Hillary Clinton crushed Bernie Sanders in the South Carolina primary and immediately turned to potential battles ahead as she offered a vision for America based on “love and kindness” in stark contrast to the anger and division promoted by Donald Trump.
Polls closed at 7pm local time across South Carolina, and within seconds the Associated Press had called a victory for Clinton.
Final polls had suggested she was heading for a victory margin of more than 27 points, but the reality was much more overwhelming – with 100% of the votes counted, Clinton led 73.5% to 26% over Sanders.
The Vermont senator had in effect conceded defeat within two hours of polls opening on Saturday when he flew out of the state, heading for Texas and Minnesota, two of the Super Tuesday battlegrounds looming this week.
With the South Carolina stage to herself, Clinton promised: “Tomorrow we take this campaign national.”
And in a pointed message to Donald Trump, she said: “Despite what you hear, we don’t need to ‘make America great again’. America has never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again.
“Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers.
Relishing her victory, she set herself up first as a more rounded candidate than Sanders – “America isn’t a single issue country, my friends” – and then as an optimistic counterpoint to Trump.
“I know it sometimes seems a little odd for someone running for president these days, in this time, to say we need more love and kindness in America,” Clinton said. “But I’m telling you from the bottom of my heart, we do.”
Associated Press exit polls showed that about six in 10 South Carolina voters were black, a demographic in which Sanders appeared to have had little cut-through. The exit polls also suggested that Clinton won 84% to 16% with black voters.
She invoked civil rights heroes Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr and John Lewis as she said America must face the reality of systemic racism in its broken criminal justice and immigration systems.
The result in South Carolina means she heads into Tuesday’s contests across 12 states believing she can begin to pull away from her tenacious rival from Vermont.
Sanders took off from Dallas bound for Rochester, Minnesota, two minutes before polls closed and was in the air when the result was announced. His campaign team sat in silence at the front of the plans as members of the media in the seats behind sought a response to the result.
In a statement released by his campaign, Sanders said: “Let me be clear on one thing tonight. This campaign is just beginning. We won a decisive victory in New Hampshire. She won a decisive victory in South Carolina. Now it’s on to Super Tuesday … Our grassroots political revolution is growing state by state, and we won’t stop now.”
After extracting a win from a virtual tie in Iowa, losing overwhelmingly in New Hampshire, and rebounding in Nevada, South Carolina gave Clinton her first big win of the campaign with just three days to go before the Super Tuesday contests, where she is poised to win handily in states with similar electorates.
Clinton worked hard in the state, dedicating much of the past week to campaigning in churches, community halls and college campuses. She was joined by a major figure in the civil rights movement, congressman James Clyburn, who refused to endorse a candidate in 2008, and other local politicians.
The mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and other black men killed by police officers also campaigned for her in the state. At almost every event, she spoke forcefully about the women’s struggle.
Obama remains wildly popular among Democrats in South Carolina, and especially among black voters. Clinton sought to lay claim to the president’s mantle by embracing his signature policies and emphasizing their closeness.
“I’m really proud to stand with President Obama,” Clinton said at an event Kingstree on Thursday. “And I am really proud to stand on the progress he’s made, because I want to build on it and go further. I will not let the Republicans rip it away and set us backwards.”
But there were also signs that Clinton still has work to do. On Wednesday she was confronted at a fundraiser in Charleston by Black Lives Matter protesters, who demanded she apologize for the consequences of her husband’s 1994 crime bill and for having called young black males “super-predators” in a 1996 speech on crime.
In a statement to the Washington Post, Clinton said “shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today”. Asked about the crime bill during a town hall in Charleston, she said its consequences were “serious” and she had proposed an agenda for healing some of the damage done by the law, especially to communities of color.
Sanders spent time and money on the South Carolina primary, tweaking his stump speech to include an anecdote about marching with Martin Luther King Jr, appearing at campaign events with the rapper Killer Mike and airing a radio ad from film director Spike Lee.
But Sanders’ team always believed the south would be a uphill struggle compared with more progressive states in the north and west of the country. In South Carolina, Sanders duly struggled to introduce himself to voters who have long known the Clinton name.
“I don’t even know Bernie Sanders. Who is that?” said one voter, T Jackson, after leaving a polling station in Hopkins on Saturday. “Nothing against him. I’ve never even heard of him before now. But we [have] known Hillary forever.”
It was that feeling of familiarity and loyalty that drew Jackson to the polling booth on Saturday morning.
“In the last election, we were in line when they declared the winner and I hadn’t even voted yet. So evidently my vote didn’t count,” Jackson said. “It was very disappointing. My vote doesn’t matter. But I vote anyway, I voted today, hoping that it does matter.”
Pattie Murray, a preschool teacher from Hopkins, was among a minority of voters who had not yet forgiven Clinton for the heated campaign she and Bill Clinton ran against Obama in 2008. Obama won South Carolina by 28 points, a victory he owed in large part to the support of black voters.
“She says that she would keep Obama’s policies and everything,” Murray said, “but she really bashed him when they ran against each other. In the very beginning, she was really against [him] and basically said he wasn’t the person for our country. Now to get that vote, she’s saying she’ll continue his policy.”
On the Sanders plane, as South Carolina receded into the distance, Jane Sanders told reporters the campaign would regard it as a good night if he reached 40% of Democratic voters in the state. Some in the Sanders camp were privately braced for worse than a 20-point gulf – particularly among African American voters.
“I think we’re getting a lot better [at reaching African American voters] – it’s just that they didn’t know us,” said Jane Sanders when she was asked by the Guardian why efforts to reach this crucial Democratic constituency appeared to have been unsuccessful. “They didn’t know us in the south generally.”
She said: “Hillary Clinton has fought three elections through these states. This is our first. From May to December, the media didn’t take [Bernie] seriously. They didn’t have a chance to meet him. That’s not because we weren’t trying, but we couldn’t spend as much time in the south as we’d like.”
Sanders’ relatively lukewarm position on gun control also appears to have hurt the campaign in South Carolina, where memories of last summer’s shooting at a Charleston church are raw, but Jane Sanders was unrepentant about the more nuanced position.
“I find it interesting that there are some states where she’s hit us hard on guns and some states she’s not talking about it,” she said. “Bernie is saying the same thing in every state, so that everybody knows where he stands.”
The Sanders team hopes to put South Carolina behind it more quickly than its setback in Nevada, in part because expectations were low but also because it remains confident of picking up large numbers of delegates – if not outright wins – on Super Tuesday.
“The mood is good. It’s going as we thought,” said Jane Sanders. “It’s a 50-state election and the states that she is picking up are red states.”
She also defended the decision to leave South Carolina so quickly. “They’re just voting today. We want to get to Texas and Minnesota and it’s difficult to get it all in. Time is short.”
The reception in Austin, the first of two Texas rallies on Saturday, certainly appeared starkly different. Thousands flocked to a racetrack outside the liberal city to hear Sanders return to his more typical call for political revolution.
Privately, staff say the campaign hopes to pick up delegates rather than win outright in Texas, but the senator did not seem to have gotten the memo about expectations management.
“If all of you come out to vote and bring all your friends and family, we are going to win here in Texas,” Sanders said, to wild applause.
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