Joe Biden's campaign isn't dead yet

A pair of polls and a big endorsement in South Carolina gives hope to his flagging bid.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Just as his White House bid appeared to be sputtering to an ugly end, there are signs of life for Joe Biden still.

And perhaps more than that.

A second-place finish in Nevada, a major endorsement in South Carolina, a strong debate Tuesday and a pair of polls showing him with a staggering lead here have given new hope to his campaign. Money is flowing anew into his war chest, as well as to a super PAC supporting him.

Armed with those data points, the campaign and super PAC are telling donors that Biden — given his strength among African-American voters and momentum kicking in at the right time — is quickly emerging as the alternative to frontrunner Bernie Sanders.

“The debate was really a huge turning point,” said Amanda Loveday, a senior adviser with the PAC and former director of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Donors who had pulled back from Biden, wondering whether Mike Bloomberg would claim the moderate mantle, have started digging into their pockets again, she said. “That got them off their hands.”

And it got rank-and-file voters on their feet. For a campaign that regularly struggles to attract big and energetic crowds, Biden drew something rarely seen at his rally at Coastal Carolina University in Conway on Thursday: a long line of enthusiastic supporters.

On Thursday, Biden announced on social media that his campaign raised $1.2 million from nearly 30,000 donors the day after the debate, in which Biden turned in his strongest performance of the 10 encounters with his rivals.

Why is Biden still polling so well?

Unite the Country, the super PAC backing Biden, would not yet reveal the level of donations coming in but it did purchase digital ads in the six figures.

While that's a meager amount compared to how much rival campaigns are spending, Biden's surrogates are confident that a commanding win on Saturday will yield momentum and money.

“I feel confident that Joe Biden will win here by double digits. And he’s going to do well on Super Tuesday,” said Dick Harpootlian, a key South Carolina organizer for Biden. Harpootlian took it a step further. “Without Bloomberg in this race, he would sweep Super Tuesday and Bernie would be a distant memory.”

Cash-strapped, and with the campaign set to shift to an array of far-flung states, Biden has been more aggressive seeking out earned media. He's made a series of appearances on local and national TV recently, a noticeable shift from when he was the frontrunner and sitting on a bigger war chest.

The newest data point boosting Biden is a Monmouth poll showing he has a 20-point lead over Bernie Sanders in South Carolina, 36 percent to 16 percent. The poll, and others like it in South Carolina, was welcome news for a campaign buffeted by three straight losses in a row in the other early states. Those losses had insiders writing his campaign off for dead and Biden and his surrogates repeatedly insisting that he was in the midst of a comeback after last week’s second-place finish in Nevada.

A national poll from Fox News, however, was almost the inverse in showing Sanders with 31 percent support to Biden’s 18 percent.

But Biden’s campaign said that a big win in South Carolina will change the national polls. His campaign had always planned to use South Carolina as a springboard into the run of Super Tuesday states and beyond to make the case that he does better than any other Democrat with voters of color. But Sanders’s win in Nevada, where he racked up big margins with Latinos, challenged that narrative.

Biden’s campaign had always planned to use South Carolina as a springboard into the run of Super Tuesday states and beyond to make the case that he does better than any other Democrat with voters of color. But Sanders’s win in Nevada, where he racked up big margins with Latinos, challenged that narrative.

One of the architects of Sanders’ Nevada victory, senior adviser Chuck Rocha, said the Biden campaign’s focus on black voters came almost to the exclusion of Latinos. That gave Sanders an opening with Hispanics, who wield major influence in the two biggest states that vote in March, Texas and California. Rocha also said Colorado, with its mix of white progressives and Latinos, is favorable territory for the campaign on Super Tuesday.

“Bernie Sanders’ multi-racial coalition is very real and equips him the best to win the nomination and beat Trump,” Rocha said. “We listened to diverse communities, hired them and invested in them and they delivered.”

One of the biggest threats to Biden could be the existence of the two billionaires in the race, Tom Steyer and Bloomberg.

Steyer has spent huge sums in South Carolina and, though he’s polling a distant third to Biden, may sap away some of the former vice president’s support and thereby help Sanders, media reports and polling indicate. Polling also shows that Bloomberg in Texas has made the race a tie between Sanders and Biden, but without Steyer in the race, Biden would marginally lead in Texas.

“It’s quite an irony: Bernie’s two biggest benefactors are billionaires,” said Biden campaign pollster John Anzalone, pointing out that Sanders has built a campaign around demonizing billionaires.

A new memo from Unite the Country obtained by POLITICO made the pitch that Bloomberg was standing in Biden’s way.

Steve Schale, an adviser to Unite the Country, said the super PAC is focusing heavily on African-American turnout and persuasion in five Super Tuesday states: North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee.

More than 75 percent of the delegates in all of the states that vote in March hail from communities where at least 30 percent of the voters are from communities of color, Schale said.

“The biggest challenge facing Joe Biden and our goal of helping him to a big night on March 3rd isn’t Bernie Sanders, or any of the other candidates who have been on the debate stage” the memo reads. “Rather, his biggest challenge is the work Michael Bloomberg is doing to divide the moderate vote to the benefit of Bernie Sanders. In fact, today, it is fair to argue that the single best thing Bernie Sanders has going into Super Tuesday is Mayor Bloomberg.”

In an interview, Loveday underscored that point.

“A vote for anyone else is a vote for Bernie,” she said. “No one else has the trajectory to be the nominee. It will be Joe Biden or it will be Bernie Sanders.”