The Democratic presidential nomination race shifts tomorrow to South Carolina, with Hillary Clinton banking on the black vote to beat Bernie Sanders and gain momentum ahead of the multi-state "Super Tuesday" contests next week.
In this early stage of the race, Clinton leads in the delegate count for the nominating convention this summer, after winning in two of the first three states to vote -- in Iowa, narrowly, and then in Nevada.
In South Carolina, where 55 per cent of voters in the Democratic primary in 2008 were African-American, polls show Clinton is favoured to win.
Some Clinton supporters say Senator Sanders, a transplanted New Yorker and self declared democratic socialist who now represents Vermont, is a little known commodity down here in the south.
"No one knows about him. He hasn't been in the eye of the public as long as Hillary has," Olivia Brown, 26, who works in a local health insurance company, said at a Clinton campaign appearance yesterday.
"Hillary looks presidential," Brown added.
"Hillary is a household name," added her mother, Sharon Williams, a 57-year-old science teacher.
"She doesn't give up. She has a very strong fighting spirit. She's able to always pull along, to find another way to come back and restart her goals," Williams said.
Leaving nothing to chance, the entire Clinton family has deployed to South Carolina to plug away for Hillary.
The hope is that a win here will give fresh drive to the once clear cut favourite whose campaign now seems at times to be sputtering against the upstart Sanders.
Team Clinton - former president Bill, daughter Chelsea and Hillary herself - are hitting black churches and college campuses to hammer away at the same message.
It goes like this: Hillary Clinton is the only candidate with a solid program to break down barriers that still prevent minorities in the US from getting ahead.
She notes specifically the cost of going to college and the need to reduce the disparity between prison sentences meted out to young blacks, compared to young white offenders.
"Right now there are barriers, economic barriers, health barriers, education barriers. We also have to be honest about systemic racism which is still a problem in America," Clinton said last night at the recreation centre of Royal Baptist Church in the city of North Charleston.
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"Really? He's declaring defeat before the battle has even started. He's proving once again he is unqualified to be commander in chief of our military," Clinton said amidst applause from the audience.
"Here's another example. He was asked if he would defend our allies. He said well, first he'd want to know if they made any payments to us to defend them. And when asked specifically about Israel, he said, and I quote again, he would love to be neutral," she said.
Clinton asserted that the US cannot have a president who says he is neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who knows what on Wednesday, because in his mind, everything is negotiable.
"We stand with our allies. We stand with those who will help us defeat terrorism," Clinton said.
