Bernie Sanders’ operatives say they are looking beyond Super Tuesday, to the more friendly terrain of Kansas, Nebraska, and Maine to deliver them wins. | AP Photo South Carolina sets up Super Tuesday endgame for Sanders Hillary Clinton's romp dramatically narrows Bernie Sanders' path forward.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A bruising, nearly 48-point loss to Hillary Clinton in South Carolina on Saturday night dramatically narrowed the path forward for Bernie Sanders, raising serious doubts about his ability to win the delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination.

South Carolina will widen Clinton’s delegate lead, which stood at one after her Nevada win on Feb. 20. But more significantly, the contest here demonstrated that the Vermont senator has failed to make any headway at all with African-American voters in the South. Even with 200 paid Sanders staffers on the ground and nearly $2 million in television spending, Clinton swept the black vote by a 5-to-1 ratio, according to exit polls. Among black voters 65 and older, Clinton won by a stunning 96 percent to 3 percent.


“When we stand together, there is no barrier too big to break,” Clinton said at her victory rally in Columbia, where, for the first time on a 2016 election night, she took the stage without Bill or Chelsea Clinton by her side. “Tomorrow, we take this campaign national.”

Now, heading into Super Tuesday, when 11 states will cast ballots on March 1, Sanders will face possibly insurmountable contests in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and Virginia, all states with sizable black populations in which he has not invested as much time or money.

“Delegates determine the presidential nomination, and I don’t see a path for Sanders to get there,” said Jeff Berman, a consultant to the Clinton campaign who ran Barack Obama’s 2008 delegate strategy.

Running through a best-case scenario for Sanders, Clinton operatives said they expect Sanders could win Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Vermont — states tailor-made for the democratic socialist because they hold caucuses, are predominantly white, located in New England or have a history of electing progressives.

But even if Sanders manages to pull out significant wins in all five, the delegate math will make it difficult for Sanders to catch up: They represent only one-third of the delegates up for grabs on Tuesday. And the Clinton campaign has invested heavily in states like Colorado and Minnesota in order to limit Sanders’ margins.

Sanders’ operatives said they are looking beyond Super Tuesday, to the friendlier terrain of Kansas, Nebraska and Maine to deliver them wins. But by then, Clinton operatives predicted, it could be too little, too late to close the delegate gap.

“Our delegate lead will only grow in the period after Super Tuesday,” Berman said.

Sanders’ situation is similar to one in which Clinton found herself eight years ago, when Barack Obama established a delegate lead during 11 consecutive victories after Super Tuesday and she was never able to catch up. In that race, Super Tuesday resulted in a colossal tie between Obama and Clinton.

This year, however, it’s on Super Tuesday that Clinton operatives expect to open up a lead of 50 delegates or more and leave Sanders behind for good.

“Super Tuesday in 2016 is not the same as in 2008, when the Democratic candidates fought to a draw,” said Berman. “This year, it is much more Southern-dominated, heavily diverse with African-American voters in many states and Hispanic voters in Texas. South Carolina is telling us how well Sanders can compete among these voters and how he’ll perform … on Super Tuesday.”

The states where Sanders is expected to win — like his home state of Vermont — don’t give him the margins he needs to remain competitive. Vermont awards just 16 delegates, for example, compared to 222 awarded in Texas, where Sanders is not advertising on television and has spent little time campaigning over the past 10 months.

But he started to make a push there on Saturday and showed he is still able to turn out Taylor Swift-size crowds — more than 10,000 supporters turned out for his rally in Austin.

That grass-roots support and his extraordinary small-donor fundraising juggernaut are expected to keep Sanders fighting through June.

“We tried to win Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and we almost did,” said Sanders’ senior strategist, Tad Devine. “When it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, we took a much longer view of this. Our view extends to the middle of March. We’re in sprint mode.”

Devine acknowledged that the results in South Carolina indicate the campaign has a difficult task ahead in terms of winning over black voters.

“We’ve tried hard in South Carolina,” he said, “and it’s an important first step in a long process of introducing him to the African-American community all across the country and build support. That’s going to take time, though.”

The problem for Sanders is that time is running out. The next real battleground contest will take place on March 8 in Michigan, where Clinton has been making the toxic-water woes of Flint a centerpiece of her campaign.

A win there would be symbolically important for Sanders, because of the outsize role Flint has played in Clinton’s campaign. But Clinton operatives noted that Mississippi, which votes on the same day and where Clinton is expected to win, would allow them to win more delegates even if Sanders takes Michigan.

Sanders’ campaign expects that the Vermonter’s personal story — he is the son of Polish immigrants — will resonate more deeply with Latino voters. And Devine said the campaign will fight to win New York, where Clinton served as senator for eight years, because Sanders has roots in Brooklyn and upstate New York shares a small media market with Burlington, so he is better known.

But for now, Clinton allies who expect that Sanders will plow on through June are feeling friendlier toward the candidate whose popularity and attacks on Bill Clinton have infuriated the former president. Rather than calling on Sanders to drop out anytime soon, they are attempting to tone down the rhetoric of the campaign so Sanders doesn’t escalate his attacks on Clinton and soften her up ahead of a general election.

“Bernie is running a great campaign,” said longtime Clinton ally Paul Begala, who now advises Clinton’s super PAC, Priorities USA. “He’s raising money; he’s building crowds. I don’t want him to go away. He’s making Hillary a better candidate. And he’s not running an insult-based campaign. I don’t want it to end.”

