WASHINGTON -- South Carolina, where the third contest in the 2016 presidential primaries will take place next year, has become a key state for Vice President Joe Biden as supporters prepare to organize should he mount a late bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
The effort to get Biden to run has more than 200,000 addresses on its email distribution list, up from a few thousand names in March, Joshua Alcorn, senior adviser to "Draft Biden 2016," said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union broadcast.
"Joe Biden is the original authentic candidate," said Alcorn, a former aide to Joe Biden's son, Beau, who died in May of brain cancer. "It's our job at 'Draft Biden' to sort of remind people of who Joe Biden is."
The vice president is undertaking a "deliberative process" with his family and inner circle on what the best decision would be, Alcorn said.
On Saturday, the Post and Courier in Charleston ran an editorial encouraging Joe Biden to run.
It was just another sign of Joe Biden's ties to the state, where he and his wife, Jill, retreated to consider his path. Over the course of the couple's Kiawah Island vacation, many of the players in his South Carolina campaign-in-waiting reached out in person or through calls or messages to him through aides, pledging their support if he decides to run.
"We talked many times about him running in 2016, before Beau fell ill again, and during and after his passing," said state Rep. James Smith Jr., a Democrat who said he has been in contact with Joe Biden and aides. "This was a very important week for he and Jill as they're working through this personal decision."
"As soon as he announces, he'll immediately have the most formidable organization in the state," said Smith, predicting that the vice president will run but stressing that Biden has not told him anything definitive. "We will have a longstanding organization ready when he gives the go, when he and Jill say they're ready."
Dick Harpootlian, the former state Democratic Party chairman, is a supporter of Joe Biden's. But Smith symbolizes another of Joe Biden's ties to the state: The 47-year-old lawmaker met him in 2006 and, as a guardsman who was Beau's age, bonded with the vice president personally and politically.
South Carolina is a big military state with voters who also have family ties to the troops, like the vice president. Beau Biden was an Iraq veteran.
Joe Biden, who went in June with President Barack Obama to mourn the racially motivated killings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and stayed there to commune with parishioners on his own, also has amassed a list of state lawmakers and black pastors who've supported him before and are holding off on a commitment to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton until they know what he's going to do.
Some of them said there are enough black Democrats in the state who are still turned off by the Clintons' approach toward Obama in the 2008 primary to make a Biden candidacy welcome in South Carolina.
A Section on 08/17/2015