Here's how Trump won in South Carolina — and what it could mean for his chances in November
JOSH BOAK and LINLEY SANDERS
Updated Sat, February 24, 2024 at 10:34 PM CST·5 min read
Link:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/majority-south-carolina-republicans-oppose-220610110.html
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Donald Trump won over South Carolina Republicans as the candidate who voters believe can win in November, keep the country safe and will stand up and fight for them as president.
Trump
cruised to victory in the South Carolina primary with the support of an almost unwavering base of loyal voters. AP VoteCast found that Republicans in the state are broadly aligned with Trumps’s goals: Many question the value of supporting
Ukraine’s fight against Russia; and overwhelming majorities see immigrants as hurting the U.S. and suspect that there are nefarious political motives behind Trump’s multiple criminal indictments.
Even in her home state of South Carolina, where she was once governor,
Nikki Haley appeared to have little chance against Trump. Just over half of GOP voters had a favorable view of her, whereas about two-thirds had a positive view of Trump.
About 6 in 10 South Carolina voters consider themselves supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement, a Trump slogan that helped catapult him to the White House in 2016. About 9 in 10 Trump voters said they were driven by their support for him, not by objections to his opponent. Haley’s voters were much more divided: About half were motivated by supporting her, but nearly as many turned out to oppose Trump.
AP VoteCast is a survey of more than 2,400 voters taking part in Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.
HOW TRUMP WON IN SOUTH CAROLINA
Trump’s victory in South Carolina looked remarkably similar to his
wins in the Iowa caucuses and
the New Hampshire primary. It’s a sign that regional differences that once existed within the GOP have been supplanted by a national movement that largely revolves around the former president.
Trump, 77, won in South Carolina with voters who are white and do not have a college degree, one of his core constituencies. About two-thirds of Trump’s backers in this election fell into that group.
A majority believe Trump is a candidate who can emerge victorious in November’s general election, while only about half say the same of Haley. Voters were also far more likely to view Trump than Haley as someone who would “stand up and fight for people like you” and to say he would keep the country safe. And about 7 in 10 say he has the mental capability to serve effectively as president.
Trump’s voters also backed his more nationalist views — they are more likely than Haley’s supporters to have lukewarm views of the NATO alliance or even consider it bad for the U.S., to say immigrants are hurting the country and to say immigration is the top issue facing the country.
NIKKI HALEY’S POLITICAL FUTURE
At the age of 52, Haley has bet that she can offer a generational change for the GOP. But the future she articulated has little basis in the present-day GOP, even in South Carolina, where she previously won two terms as governor. About 4 in 10 of South Carolina Republicans — including about 6 in 10 of those supporting Trump — say they have an unfavorable opinion of her.
Haley has said she
will stay in the race until at least the Super Tuesday primaries, though so far there are no signs that she has disrupted Trump’s momentum. She’s struggled to convince the core of the Republican Party that she’s a better choice than the former president — losing most conservatives and those without a college degree to Trump.
Who is her coalition? Haley dominated among South Carolina voters
who correctly said that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Roughly three-quarters of her supporters say Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020, and about 4 in 10 voted for Biden in that election. Her problem is that about 6 in 10 Republican primary voters say they believed Biden was not legitimately elected.
TRUMP’S POTENTIAL WEAKNESSES IN A GENERAL ELECTION
Trump has an iron grip on the Republican base, but that might not be enough of a coalition to guarantee a win in November’s general election.
South Carolina was a chance to show that he can expand his coalition beyond voters who are white, older and without a college degree. But about 9 in 10 of South Carolina's primary voters were white, making it hard to see if Trump has made inroads with Black voters whom he
has attempted to win over.
Haley outpaced Trump among college-educated voters, a relative weakness for him that could matter in November as people with college degrees are a growing share of the overall electorate. Even though South Carolina Republican voters believe that Trump can win in November, some had worries about his viability.
About half of Republican voters in South Carolina — including about a quarter of his supporters — are concerned that Trump is too extreme to win the general election. About 3 in 10 voters believe he acted illegally in at least one of the criminal cases against him, even though about 7 in 10 believe the investigations are political attempts to undermine him.
Trump dominates among conservative voters. But his challenge is that those voters were just 37% of the electorate in the November 2020 presidential election. The other 63% identified as moderate or liberal, the two categories that Trump lost to Haley in South Carolina.
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AP VoteCast is a survey of the American electorate conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research for AP and Fox News. The survey of 2,466 Republican primary voters was conducted for five days, concluding as polls close. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters drawn from state voter files and self-identified registered voters selected from nonprobability online panels. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated to be plus or minus 3.4 percentage points for Republican primary voters.
Trump wins South Carolina Republican primary, Haley vows to fight on after losing home state
Haley said she will continue her campaign despite a string of losses to the former president.
Andrew Romano
·West Coast Correspondent
Updated Sat, February 24, 2024 at 8:34 PM CST·6 min read
Former President Donald Trump defeated former South Carolina Gov.
Nikki Haley in her home-state primary Saturday, keeping him on track for his third straight GOP presidential nomination — and a November rematch with President Biden, the Democrat who beat him in 2020.
The Associated Press
called South Carolina for Trump at 7 p.m. ET, just as the last polls closed there.
Trump wasted no time Saturday in declaring victory, quickly taking the stage at the State Fairgrounds in Columbia, the state's capital. "This was a little sooner than we anticipated — an even bigger win that we anticipated," Trump said.
Haley says she’ll keep campaigning despite loss
Past candidates have tended to exit the race after losing their home state. In 2016, for example,
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio ended his bid the night Trump bested him there.
But Haley was clear, both before and after Saturday’s primary: “I’m not going anywhere,” she vowed —
at least not yet.
"I said earlier this week that no matter what happens in South Carolina I would continue to run for president," Haley said in a speech Saturday night. "I'm a woman of my word."
Earlier in the week, Haley had explained her decision to remain in the race.
“In the 10 days after South Carolina, another 21 states and territories will vote,” she said. “People have a right to have their voices heard. And they deserve a real choice, not a Soviet-style election where there's only one candidate, and he gets 99% of the vote.”
Understanding Haley’s argument
Haley has a point. In a presidential primary election, candidates compete in a months-long, state-by-state calendar of primaries and caucuses. Whoever gets the most votes in a specific state is typically awarded the most delegates, and whoever is first to collect a majority of the total available delegates — or whoever remains after everyone else has dropped out — becomes the party’s “presumptive” nominee.
But runner-up candidates can win delegates, too. Despite Trump’s
substantial lead in the delegate count, neither has anywhere near the 1,215 they need to clinch the GOP nomination. And even then, the race won’t technically end until the last states vote and the delegates formalize the nomination at their party’s summer convention — which, for the GOP, starts July 15 in Milwaukee.
Nikki Haley looks on after casting her vote in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary election on Kiawah Island, South Carolina. February 24, 2024. Reuters/Brian Snyder (REUTERS / Reuters)
Yet Haley’s loss in South Carolina — more so than her previous defeats in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada — makes it plain that her path to the nomination will only get narrower from here on out.
Haley had every advantage in the Palmetto State. She was born in Bamberg, a small town 55 miles south of Columbia. She graduated from Clemson. She served three terms in the state legislature and two terms in the governor’s mansion, where her approval rating hit 80%.
Stumping in Iowa and New Hampshire last winter, Haley often spoke of her “sweet state of South Carolina” as a kind of firewall — a place that could propel its native daughter into future primaries with renewed momentum.
And true to that vision, Haley campaigned hard there in recent weeks, blasting Van Halen’s “Right Now” as her “Beast of the Southeast” bus tour rolled up to stops throughout the state — where she would disembark and criticize Trump (on his attitude toward Russia, on his chaotic temperament, on his expensive legal woes) more aggressively than ever.
Overall, Haley’s campaign and her two allied super political action committees dropped $8.4 million on advertising in South Carolina,
according to Bloomberg. Trump’s team spent next to nothing.
What comes next in the GOP primary battle
This same pattern is set to play out with increasing frequency in the next phase of the GOP nominating contest. After South Carolina comes Super Tuesday on March 5, when 15 states and 1 territory — including the big delegate prizes of California and Texas — will weigh in.
Haley’s team has argued that some of these states hold open primaries, like South Carolina. But as the Palmetto State showed, registered Republicans still dominate the party’s primary electorate — and in most places, Haley will have an even harder time swaying them than she did in her home state.
A woman with a dog stands in line to cast her vote in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary election. February 24, 2024. Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein (REUTERS / Reuters)
In Michigan, the next state on the calendar, Trump led by
60 points in the only public poll released this year. In California — the largest state to vote on Super Tuesday — Trump is ahead by
52 points. And nationally, the former president is lapping his former UN ambassador 79% to 14% among potential Republican primary voters,
according to the most recent Yahoo News/YouGov sounding.
Winner-take-all contests, in which the candidate who wins the most votes gets all the delegates, are about to become more common as well.
All of which means Trump’s lead is likely to explode over the next month. In a
memo shared with the press Tuesday, senior Trump advisors estimated that even if Haley keeps performing as well as she did in New Hampshire, her strongest state so far, Trump will secure the 1,215 delegates needed to clinch the GOP nomination on March 19. If Haley underperforms her Granite State levels, they added, Trump will hit the 1,215 mark a week earlier.
Haley would be free to continue running at that point. Last month, her campaign and super PAC raised a combined $23.6 million — $7.4 million more than Trump’s. As long as anti-Trump donors keep contributing to Haley’s candidacy, she can keep giving voice to their concerns — and holding out, perhaps, for some seismic legal shift to upend the race.
“Instead of asking me what states I’m gonna win, why don’t we ask how he’s gonna win a general election after spending a full year in a courtroom?” Haley said in
an interview earlier this week with the Associated Press,.
“People are not looking six months down the road when these court cases have taken place. He’s going to be in a courtroom all of March, April, May and June. How in the world do you win a general election when these cases keep going and the judgments keep coming?”
Trump Demolishes Nikki Haley in Her Home State Primary
Nikki McCann Ramirez and Althea Legaspi
Sat, February 24, 2024 at 6:57 PM CST·5 min read
Former President Donald Trump has won the South Carolina Republican primary, demolishing his sole opponent, former
Governor Nikki Haley, in her home state. The
Associated Press was among the first to call the race shortly after polls closed at 7 p.m., basing it on AP VoteCast — a survey of South Carolina Republican voters.
“An even bigger win than anticipated,” Trump said from his watch party podium in South Carolina following the AP call, per
USA Today, though the final numbers had not yet come in. “This is fantastic evening,” he added. “It’s an early evening.”
In an
NBC News exit poll, Trump overwhelmingly won the support of men and women (68 percent and 62 percent, respectively), voters under 45 and those over 45 (64 percent and 65 percent), voters with and without college degrees (51 percent and 75 percent), and self-identified Republicans (73 percent).
The former president has swept every Republican primary contest so far. After a
blowout win in the Iowa caucuses, many of Trump’s opponents — including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy —
withdrew from the race and fell in line behind the former president. Trump went on to secure
a decisive victory over Haley in New Hampshire.
Haley was polling
30 points behind Trump going into South Carolina, and lost
the Nevada primary earlier this month to the “none of these candidates” option listed on the ballot, while Trump easily won the state’s caucuses a few days later.
Trump’s domination in South Carolina, the state Haley governed for six years, is a mortal wound to her already stumbling candidacy. With Super Tuesday, arguably the primary season’s most consequential single day,
just over the horizon, Haley has yet to make a notable dent in Trump’s trajectory to the general election, and her own party seems determined to
force her out of the race. Regardless, Haley remains defiant in her refusal to suspend her campaign, a move which would essentially hand an uncontested nomination to Trump and the Republican National Conference in July.
On Tuesday, Haley
reaffirmed her commitment to continue her bid for the nomination. “I’m campaigning every day until the last person votes,” she said.
Instead of bowing out, Haley has noticeably ramped up her attacks against Trump. In her Tuesday speech to South Carolina voters, she referred to him as “unhinged and unstable” while skewering “politicians who publicly embrace Trump” but “privately dread him.”
“They know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be for our party. They are just too afraid to say it out loud. Well I’m not afraid to say the hard truth out loud. I feel no need to kiss the ring, I have no fear of Trump’s retribution,” Haley said.
In the early stages of the primary, Haley was able to avoid incurring the full ire of Trump’s campaign. As previously
reported by Rolling Stone, Trump’s team viewed Haley as a convenient tool to help them “ratfuck” DeSantis and foment infighting between candidates. But as the field narrowed, the former president set his sights on completely obliterating his former U.N. ambassador’s electoral steam. As one adviser put it, Trump’s campaign went into full-blown “wreck-Nikki-Haley mode.”
The wrecking ball was on full display in Trump’s response to her Tuesday speech. On
Truth Social, the former president called Haley “stupid” and claimed “the only money she is getting now is coming from Democrats. I know her well, and she just doesn’t have what it takes, and never will.” The former president
later vowed that “anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp.”
Ahead of the primary, Haley — who has attempted to position herself as a common-sense moderate on reproductive rights — backed a controversial
Alabama Supreme Court ruling that deemed embryos created using in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, are legally considered people. “Embryos, to me, are babies,” she
told NBC News before later attempting to soften to comments in an
interview with Newsmax. The readjustment was overshadowed by
Trump’s call for the state to “find an immediate solution to preserve the availability of IVF” in a statement on Friday.
On Tuesday, Trump told voters at a
Fox News town hall in Greenville, South Carolina, that he expected to win “bigly” against Haley. “She is here. She is down by 30, 35 points. And everybody knows her. You are not supposed to lose your home state, it shouldn’t happen anyway. And she is losing it bigly. Big — I said bigly.” The former president added that he believed Haley was staying in the race because she “doesn’t know how to get out.”
“They are trying to hurt me because of the general election, so the Democrats are giving her money and she is playing into the game,” he added. “I think she just can’t herself to get out. Look, if she was doing well, I’d understand that but she is doing very poorly.”
Trump’s prediction was correct, of course. The former president did win “bigly” in South Carolina, and while Haley may continue to hold out for a last-ditch miracle that may land her the nomination, as of now her campaign is a lost cause.
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