Senator Barack Obama of Illinois won the primary's popular vote by a 28.9% margin.

South Carolina's 45 delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were awarded proportionally based on the results of the primary.

However, in the last three polls taken before the South Carolina Primary, Barack Obama took a commanding lead over both Edwards and Clinton.

Throughout the South Carolina campaign, most pundits had predicted Barack Obama the winner, primarily because of the state's large African-American population.

For this reason, Obama was shown to be significantly ahead of his two rivals, John Edwards, who carried the state in 2004, and Hillary Clinton, whose husband was popular in the African-American community.

Barack Obama began to attack former President Bill Clinton for his comments which were taken as racist.

These comments are considered by analyst and historians alike as the turning point of the South Carolina primary and ultimately the cause of Clinton's loss of support from the black community.

Into the final days of the campaign in South Carolina, it became apparent that Obama would win by a rather wide margin.

This was also combined with the fact of Edwards's constant barrage of attacks claiming Clinton (and Obama's) big city politics were "too good for the people of South Carolina".

However, despite the attacks from opponents that Bill Clinton's attacks largely alienated African-Americans, Clinton was able to keep a 35% support amongst that key constituency, while losing the white vote to Edwards, In the end, Clinton's African-American support was able to place her in a clear second-place finish, finishing 9 points ahead of John Edwards despite losing to Obama by 29 points.

In 2004, Edwards won the South Carolina Primary, with 45% of the vote to John Kerry's 30% and Al Sharpton's 10%.

During the South Carolina Democratic Debate in Myrtle Beach, Edwards sought to distinguish himself from Senators Obama and Clinton, and criticized them for their attacks and "big city" politics.

As soon as he began to question how the attacks helped, he was widely cheered by the audience for in what many people thought was what distinguished Edwards from negative campaigning.

[21] As of January 19, RealClearPolitics reported that the average support from polls placed McCain in the lead with 26.9%, followed by Huckabee with 25.9%, Romney with 14.7%, Thompson with 14.6%, Paul with 4.4%, and Giuliani with 3.4%.

He did manage to win Congressional districts 3, 4 and 5 in the North of the state earning him a total of 6 delegates.

Since Barry Goldwater carried the state in 1964, the only Democratic presidential nominee to win it was Jimmy Carter of neighboring Georgia in 1976.

McCain dominated the populous northwest, while Obama did best in the cities of Columbia and Charleston, as well as the rural, heavily African American areas.

[45] McCain's margin of victory in South Carolina was much less than that of George W. Bush who carried South Carolina in 2004 with 57.98% of the vote to John Kerry's 40.90%, a 17.08% margin of victory compared to McCain's 8.97% in 2008, resulting in an 8.11% swing to the Democrats in 2008.

At the state level, however, Democrats picked up two seats in the South Carolina House of Representatives.

John McCain carried 5 of the state's 6 congressional districts in South Carolina, including one held by a Democrat.