first black president, Barack Obama. She’s not going to take it again from a 73-year-old ethnic Jew from Vermont.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.