Interviews with two dozen South Carolina lawmakers, consultants and voters here suggests there are deep cracks in Joe Biden’s firewall state, where his campaign expects to turn his misfortunes around with a robust victory that highlights his broad-based support — particularly among African Americans…

“Before any of these elections took place — the Iowa caucus, or [the] New Hampshire primary, my sense was, there was a structural impediment to people going out and being ‘rah rah’ and voting for Joe Biden,” Myers said. “If the whole of your argument for my vote is, ‘I’m electable’, and there is nothing that you presented as, you know, the case study for why we should elect you, though you are electable, what is the point? Give me a reason to elect you. And I don’t think that that campaign’s doing a good job of that.”

Some point to Biden’s message as the problem. His “soul of the nation” rhetoric and electability argument, which are rooted in the idea of returning America back to its pre-Trump state, don’t motivate voters, they say. And boasting support from the state’s older, prominent black lawmakers, they argue, does not excite the young or infrequent voters needed to build a winning coalition in November.