While Emanuel has never lost a race, he declined to run for a third term as mayor of Chicago, following clashes with the teacher's union and his handling of the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer.
If he ran, he'd face fierce opposition from the party's left flank and the McDonald shooting could doom his support among Black voters.
"I'm not sure people in South Carolina know or care who Rahm Emanuel is," Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a longtime South Carolina Democrat lawmaker told Politico. "His connection to Barack Obama is decades old. We're in a different time."