As part of that argument, the campaign’s South Carolina surrogates are spreading the word that New Hampshire voters shouldn’t vote for Pete Buttigieg because of his anemic black support.

“Whatever happens on Tuesday, Vice President Biden will still be in this race,” Symone Sanders, the Biden adviser he dispatched to Columbia, South Carolina, said repeatedly Tuesday on national and local television. “This race very much runs through Nevada, South Carolina and Super Tuesday.”

Privately, Biden’s campaign advisers sound gloomier notes.

“We have to do one thing: survive until South Carolina. We’re going to win South Carolina. If we don’t, we’re done,” said one.

The campaign once thought the candidate would win at least two of the first four early states: South Carolina and one other. But that talk is gone after the Iowa loss, the looming one in New Hampshire and the worry that on Feb. 22 he won’t carry Nevada, which Biden’s team mentions far less often than South Carolina and where operatives say Bernie Sanders is favored to win, despite polls showing Biden with a marginal lead.

Adding to the Biden campaign’s woes, a Quinnipiac University poll Monday showed him trailing Sanders nationally and hemorrhaging black voter support. In just two weeks, Biden’s African American backing dropped 22 percentage points down to 27 percent, while Michael Bloomberg’s black support more than tripled to 22 percent on the strength of the billionaire’s quarter-billion dollar ad campaign nationwide.

Meanwhile, a state senator in Florida — a state with an influential black Democratic primary electorate that Biden was once confident of winning — switched his endorsement to Bloomberg as others who support Biden began expressing doubts about his viability.

“The Biden campaign’s ‘Magic South Carolina‘ theory is weak,” Florida Democratic consultant and pollster Steve Vancore said, adding that Biden’s strategy is “reminiscent of what happened to Rudy Giuliani in 2008 when he made Florida his firewall and lost badly in every state. By the time he got to Florida, he was an afterthought.”

Vancore said it’s too early to completely count Biden out, but the campaign is reeling.

“Biden’s not yet Dead Man Walking. He’s Wounded Man Hobbling,” Vancore said.

Underpinning the Biden campaign’s strategy involving South Carolina — and the springboard it was supposed to be into the March 3 Super Tuesday run of states — was the assumption that he would perform better than he did in Iowa and that he wouldn’t try to win New Hampshire. Biden was also slow to ramp up in Nevada, state operatives say.

When Bloomberg made his late decision to run for president and contest the race starting on Super Tuesday, it threatened to eat into the margins in the very states where Biden hoped to win big.

At the same time, another billionaire, Tom Steyer, has spent big in South Carolina, where polls show he’s climbing into second place behind Biden and threatens to eat into the big margins that the former vice president once hoped to enjoy there.

“There is no Joe Biden firewall,” said Steyer adviser Kevin Cate. “There is no springboard.”

But Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, told reporters at a roundtable Monday that South Carolina will deliver.

“I don’t think people in South Carolina are going to change their allegiance or their vote based on what’s happening in [New Hampshire],” she said. “There’s a real sense that the first four states are part of a process, part of a package. That they are intentionally the first four because they give an opportunity from different parts of the country and for diverse voices to be part of the process.”

The Biden campaign’s top African American surrogates in the state are amplifying the message that South Carolina is being overlooked and that black voters are therefore being short-shrifted.

“We’ve been done so wrong for so long,” said Bernice G. Scott, a top Biden surrogate in South Carolina and former Richland County Council chair. “It’s a sad situation that the voices of black voters haven’t been heard yet.”

If Biden does win as currently expected in South Carolina, margins will matter for him going forward.

“It’s of the utmost importance for him to run up the score in South Carolina in order to tell the story that he can build the coalition needed to win the nomination,” said Laphonza Butler, who was a consultant for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and advised her on the state.

“The probability of Biden doing real well on Super Tuesday will get less and less if he loses more and more,” Butler said. “Super Tuesday won’t be a horrible showing for the former vice president. But those states are the most up in the air, with the constant barrage of ads from Bloomberg and the investments of other candidates like Mr. Steyer. And I don’t think Biden and the super PAC supporting him has had the resources he needs to compete the way he would want.”

Chris Lippincott, a Democratic strategist from the Super Tuesday state of Texas, said Biden is still favored in his mammoth state and can still be the nominee, according to recent polls. Echoing Butler, he said the dynamics of the race surrounding Bloomberg and Steyer could have changed the stakes for Biden in South Carolina and beyond.

“Narrative gives way to math on Super Tuesday,” Lippincott said. “And until South Carolina, Biden’s just got to survive.”