By Marie Horrigan, CQ Staff

CQ Politics Presidential Race Rating: Safe Republican

Electoral Votes: 8

South Carolina’s strong tilt toward the Republican Party and away from its traditional conservative Democratic roots — developed over more than four decades since Strom Thurmond’s historic switch to the GOP in 1964 — make John McCain a nearly prohibitive favorite to secure the state’s eight electoral votes.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter of neighboring Georgia became the only Democrat to carry South Carolina in the past 10 presidential races. George W. Bush took 57 percent of the state’s vote in 2000 and 58 percent in his re-election bid. Both senators are Republicans — Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham , one of McCain’s closest friends in public life and a sure bet for a second term this fall — as are second-term Gov. Mark Sanford , four of the state’s six House members and solid majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly.

And McCain won the state’s early primary on Jan. 19, a victory that was important for several reasons. In edging Mike Huckabee by 3 percentage points, McCain blunted the former Arkansas governor’s effort to establish himself as the candidate of the South and a more ideologically conservative alternative to McCain. That victory also avenged McCain’s loss of the same primary eight years ago to George W. Bush , which effectively ended his first bid for the White House. The win also secured for McCain a coveted symbolic prize, because no one has won the GOP nomination without first winning South Carolina since it started holding Republican primaries in 1980.

But if any Democrat is going to even gesture toward bidding for the state, it’s Barack Obama in his campaign to become the nation’s first African-American president. Three in 10 South Carolinians are black; of places with electoral votes, only three (the District of Columbia, Mississippi and Louisiana) have higher black population percentages. Obama overwhelmingly dominated the black vote throughout the nominating contest — including in South Carolina, where exit polls showed he carried eight out of 10 black voters on his way to winning the state’s relatively pivotal January primary with a decisive 55 percent of the vote. He carried all six congressional districts and all but two of the 46 counties.

There is no question Obama has energized supportive voters in South Carolina, said David Woodard, a professor of political science at Clemson University. “But whether or not there’s a carry-over effect in a general election, that’s another thing entirely,” he added. Obama would have to win a significant proportion of independents in addition to generating a much-elevated turnout of black voters to pull off a huge upset.

There are no competitive congressional races in South Carolina this year.