ORANGEBURG, S.C. >> When Helen Duley was asked whom she would be voting for in the South Carolina primary, she answered as if the very question were absurd.

“What I’m seeing is a bunch of confusion, hearsay and foolishness,” said Duley, 60, a retired nursing assistant who is African-American, shortly after finishing breakfast here at the downtown McDonald’s. “What I also see is a veteran who’s already been in the White House eight years. A veteran: Hillary Clinton.”

But that was late January. Interviewed again Tuesday as Clinton’s rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, was surging toward an overwhelming victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Duley found herself suddenly intrigued by a candidate she barely knew. “It makes me feel good,” she said, chuckling, “that young people are listening to the elderly people.” Duley now said she was an undecided voter and planned to do some homework on Sanders, despite respect for Clinton that spans nearly a quarter-century.

Clinton has long looked forward to the Feb. 27 Democratic contest in South Carolina, the first state where blacks will make up a dominant part of the primary vote. African-Americans accounted for more than half the voters in the 2008 Democratic primary, and she has been counting on them as a bulwark, not just in South Carolina but also in the so-called SEC primary in six Southern states on March 1.

In recent days, the courting of black voters and their prominence in the Democratic race has increased dramatically. On Wednesday, Sanders visited Harlem, where he dined with the Rev. Al Sharpton. That same day the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent voice on race, said that he would vote for Sanders, even though Coates had criticized Sanders previously. On Thursday, The Nation, the left-wing opinion journal, published a piece by Michelle Alexander, a law professor and civil rights advocate, in which she argued that black “devotion” to the Clintons was misguided.

On Thursday, the political arm of the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed Clinton, and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a hero of the civil rights moment, cast doubts on Sanders’ civil rights credentials.

“You judge a person by their results, and there is no question that the person that has obtained the most results and benefits for communities of color and everyone in America, in my opinion — especially getting Democrats elected — it’s not even close. It’s not even close,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., the PAC’s chairman. “It’s Hillary Clinton.”

In Orangeburg, interviews with black voters like Duley reflect both enormous stores of good will and name recognition that have given Clinton an early advantage in this state and a growing awareness that there is an alternative, one that could prove particularly intriguing for young voters.

Duley enthusiastically supported the presidency of Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, only to abandon Hillary Clinton in 2008 in her Democratic primary bid against Barack Obama. It was a chance, Duley said, to make history and elect the nation’s first black president. But Duley said she had never lost her fondness for Hillary Clinton.

“I thought she would have made a good president back then, had he not come along,” she said.

It is a common theme.

“In ‘08, we wanted the barrier broken, but it wasn’t a vote against Hillary,” said Michael Butler, a pastor of a Pentecostal church who became the first black mayor of this small city in 2013, five years after Obama became the first African-American to win the presidency. “We liked her. We loved her.”

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll released late last month showed Clinton with a 64 percent to 27 percent lead over Sanders among likely voters in the South Carolina primary. Among likely black voters, her lead was 74 percent to 17 percent.

Respect for the Clinton brand is easy to find in Orangeburg County, a majority-black swath of former plantation land notable for a pair of historically black colleges, a towering monument to the Confederate dead, stultifying poverty and a rich trove of Democratic votes.

Still, the fact that black voters strayed from Clinton in 2008 is fueling the hopes of Sanders’ loyalists. They believe that many African-Americans will defect to him once they are familiar with his left-of-center policies. State Rep. Justin T. Bamberg, from neighboring Bamberg County, recently abandoned Clinton and endorsed Sanders. As of Wednesday, he was one of five black state legislators who had endorsed Sanders, compared with 22 who had endorsed Clinton.

Bamberg, 28, said he had made the switch after learning more about Sanders’ history, which Bamberg summed up as a long fight for “racial, social and economic justice.” He predicted that the primary vote would be closer than polls suggest.

“Bernie Sanders is killing the game when it comes to young voters,” he said. “They’re not just saying, ‘I’m going to vote for him.’ They’re working and using social media. You’d think they’re on his campaign team, and they’re not.”

One challenge, supporters say, is helping black voters get to know Sanders, whose home state, Vermont, can sometimes seem so exotic as to be almost foreign.

“His name never comes up,” Clyde Wilson, a black forklift driver, said in late January, as he polished off a plate of chicken at a local diner called the Biddie Banquet. “He might as well be Bernie Madoff.”

Two weeks later, however, Wilson, 38, said that Sanders had at least become part of the conversation among his friends and relatives.

“Oh yeah, people are starting to hear his name a little bit,” Wilson said in a phone interview Tuesday. “They still don’t know what he’s about, though.”

The Sanders campaign is working to rectify that with fliers like the one its canvassers were handing out last month, which featured a full-color photo of Sanders posing with three smiling African-American girls. He “marched with Dr. King,” the flier said. He would bring criminal justice reform. A $15 minimum wage. Tuition-free public colleges and universities.

Sanders’ impassioned jeremiads about the political system’s favoring the rich over the poor have the potential to resonate in a place like Orangeburg County, perhaps best known as the site of a 1968 massacre in which state troopers opened fire on a civil rights demonstration, killing three and injuring 28. Today, nearly one in four people lives in poverty. Duley’s daughter, Shaquan Duley, made national news in 2010 when she suffocated her two toddlers. She was unemployed and despaired that she could not adequately care for her children.

On a recent afternoon, a Sanders campaign canvasser, Fredericka Scott, won over Mary Smalls, 65, after telling Smalls about Sanders’ universal health care proposal. Smalls, a hospital worker earning $14 per hour, said she wanted an ironclad guarantee that she would have access to affordable health insurance after retirement. “That means a whole lot, you know,” she said.

But loyalty and historical memory are also potent forces here. Many black voters recalled Clinton’s two terms as a time of relative prosperity and said they admired his message of racial unity, delivered with a nuanced grasp of African-American cultural sensitivities. Archie Fair, 55, a barber, gave Clinton credit for leading, as first lady, the 1993 task force that explored the idea of universal health care.

“That’s something Hillary Clinton was trying to do a long time ago,” Fair said. “Now we have these people who have health care who never had it before.”

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