Amanda Garrett, a telecom engineer who hosts a local "Drinking Liberally" meet-up, is seen in this photograph taken in Greenville, South Carolina. (Image courtesy of Amanda Garrett)

GREENVILLE, South Carolina — Amanda Garrett has narrowed it down to three choices: Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg.

The 38-year-old telecom engineer isn’t ready to commit, she says, until after at least the first debate. Probably not until after the second or third.

“If I had to pick one right now, I would probably go with Elizabeth Warren. I think that she has really thought through all of the issues that we're facing. And I don't feel like her ideas are pie in the sky,” Garrett said of the Massachusetts senator, whose slogan has become “I’ve got a plan for that,” thanks to her white papers on many issues liberals care most about.

Garrett is one of the hosts of “Drinking Liberally,” a meet-up she joined in 2006 to discuss shared liberal ideals and candidates in a state that hasn’t voted a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter, from neighboring Georgia, in 1976.

While the preferences of South Carolina’s Democrats don’t hold much weight in a general election, the state plays a central role in the primary. Because black voters make up about 60% of the primary electorate in South Carolina, the party puts a lot of weight on results here.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton all carried this state on the way to winning the nomination. That’s four of the past five contested Democratic conventions.

Members of the “Drinking Liberally“ group meet up at Iron Hill Brewery in Greenville, South Carolina. (Salena Zito/Washington Examiner)

Garrett, also a member of the local “liberal Mom Facebook group” that meets monthly, senses something new about this year’s Democratic electorate.

“We had a lot of contentious moments between the Hillary Clinton supporters and the Bernie Sanders people,” she said. This year, she thinks competing camps will be more amiable. “With so many people in the primaries, it’s very likely that the person who gets the nomination is not going to be the person you want,” she said.

“You have to just get over it now and accept that whoever it is, we all come together. Even if it just means sucking it up and biting our tongues a lot.” As she puts it, “In the primary, you vote with your heart, and general election, you vote with your head.”

Last week, most Democratic candidates converged in Columbia for Rep. James Clyburn’s iconic annual fish fry, the state party convention, and a Planned Parenthood forum. Candidates competed to offer voters the most free stuff and to position themselves as the most likely to beat President Trump.

South Carolina House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford said voters are looking for two things: who is genuine and who is going to win the general election.

“We would love to fall in love early, but if not, we're going to fall in line and get behind whoever can beat Donald Trump.”

Rutherford, an African American, has not endorsed anyone to date. “I've met with all of the top-tier candidates except for former Vice President Joe Biden, but he and I have spoken on the phone.”

Rutherford says what keeps Biden at the top of the polls is not that he comes to South Carolina often: “It's the fact that people think he can beat Donald Trump.”

“Everybody you talk to says, you know, I may like this person, I may like that person, but we've got to beat Donald Trump, and so, that's on everybody's mind, and that's on the tip of everybody's tongue,” he said.

He also stresses that black voters, in particular in the South, tend to be more moderate to conservative than the Democratic field is. “That might impact who they support.”

South Carolina House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford (pictured center-right) speaks to fellow lawmakers at the State House in Columbia. (Image courtesy of Nick Sottille)

“I'm not sure that if we were to do an overlay of South Carolina Black Democrats and, say, New York City or Vermont, that we wouldn't be considered Republican. ... For example, LGBTQ rights are big in the Democratic Party in South Carolina, they're big for me, but they're not very big in the black church all the time.” Rutherford also points out how many South Carolina Democrats own guns, which are not popular among Democratic politicians.

“It is very difficult sometimes for national Dems to understand that.” In 2008, Rutherford says he pleaded with Hillary Clinton: “Please understand and make your comments appropriate to people who may live 20 miles from Orangeburg, where their nearest neighbors are a mile away and they have snakes and they have coyotes and they have animals and they have people that they don't know, and so they have guns, lots of guns.”

“You know, when we call things assault rifles, assault rifle is a political term, it's not a gun term. You don't walk into a gun shop and ask for an assault rifle. You ask for an AK-47 and an Uzi. So when you say that, it doesn't translate, so there are a number of key issues like guns and life that are different here among Democrats.” The divides extend to the most sensitive issues. “We have a lot of black preachers that get elected, and they're simply pro-life,” Rutherford says.

So far, South Carolina looks like the rest of the country. The latest CBS News Battleground tracker polls show Joe Biden at the top among South Carolina Democrats; the poll also showed Biden leading among African American voters, with half considering Sanders and a third of black voters considering Harris.

Columbia Democratic pollster Carey Crantford has private polling that reflects the same sentiments. He notes that Biden has always maintained a political footprint in this state including his involvement in last year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Biden backed the man who eventually became the nominee, James Smith.

“Smith ran that kind of centrist Democratic campaign against two challengers, one who was really pushing hard for gun control and against politics as usual. Biden was very visible during that effort, even doing a video at the convention and supporting Smith,” he said.

Rutherford said instead of seeing all of the candidates on the stage last week at the state convention he’d rather see them get to know voters at the most granular level.

“What I want to see is somebody that understands the essence of sitting in a black barbershop. ... You can know all the facts in the world, you can be, you know, Jeopardy! champion, but if you don't know how to tell jokes and throw barbs and not be so beholden to only saying things that you can factually back up, well I don't know that you can contend with Donald Trump.”