Over the weekend, three Democratic presidential hopefuls made pit stops in the Palmetto State to tout their plans for everything from the economy to health care to education.
Now that the Iowa State Fair has ended, South Carolina has become a prime target for 2020 candidates, given that the state will hold the first primary contest in the South.
Candidates aiming for early momentum will need to score big in South Carolina in order to advance to later states.
Here’s how their stops went:
Elizabeth Warren started off with a town hall event in Aiken, South Carolina on Saturday. There she laid out her healthcare plan, which received huge applause from the crowd gathered at the University of South Carolina Aiken campus.
“Healthcare is a basic human right,” Warren told the crowd. “It is time to fight for basic human rights. I support Medicare for all because that’s how we skip the state government and go straight to guaranteeing healthcare for every single American.”
Warren is among multiple candidates who have proposed Medicare for all, first proposed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
On Sunday, Warren stopped by a church service where she tried to appeal to Christian voters, discussing how faith has impacted her life.
“We owe each other that everybody gets a turn,” Warren said. “This is, for me, what the world is about and what the Lord teaches us.”
Warren has risen in the polls and is now second, behind only former Vice President Joe Biden.
Southbend Mayor Pete Buttigieg held a roundtable on Saturday in Hampton, South Carolina. There he met with mostly rural voters. Education was front and center during the discussion, and Buttigieg said he believes some subjects taught in school are often put on the backburner, despite their importance to society as a whole.
“Things like the humanities,” Buttigieg said, “things like civics. Anything that goes into one’s character. It’s not a luxury, because we’re not just educating workers; we’re educating citizens. And we need people who can grow up and become leaders in the community, and I think that gets shorted a lot.”
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders held a town hall event in Columbia on Sunday, where he called for criminal justice reform. Sanders claimed the US edges out China when it comes to incarceration.
“China is a country four times our size,” Sanders told the crowd. “It is a Communist, authoritarian country that does not tolerate dissent particularly well. Four times our size, and we have more people in jail than China does. And the folks that we have in jail are disproportionately poor, and disproportionately minority.”
According to Bureau of Justice statistics, nearly 2.2 million adults were incarcerated in 2016.
Expect more candidates to visit soon, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.