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But when the benediction was completed, the rush of congregants to the front pew signaled that this Sunday was unique: The honored guest was former Vice President Joe Biden, and everyone wanted a photo.
“He was with President Obama and you know what that means, he has a head start in my book,” said Barbara Cain Seabrook, a 58-year-old member of Brookland Baptist. “I think he has the community at heart.”
Nearly every Democrat in South Carolina agrees that Biden is the early pacesetter in the state’s critically important primary, buoyed by his long-standing relationships with elected officials here and support from black voters, who make up almost 60% of the Democratic electorate.
But black leaders and strategists are divided over whether that backing will endure over the next year. One camp believes his experience and appeal to older voters will make him an electoral juggernaut among the black community, while another sees him as a paper tiger whose appeal is generational and who may be overly reliant on his ties to Obama.
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Black voters will represent a crucial segment of the primary electorate in many states, and Biden’s ability to build lasting support among them will be essential to determining the strength of his candidacy. He has emerged as the pacesetter in a crowded field in large part because of sky-high polling numbers among black voters, support he never enjoyed during two previous presidential runs.
“Obama is gone, and we’re trying to get to the future,” said Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state’s most powerful Democrat and the party’s third-ranking member of the House. Clyburn, who worked closely with Biden during his years in the White House, said the former vice president has to “lay out what his vision is, and it’s yet to be seen whether it coincides with black people’s dreams and aspirations.”
Those more bullish on his chances cite his slew of early endorsements in South Carolina (more than 20 announced Monday, including pastors, state legislators and school board members), the association with Obama, and the hiring of Kendall Corley, a prized Democratic organizer who specializes in field operations and turned down several other campaigns to serve as Biden’s South Carolina state director.
In states like South Carolina, Biden’s advantage with black voters not only helps him amass delegates before the Democratic convention, but helps counter the widespread perception that he is a candidate running on a bygone appeal to the white working class.
“He has a message that’s not just for black people, but for everyone,” said Terry Davenport, 52, who attended Biden’s rally in South Carolina over the weekend. He and several other attendees made a similar point — Biden is the person with the longest relationship with black communities but can also win white votes.
Biden “can’t assume he has the black vote,” Davenport said. “But we do know he’s better than that guy in the White House.”
Others, like, Jarrod Loadholt, a Democratic political strategist in the state, are skeptical of Biden’s ability to maintain his lead with black voters. Loadholt cites the 2007 primary, when Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton also enjoyed robust support among black Americans in several polls. Obama overtook her in a shift that swung the primary.
Loadholt also questioned Biden’s ability to get beyond the obvious campaign stops in the state and do the hard work needed to reach more rural black voters.
“Joe Biden is only going to campaign in the South Carolina cities that have a Marriott,” Loadholt said. “And every person in South Carolina knows those fives cities: Columbia, Charleston, Greenville, Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head. But where I’m from, where the primary is really won — your phone doesn’t work.”
“They like Barack Obama, and they know Joe Biden,” he said. “But do they like Joe Biden? He has to work for that vote.”
Biden has structured the early weeks of his campaign almost singularly around President Donald Trump, casting himself as a racial unifier in a time of division. He stressed that over the weekend in South Carolina.
But Biden, who served for years as a senator from Delaware before becoming vice president, has a legislative record littered with divisive stances on issues relating to black people. He was an early opponent of busing programs aimed at school desegregation, and he played an integral role in the punitive crime reduction efforts of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which helped lead to the explosion of incarceration rates among black Americans.
Biden has expressed some remorse for the crime legislation, and for his treatment of Anita Hill when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee during Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. But surrogates, and many voters, have repeatedly downplayed both incidents, and said they believe voters will judge him through his most recent actions in Obama’s administration.
“Everybody makes mistakes,” said Kenneth Webb, a 73-year-old black South Carolina resident who attended Biden’s rally in Columbia. “This is South Carolina. We’ve seen people like Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings change their views. This isn’t anything new to us.”
Through a spokesman, Biden declined a request for an interview for this article, but he told Charleston’s Post and Courier this weekend, “I think the African-American community nationwide knows who I am.’’
“I’m not saying the others aren’t qualified, I’m just saying I’ve been there,” he said.
Several of Biden’s primary opponents have also tried to make outreach to black communities in the early months of their presidential campaigns, a testament to the importance of this reliable Democratic voting bloc, and the desire among 2020 candidates to recreate Obama’s winning coalitions from 2008 and 2012.
However, each of those candidates has their own struggles. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts earned rave reviews at the She The People forum on women of color, but the crowd was largely activists and political operatives, not the rank-and-file Democrats where she has yet to break through.
The race’s two black senators, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, are still relatively new to the national stage, and must contend with the perception among even some black voters that several of the white candidates are better suited to defeat Trump.
“The ballgame for Biden is South Carolina,” said Antjuan Seawright, another state Democratic strategist who has forged close relationships with Biden’s team. “But I’ll tell you this: This is not 2008 and this is not 2016. The mood of our party is different. People are just motivated to win.”
Bakari Sellers, the former state legislator who has endorsed Harris, said the race is in the early stages right now, but “when school starts” in the fall, Biden will be under more intense scrutiny.
“Joe don’t have no plan for improving rural hospitals, Joe don’t have no plan for combating black maternal mortality,” said Sellers, using rhetorical flourish. “He don’t have no plan for HBCUs. He won’t have a plan for black homeownership. Joe’s plan is to run against Donald Trump.”
Research from other liberal groups also suggests that Biden’s relationship with black voters may be generational. Data For Progress, the progressive group aligned with more left-leaning candidates, conducted several focus groups about Biden’s “electability,” and tracked how different populations responded to negative statements about Biden’s past, including his positions on crime and law enforcement. Among black Americans, millennials were almost twice as likely to back away from Biden than black voters overall, which indicates his support with older black Americans is more fixed.
Biden’s candidacy is in some ways a test of which candidate has the measure of the black electorate in South Carolina and nationwide. Younger black Democrats driven by grassroots ideology want to rally around issues like inequality and criminal justice, and they see Biden as emblematic of an old guard that has mistreated black communities.
But many state elected officials and political operatives, pointing to early polling, believe the former vice president’s ‘‘return to normalcy” message will resonate more than any rigid ideological framework.
At his rally at a community center in Hyatt Park Saturday, Biden came on stage after a performance by an all-black gospel choir and marching band. He also played a new campaign advertisement, which splices together autobiographical clips and Obama’s speech about Biden at the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in 2017. He offered few policy details, but one attendee, Carlton Boyd, left feeling good, saying, “Trump casts a shadow of uncertainty, while Joe Biden is security.”
At Brookland Baptist on Sunday morning, Cain Seabrook, the church member, said there was nothing more Biden needed to do to earn her vote — not a policy agenda, or a campaign visit, or good performances in the Democratic debates.
She repeated her earlier points: She planned to vote for Biden because he served with Obama. And, in a bonus, she said, he seemed to clap on beat to the music.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.