
South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Keith Ingram said Friday that the party has canceled its campaign events in the state to avoid appearing to collude with the RNC, which has declared the race for the party’s nomination for president.
Ingram said he will continue to do business with the state party as he has throughout his career, but he said the party was “sending a strong message to the RNC.”
In an interview with ABC News, Ingram said his decision was not about a possible conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the South Carolinian party, but instead because he felt the state’s nomination was more important to him than the nomination of any candidate in the GOP primary.
“I think that the South has a lot of things that we would like to be able to bring to the table,” he said.
“We’re a party of inclusion, and if we can help facilitate the kind of inclusive platform that Hillary Clinton and other candidates want to have, that’s the way to go.”
The South Carolina race has been tight and a close race for months.
Trump leads the GOP field by about 8 percentage points, but Hillary Clinton is leading in the race among likely voters.
South Carolina has a population of just under 1.3 million people, according to the latest U.S. Census data.
Trump has held the state for more than three decades, while Clinton has been in the House of Representatives since 2008.