COLUMBIA, S.C. — Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland played up his family ties to South Carolina and issued a spirited call to action as he addressed a room of Democrats hundreds of miles from home.

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota told The New York Times that he liked the idea of holding the first-in-the-nation presidential primary election in South Carolina, and stressed that Democrats should show up in red states like this one.

The 2028 presidential campaign is years away, and virtually everything about it is uncertain. But in the eyes of some South Carolina Democrats who filed into the state party’s dinner Friday night or headed to Rep. James Clyburn’s annual fish fry nearby or showed up at Saturday’s party convention, the earliest stages of the primary race are plainly underway.

And to them, just one question really matters: Who can win a general election?

“South Carolina Democrats don’t want to waste their vote,” said former Gov. Jim Hodges, the last Democrat to lead the state. “It’s very important that the candidates have a little swagger and confidence and that they lay out a persuasive case for how they can win.”

Indeed, interviews with roughly a dozen elected officials and party activists who were in Columbia this past week show that at this early stage, some are already inclined toward the kind of punditry that dominated the 2020 primary campaign, viewing potential candidates through the prism of their general election appeal.

Walz and Moore, of course, are not currently presidential candidates — not that anyone was buying their 2028 brush-offs. (“They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t interested,” Hodges said.)

The order of the next presidential primary calendar is also unknown, though some in South Carolina are strategizing about how to lock in President Joe Biden’s move to put their state first.

Yet Moore — who is up for reelection next year in Maryland and keeps insisting to reporters, in the present tense, that he is “not running” for president — sounded more like a national candidate during his 30-minute address Friday night at the annual Blue Palmetto dinner.

He walked the audience through his record in Maryland and introduced himself as the grandson of a Charleston native who had “South Carolina grit all through his bones” and the great-grandson of a minister who had been threatened by the Ku Klux Klan in the state.

Public records, however, indicate that the grandfather in question was born in Greenville County, South Carolina, which is across the state from Charleston. Asked on Saturday about that discrepancy, Moore expressed surprise before adding: “Then maybe it is Greenville. My mother told me Charleston.”

At the dinner Friday, Moore cast himself as an action-oriented pragmatist, suggesting that his party should respond with urgency to President Donald Trump and offer its own affirmative vision.

“Gone are the days when the Democrats are the party of ‘no’ and ‘slow,’” he said. “We must be the party of ‘yes’ and ‘now.’”

He received a warm and attentive, if not raucous, reception. One of his best-received lines, in an audience with many Black attendees, was among the most personal.