Polls just closed in South Carolina, where Hillary Clinton is favored to defeat Bernie Sanders easily, possibly by as large a margin as Sanders’ big win in New Hampshire. Any comments about the Democratic race for the presidency are welcome in this thread. Here are a few links to get the conversation started.

African-American voters are critically important for Clinton and will make a large share of the electorate not only in South Carolina but also in at least six of the states that vote on “Super Tuesday” (Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia). This chart shows data from the 2008 primaries on the non-white percentages of electorates in the states that will vote on March 1.

Toni Monkovic argued recently, “We’re living in an era when blacks have essentially played kingmaker in the most important elections in the nation.” Sanders did extremely well among white working-class voters in the first three states, but “he does not really have a path to victory unless he can significantly narrow or even erase Mrs. Clinton’s edge among nonwhite voters,” Nate Cohn argued earlier this month. The prevalence of moderate Democratic voters in several of the Super Tuesday states should also work to Clinton’s advantage.

Tim Murphy wrote an interesting piece for Mother Jones on “Clinton’s Most Valuable Allies in South Carolina: the Moms of Black Lives Matter.”

Terrell Jermaine Staff profiled Marcus Ferrell in Fusion. Ferrell’s job with the Sanders campaign is “convincing black folks to ‘feel the Bern.'”

David Sirota took a close look at what economists say about whether Sanders’ plans on single-payer health care and free education at public universities “add up.”

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com laid out which states Sanders needs to win on Super Tuesday and beyond to win the Democratic nomination.

Excerpts from all of those articles are after the jump.

For comic relief, I recommend Steve Deace’s latest column for the Conservative Review on how 2016 is shaping up to be “the devil’s favorite presidential election.” He takes some ridiculous shots at Clinton and Sanders but the real venom comes out when he writes about Donald Trump. Deace is furious the strong anti-establishment sentiment in the Republican electorate is working mostly in Trump’s favor, rather than pushing Ted Cruz ahead.

UPDATE: Clinton is on track to outperform her lead in South Carolina polling. She gave her victory speech less than an hour after polls closed, and sounded like she was running against Donald Trump, not Sanders. I’ve added excerpts from her speech below. She recognized by name all of the “Black Lives Matter” moms, as well as their children who were killed.

SECOND UPDATE: Wow. A crushing victory for Clinton by nearly a 3 to 1 margin. I don’t remember seeing anyone predict she would even win 2 to 1. Harry Enten speculates that South Carolina “may be the beginning of the end for Sanders.” Added excerpts at the end of this post.

From Tim Murphy’s piece for Mother Jones, “Clinton’s Most Valuable Allies in South Carolina: the Moms of Black Lives Matter.”

The women—Maria Hamilton, the mother of Dontre Hamilton; Lucia McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis; Geneva Reed-Veal, the mother of Sandra Bland; Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin; and Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner—spoke to small audiences at three black churches in the first round of a two-day trip that will culminate Tuesday night in a megarally with Clinton in Columbia. They talked emotionally about their faith and their families’ trauma, but they were there primarily to deliver a simple message about the Democratic presidential front-runner: You can trust Hillary Clinton.

In Nevada, as in New Hampshire and Iowa before it, Democrats who said “trustworthiness” was an important factor in their vote chose Sanders in overwhelming numbers. Talk to an undecided voter at a rally and there’s a better-than-even chance it comes up. “I think there’s an underlying question that maybe is really in the back of people’s minds, and that is, ‘Is she in it for us or is she in it for herself?'” Clinton conceded to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.

The five mothers were there to ease those concerns, while talking up the former secretary of state’s plans for gun control and criminal justice reform. […]

Clinton sealed the deal, they explained, when she met with the five of them last fall in a conference room in Chicago. It was a low-key affair. The candidates’ staffers shooed reporters from the room before it began, and Clinton showed up with a notepad to jot down what she heard. They were told they had 30 minutes; the meeting lasted for two hours. “She knew which cases went to jail,” Fulton said, when she told the story at the second stop of the day, a church in Sumter. “She knew specifically what happened in our tragedies. She knew that information and she knew because she cares. She cares. Not only does she care about victims of gun violence but she cares about women, she cares about African Americans. She cares!”

From Terrell Jermaine Staff’s profile of Marcus Ferrell in Fusion:

Ferrell is careful not to say anything that could be construed as a jab against Hillary Clinton, focusing our conversation on his team’s strategy to gain black support. He joined the Sanders campaign after the senator’s still-criticized July appearance at the Netroots Nation conference. During his one-on-one interview with journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, protesters interrupted, shouting, “Black lives matter!” Sanders looked like he didn’t know what to do or how to respond. When he did, it came off as abrasive and patronizing. […]

Ferrell says Sanders has come a long way since then, pointing to a 20-point gain in black support in South Carolina in the six months since he joined the team. Until now, no one has spoken with Ferrell at length about his job as Sanders’ top adviser on all things African-American. Frankly, given how challenging it’s been for Sanders to register with black people, some find it surprising that Ferrell (or any other black person, for that matter) would want the job. […]

So far, not enough black voters seem to be buying into Sanders’ message of economic inequality. The senator does a great job identifying the problems black people face, but critics say that he provides few solutions that will actually address them—and that many of the solutions he does provide are hopelessly unrealistic.

When I ask Ferrell how he plans on overcoming that perception, he says part of his team’s strategy is convincing African-Americans that “Bernie’s candidacy is a pathway to start the process of becoming economically free.” Moreover, he says many loyal Clinton supporters who voted for then-Sen. Barack Obama over her in 2008 don’t want to do so again in 2016.

Ferrell says the campaign has had to spend time and money fighting the media over months-long mischaracterizations of his candidate, such as the assertion that Sanders is unwilling to speak about race beyond talking points.

From David Sirota’s article for the International Business Times, “Election 2016: Do Sanders’ Economic Plans Add Up? The Cost Of His ‘Revolution.’”

Economists may criticize Sanders’ plans or support them, yet virtually everyone seems to agree the Vermont lawmaker is proposing the greatest expansion of the public sector since the New Deal.

Sanders does not hide from characterizations he is promising an enormous reordering of American economic life: He drapes himself in such talk as the central virtue of his campaign. A self-described Democratic socialist, he praises the generous — and expensive — social welfare programs run in countries such as Sweden and Denmark. […]

Government today represents about a third of the total U.S. gross domestic product. That figure would skyrocket if Sanders’ agenda was realized — a worthy aspiration in the eyes of his fans, a sign of political naïveté to his Democratic opponents, and a vision of federal power run amok in the portrayals of Republicans.

Yet the debate over Sanders’ promises is really just an arithmetic problem: Would the raft of new taxes Sanders proposes generate the revenue he says they will, and would those revenues be enough to finance his vision?

Austan Goolsbee, a former Obama economic adviser who now consults for hedge funds, says the only way to find the revenue to fund Sanders’ plans would be to jack up government spending as a share of GDP to unprecedented heights — at least in America.

“An increase in spending of the amount Sanders proposes would put us at 47.5 percent,” he said. “That would actually put us, comfortably, in the range of the European countries, i.e., something quite different than anything in the U.S. historical experience.”

From Nate Silver’s latest piece for FiveThirtyEight, “Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Need Momentum — He Needs To Win These States.”

Based on the polling so far, Sanders is coming up short of where he needs to be in most Super Tuesday (March 1) states, along with major industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania where he’ll need to run neck and neck with Clinton later on.

These conclusions come from a set of state-by-state targets we’ve calculated for Sanders and Clinton, which are based on some simple demographic factors in each state. As has been clear for a long while, Sanders performs better in whiter and more liberal states. But the abundance of new polling from Super Tuesday states, along with the Nevada result, gives us the data to establish more accurate benchmarks than the ones we set before. (See last week’s article “Bernie Sanders’s Path To The Nomination” for our previous estimates.) In particular, although Sanders might not have won the Hispanic vote in Nevada, he’s clearly made up ground among Hispanic voters. African-Americans, in contrast, remain overwhelmingly in Clinton’s camp. There may also be an urban/rural divide in the Democratic vote, with Sanders performing better in more rural areas. […]

Take the Super Tuesday states, for instance. Our benchmarks suggest that Sanders ought to win Vermont, Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee to be on track for the nomination. Sanders is going to rout Clinton in Vermont, of course; he’s also slightly ahead in Massachusetts polls, although not by as much as our targets say he “should” be. There hasn’t been enough recent polling in Colorado or Minnesota for us to make forecasts of the caucuses there, but we’d probably consider Sanders the favorite in those states also.

Sanders trails in polls of Oklahoma (narrowly) and Tennessee (badly), however, when he probably needs to win those states too. Meanwhile, he’s losing states such as Georgia by a wider margin than our benchmarks suggest he can afford. The Democrats’ delegate allocation is quite proportional, so these margins matter; underperforming his targets on Super Tuesday would mean that Sanders would have to make up more ground later on with less time left on the clock.

Excerpts from Clinton’s victory speech in South Carolina:

Tomorrow, this campaign goes national. […]

We don’t need to make America great again. America never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again. […]

Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers. We need to show that we really are all in this together. […]

Our country was built by people who had each other’s backs. Who understood that, at our best, we all rise together.

Clinton also quoted from 1 Corinthians, most famous for the line, “Love is patient, love is kind.” Last month, Ruby Cramer discussed at length how Clinton has been “talking about love and kindness” during this campaign.

SECOND UPDATE: From Harry Enten’s write-up for FiveThirtyEight.com:

Perhaps the most worrisome sign for Sanders is that the momentum he had heading into the first three contests seems to have been halted in South Carolina. Sanders was down 25 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight South Carolina polling average a month ago, and it looks like he’s going to do even worse than that tonight.

Sanders needs something to change because frankly he’s losing.

Indeed, South Carolina is even more of a setback for Sanders than it appears at first glance because it reverses the progress he had been making. If you look at my colleague Nate Silver’s estimates of how Sanders would do in each caucus or primary if the race were tied nationally (Sanders needs to beat these targets to have a shot at the nomination), we see that Sanders did 19 percentage points worse than the benchmark in Iowa, 10 percentage points worse in New Hampshire and 5 percentage points worse in Nevada. That is, Sanders did not hit the target in any of those contests, but he got closer to it as time went on. In South Carolina, it looks like Sanders will run at least 10 percentage points worse than we would expect given a tie nationally, suggesting that the race has stabilized or moved in Clinton’s direction since Nevada.

Sanders’s loss of momentum couldn’t have come at a worst time for his campaign. There are six Super Tuesday states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) where black voters made up a larger share of the electorate in 2008 than they did in Iowa, New Hampshire or Nevada this year. That Sanders couldn’t break through with black voters in either Nevada or South Carolina, despite a heavy investment, makes it difficult to believe he will have any more success in these six states, where his campaign hasn’t put in the same effort.

What’s worse for Sanders — of the 865 delegates up for grabs Tuesday, 66 percent come from these six states.