"He has to bring it to Main Street, the message has to be to Main Street," said Jaime Harrison, South Carolina's Democratic Party chairman (at right). Matt Moore, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, is pictured at left. | Thomas Hammond Photography for POLITICO. S.C. Dem chair: Sanders 'has to make it real'

For all his success in communicating his message about income inequality, Bernie Sanders may face a challenge in bringing in voters in South Carolina, the state's Democratic Party chairman said Thursday.

"We’ve been pushing equal pay for women, and that’s an important point within the Democratic Party. But also in terms of race. In many jobs, African Americans make less than their white counterparts," Jaime Harrison said during the second half of the POLITICO Caucus: Economy and the Election event in Charleston, South Carolina.


That fact "is the challenge" for the Vermont senator, Harrison remarked. "He has to make it real for folks." For middle-aged African Americans, he suggested,"Wall Street is just as foreign as Moscow to them."

"He has to bring it to Main Street, the message has to be to Main Street," he said during the panel, moderated by POLITICO Caucus editor Steve Shepard.

But while Sanders has resonated among voters under the age of 30 in Iowa and New Hampshire, he may want to shift his emphasis, Harrison said later. While acknowledging the importance of young voters in the success of Barack Obama, Harrison said that for either Sanders or Hillary Clinton to win in the state, "they need to concentrate on middle class, working class folks and talk about those issues and how it impacts them."

In assessing the role that the issue of student debt plays among young voters, state Republican Party chairman Matt Moore remarked that the impact of government policy cannot be ignored.

"They're not buying houses. They're staying with their parents," Harrison said. "They're not buying cars," added Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a former Democratic congressional candidate who is currently the director of business development, at Clemson University's Restoration Institute.

Moore pointed to the disparities between rural and suburban areas in the state, praising Republican Gov. Nikki Haley for raising it as an issue.

In the earlier panel that included economists who have advised the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, panelists often returned to the meteoric rises of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, whose campaigns have both challenged the political establishment.

“I’m sort of stunned in a way that this race has very little to do with economic policy," said American Enterprise Institute columnist James Pethokoukis. "I think at a gut level, his core voters think that Donald Trump understands their problems and will fight for them.”

Stephen Moore, who advised Cruz on his tax policy, remarked that Trump's victory speech Tuesday in New Hampshire was "phenomenal."

Gene Sperling, who is an outside adviser to Clinton's campaign, resisted any comparisons of his candidate or Sanders to Trump in terms of their populist appeal during the panel, moderated by Ben White, POLITICO's chief economic correspondent.

“I would not, whether you’re Hillary Clinton or you’re representing Bernie Sanders, try to ever put your candidate in the same breath with Donald Trump or talk about favorable comparisons or anything positive," Sperling said. "This is the person who is running a campaign that is appealing to the worst instincts of people. He has mocked a person with disabilities and then asked the person with disabilities to apologize for it. He has maligned Latino Americans calling them rapists. He has had the most-anti freedom of religion position with Muslims of anyone. I never thought that I would be in a situation of following politics of having to tell my 9-year-old not about what the politics are, but that’s not how you should never act as a person. And Bernie Sanders shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath with him. And neither should Hillary Clinton.”

Asked why he thought Clinton's economic message has not performed as well, Sperling cautioned that the race is still in an early phase, echoing the former secretary of state's insistence that she is a "progressive who gets things done."

“While again I think Bernie shares a lot of our values and I think has done an excellent job as a candidate, I think that hunger [is] for a strategy that’s actually going to make our lives better," he said. "Because it’s not incremental to try to have a strategy that can actually happen. It’s a precious thing to be in the White House."