COLUMBIA — Congressman Jim Clyburn’s annual fish fry, now in its 34th year, is considered one of those can’t-miss dates on South Carolina’s political calendar.

Beyond its role as prelude to the following day’s Democratic convention, it’s an opportunity for the common folk — unable to afford the fee for the party’s annual fundraising dinner — to rub shoulders with both the powerful and wannabe powerful: city council candidates, state representatives, even future candidates for president.

It also serves as a barometer of the party’s energy for the upcoming election cycle to assess the party’s chances up and down the ballot in a state Republicans have dominated for the better part of the past quarter-century.

This year’s felt different.

The convention, an occasionally dry affair, was raucous, with brass bands and deafening crowds that simply weren’t present in recent years. The fish fry, always crowded, was packed wall-to-wall, while the convention was so well-attended that there weren’t enough chairs for all the attendees — the $2 per chair rental cost threatening the party’s already stressed convention budget.

The difference wasn’t a matter of star power, even with potential 2028 hopefuls in Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and California Congressman Ro Khanna in attendance.

Recent speakers like vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who spoke in 2025, earned enthusiasm but not as much. Even renowned orators like New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker, one of two presidential hopefuls to make the trip to Columbia for the event in 2024 alongside Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, didn’t see as much enthusiasm ahead of a presidential election where Democrats lost the popular vote for the first time since 2004.

It was about belief in the message, a belief Clyburn said was lacking two years ago. The night of that year’s election, Clyburn said, he received a phone call asking him when he planned to arrive back in Washington for then-candidate Kamala Harris’ victory party.

Clyburn, in response, was blunt: “I’m not coming to Washington,” he said at the time, “because I don’t think there’s going to be a victory party.”

“It was simply because I do not believe that people have emotionally bought into our campaign,” he added. “That’s what I think it’s going to take for us, to run a campaign that people will buy into emotionally. People can hear the words, but they’ve gotta feel it.”

A vibe shift

Democrats say they’ve got something to believe in this year.

A recent Republican-led effort to redraw the state’s congressional maps to eliminate Clyburn’s seat earlier in the week had failed, driven largely by massive Democratic turnout at the start of early voting credited with giving statehouse Republicans cold feet to continue. State legislative seats around the country had begun to flip, while South Carolina Democrats in recent special elections in areas like Dorchester and Sumter Counties have outperformed expected margins.

And as the Democratic National Committee meets in the coming months to reconsider South Carolina’s place in the presidential nominating calendar for 2028, a state party that recently reached superminority status in the statehouse now seems like a place worth watching again.

Beshear, a Democratic governor in a state that voted for Trump by a two-to-one margin in 2024, told reporters he believed South Carolina should be “the first of what I think should be two southern states” in the opening group of four early primary states. Khanna, a potential presidential candidate who has maintained a frequent presence in South Carolina, upped the ante, saying recent on-the-ground events should “settle the question” of South Carolina’s role in the calendar.

“South Carolina should be the first state in the South with the DNC,” Khanna told reporters. “I don’t even see how, after what they have done, that this can be an open question.”

But the South Carolina Democratic Party still has to demonstrate they deserve it.

Throughout the weekend, the party enlisted the help of a small army of social media influencers to help sell the message, recording the weekend festivities and interviewing candidates to share with their followings.

It’s a new program, started in December 2025 as part of the party’s outreach efforts, and is currently unpaid, meant primarily as an effort to glean neutral commentary from creators with pre-existing audiences who simply want to help Democrats win. It’s also a means of humanizing party messaging many may perceive as overly polished, or inauthentic, allowing non-political consumers to better understand or buy into the messages candidates are selling them.

“As influencers we build relationships with the people that follow us,” said Tabatha Andonian, a Fort Mill activist who built an audience in part by her work tracking ICE agents in Charlotte last year. “They trust us.”

Selling the party

The project also has a purpose, part of a growing trend among party leaders in response to the massive leveraging of social media personalities by Republicans in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Donald Trump’s White House, for example, has begun incorporating sympathetic content creators into its rotating press pool in part of an effort to reach new audiences, while national Democrats for several years have begun paid influencer programs to get their messages out.

South Carolina is looking to follow suit. While redistricting helped inspire voters, the message was spread to voters directly by social media personalities across the state, helping get the message to vote early out to thousands of people who might not otherwise have tracked the redistricting debate through traditional media.

“The way politics has been done forever has been ‘let’s spend millions of dollars to pay a corporation owned by billionaires to air a commercial to one specific demographic 35 times a day,’ instead of, ‘Hey, let’s invest in people who are actually part of the community and can reach people,’” comedian Steve Hofstetter, a participant in the program who counts millions of followers across his social media platforms, told The Post and Courier at the convention. “I think that makes a lot more sense.”

It also serves a practical purpose for the party itself. The content generated over the weekend, the party’s creator director and Barack Obama campaign alum Michael Ceraso told The Post and Courier, would likely become part of the party’s pitch to the DNC in the coming weeks, while also serving as a means of communicating the upsides of South Carolina’s nuanced Democratic electorate to party leaders and the public.

Zackory Kirk, an Atlanta-based content creator with a sizeable Instagram following, told The Post and Courier he believed the electorate of places like South Carolina, rather than his home state of Georgia, could help nominate the type of candidate who could survive in a general election environment, able to appeal to rural and urban voters in ways more cosmopolitan candidates could not.

Georgia, a battleground state, has often been raised as a national focus for the party’s efforts to win in the South. But it’s hard for people to learn what South Carolina is capable of, he said, if they aren’t able to see for themselves.

“As much as I love Georgia — it’s home, right? — I don’t want Atlanta to pick the Democratic nominee,” he said. “Atlanta is a microcosm; it’s a small place, it’s unique, but it’s not representative of America in the way that South Carolina is representative now.”