The Bennettsville and Aiken meetings were part of a coordinated statewide push. There were 10 such events, featuring either the lawyers or the mothers, across South Carolina over the last three days, each of them at a church or community center. They’re designed to be smaller events. (Clinton joined the mothers Tuesday night in Columbia.)

Compare that with Sanders’s approach. The Vermont senator came to South Carolina Saturday night after losing to Clinton in Nevada. Sunday morning, he stopped by a black church in Columbia, then headed to Greenville for a rally. It was a massive event—there were more than 5,000 people at the Bon Secours Wellness Arena. But few of them were African American—certainly a smaller proportion than the 55 percent of the Democratic primary vote that blacks comprised in 2008. Geographically speaking, that’s no surprise. Greenville is the center of South Carolina’s Upstate, which is less than 20 percent black. But after the Sunday rally, Sanders left to campaign elsewhere. He came back for a Tuesday-night town hall in Columbia and held a press conference Wednesday morning before jetting out again. Sanders appears to have decided to focus more energy on states holding March 1 nominating contests.

Clinton holds a huge lead with black voters in South Carolina in polls ahead of Saturday’s Democratic primary—as much as 47 points, in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The difference in Sanders’s and Clinton’s approaches to black voters is in part a reaction to those results—if Sanders had more of a chance to win them, he’d likely spend more time on it—but it also helps explain the gap.

It isn’t that Sanders isn’t talking about race issues. Despite the overwhelmingly Caucasian crowd, he talked at length about racial disparities in Greenville. Sanders was introduced by a local black politician, former NAACP President Ben Jealous, and the actor Danny Glover. He railed against police brutality, mass incarceration of black men, unequal prosecutions for drug use, and more.

There’s little doubt that Sanders cares about these civil-rights questions, nor that his supporters do. His fans are passionate about stopping racism. “The fact that he’s a white man who admits that white privilege exists and wants to get rid of white privilege—that’s huge,” Jonathan Bussey, a young white man, told me as he waited for Sanders to speak.

You’re just more likely to meet someone like Bussey at a Sanders event than you are a young black man. The African Americans who attend the Greenville Sanders rally tended to say they there for the same reasons that whites are there: Because they feel that the economy is rigged, the health-care system is insufficient, and Bernie is the most honest candidate and the one who was most concerned with helping the little guy.

Ralph Morton, whose gray hair matched his gray suit, told me he thought pundits and the Clinton campaign were counting black votes before they were cast, predicting a replay of the 2008 primary, where her support eroded quickly and she lost. “I think the same thing might happen to her again,” he said. “It’s just like Jeb Bush thought he was going to be a shoo-in because of past support. He got toasted.”