Nikki Haley hugs fans after losing South Carolina primary
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Former president Donald Trump has defeated Nikki Haley in the South Carolina GOP primary.
The former president’s win was initially projected at 7pm on Saturday night just as polls closed.
Mr Trump secured the expected victory over Ms Haley in her home state, where she served as governor from 2011 to 2017.
This marks yet another defeat for former UN Ambassador Haley, who vowed to continue fighting Mr Trump despite her many primary losses.
Ms Haley stayed resolute even after losing to the “none of these candidates” box listed on Nevada ballot papers earlier this month.
“I said earlier this week that no matter what happens in South Carolina, I would continue to run ... I’m a woman of my word,” she said on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump compared migrants to Hannibal Lecter as he claimed that they are coming from “insane asylums” during his almost 90-minute meandering and ominous speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
The former president was speaking about his anti-Biden messaging efforts on Saturday, saying that “migrant crime” is a “new category of crime”.
Nikki Haley’s home state comeback didn’t materialise. Now what?
It all came down to this: Nikki Haley had her shot on Saturday to prove this was still a contest. She failed.
South Carolina has now voted. It was the fifth Republican primary or caucus, after three previous states and the US Virgin Islands were all won by her opponent, frontrunner Donald Trump. Finally, the race turned to Ms Haley’s backyard.
In any other contest, a popular two-term governor and former UN ambassador would be presumed to take her home state. Instead, Ms Haley heads into her Charleston election night watch party down 30 points in all available polling and still struggling to make inroads with the conservative Republican base which is firmly backing Mr Trump.
She appears to have the fundraising momentum of a candidate with the wind at her back, but is not yet showing any signs of pulling off a victory in any individual state, writes my colleague John Bowden.
MADDOW: ‘Nikki Haley is essentially auditioning, not to be his vice president, but to be his understudy’
Trump’s potential weaknesses in a general election
Donald 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 nine in 10 of South Carolina’s primary voters were white, making it hard to see if Mr Trump has made inroads with Black voters whom he has attempted to win over.
Nikki Haley outpaced Mr 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 Mr Trump can win in November, some had worries about his viability.
Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump gestures to supporters at an election night watch party at the State Fairgrounds on 24 February 2024 in Columbia, South Carolina
About half of Republican voters in South Carolina — including about a quarter of his supporters — are concerned that Mr Trump is too extreme to win the general election.
About three in 10 voters believe he acted illegally in at least one of the criminal cases against him, even though about seven in 10 believe the investigations are political attempts to undermine him.
Mr Trump dominates among conservative voters. But his challenge is that those voters were just 37 per cent of the electorate in the November 2020 presidential election. The other 63 per cent identified as moderate or liberal, the two categories that Mr Trump lost to Haley in South Carolina.
Haley: ‘In the next 10 days, 21 states and territories will speak'
What is Nikki Haley’s political future
At the age of 52, Ms 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 four in 10 of South Carolina Republicans — including about six in 10 of those supporting Donald Trump — say they have an unfavorable opinion of her.
Ms 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 Mr 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 Mr Trump.
Republican US presidential candidate Nikki Haley is greeted by supporters after speaking at a South Carolina Republican presidential Primary night event in Charleston, South Carolina, USA, 24 February 2024
Who is her coalition? Ms 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 four in 10 voted for Mr Biden in that election. Her problem is that about six in 10 Republican primary voters say they believed Mr Biden was not legitimately elected.
Why AP called South Carolina for Trump: Race call explained
The Associated Press declared Donald Trump the winner of the South Carolina primary as soon as polls closed on Saturday. The race call was based on a comprehensive survey of South Carolina Republican primary voters that showed him defeating Nikki Haley by wide margins in her home state.
Declaring a winner as polls close based on the results of the AP’s VoteCast survey — and before election officials publicly release tabulated votes — is not unusual in heavily lopsided contests like Saturday’s primary. The survey confirms the findings of pre-Election Day polls showing Trump far outpacing Haley statewide.
The AP called the race for Trump at 7 p.m., when polls closed statewide.
VoteCast results show Trump winning on a scale similar to his earlier victories in every contest so far where he appeared on the ballot. In South Carolina, the former president is winning by huge margins in every geographic region of the state, from Upcountry in the north to Low Country on the Atlantic coast.
The survey also shows Trump with sizable leads across the state’s political geography, winning among Republican primary voters from areas that vote heavily Republican in general elections to those that vote heavily Democratic, as well as everywhere in between. Haley’s strongest support according to VoteCast was among voters with postgraduate degrees, but they make up a small share of the overall electorate.
Haley’s likeliest path to victory relied on posting strong numbers in more Democratic-friendly areas, while staying competitive in traditionally Republican areas.
Haley previously served as South Carolina governor and as ambassador to the United Nations. In her last competitive GOP primary in South Carolina in 2010, some of the areas where she performed best were in counties that tend to support Democrats in general elections. But VoteCast shows Haley not performing anywhere near the level she needs to pull off an upset.
Another key metric is votes cast before Election Day, which tend to be among the first votes reported of the night.
Since the issue of early voting became highly politicized in the 2020 presidential election, pre-Election Day votes have skewed Democratic, while Election Day votes have skewed Republican. With much of Haley’s support coming from more moderate voters this campaign, she would have needed a strong showing among early voters in order to withstand the votes later in the night from more conservative voters who voted on Election Day. While VoteCast showed Haley performing slightly better among early voters than she did among Election Day voters, she trailed badly behind Trump in both groups.
When all the votes are counted, Trump may come close to doubling the 33% he received in his 2016 South Carolina victory against a far more competitive six-way field. That year he carried 44 of 46 counties, all but Richland and Charleston, the state’s second- and third-most populous.
VoteCast provides a detailed snapshot of the electorate and helps explain who voted, what issues they care about, how they feel about the candidates and why they voted the way they did.
Trump tells Joe Biden 'You're fired' as he wins South Carolina Republican primary
Trump tells Biden ‘You’re fired’ as he wins South Carolina Republican primary
Donald Trump celebrated his comfortable victory in the South Carolina Republican primary by predicting that he would beat Joe Biden in a likely presidential election rematch in November. The former president claimed his fourth straight primary win on Saturday night (24 February), beating rival Nikki Haley in her home state. “We’re going to be up here on 5 November, and we’re going to look at Joe Biden,” Mr Trump said as the crown loudly cheered him. “He’s destroying our country and we’re gonna say ‘Joe, you’re fired. Get out. Get out, Joe. You’re fired.’” Mr Trump also compared himself to Al Capone during a CPAC speech on Saturday.
In video: Trump compares himself to American gangster Al Capone during CPAC speech
How Trump won in South Carolina
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.
Mr 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 his goals: Many question the value of supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia; and overwhelming majorities see immigrants as hurting the US and suspect that there are nefarious political motives behind Mr Trump’s multiple criminal indictments.
About six in 10 South Carolina voters consider themselves supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement, the slogan that helped catapult Mr Trump to the White House in 2016. About nine in 10 Trump voters said they were driven by their support for him, not by objections to his opponent. Nikki Haley’s voters were much more divided: About half were motivated by supporting her, but nearly as many turned out to oppose Mr 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.
Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump stands on stage as he hosts a South Carolina Republican presidential primary election night party in Columbia, South Carolina, US, 24 February 2024
Mr 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.
Mr 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 his backers in this election fell into that group.
A majority believe Mr Trump is a candidate who can emerge victorious in November’s general election, while only about half say the same of Ms Haley. Voters were also far more likely to view Mr Trump than Ms Haley as someone who would “stand up and fight for people like you” and to say he would keep the country safe. And about seven in 10 say he has the mental capability to serve effectively as president.
Mr 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 US., to say immigrants are hurting the country and to say immigration is the top issue facing the country.
‘Haley needed to prove that this is a real campaign'
Ms Haley needed to prove that this is a real campaign, not just an effort to provide GOP bigwigs with an alternative at a brokered convention.
Haley supporters who piled onto the shore at Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant on Friday evening were well aware of this. At least one expressed doubts to The Independent that the GOP would even consider Ms Haley were Mr Trump to be hopelessly sidelined from the presidential race by a criminal conviction, a mountain of legal fees, or some combination of both.
With a picturesque sunset illuminating the silhouette of an aircraft carrier to her back, Nikki Haley’s effort to barnstorm her home state came to an end on Friday. She descended from the steps of her massive tour bus, the “Beast of the Southeast”, after several triumphant honks (and an admission from Congressman Ralph Norman that they had initially missed their turn). Addressing supporters who cheered when she joked that Donald Trump had permanently “banned” them from the Maga movement, Ms Haley made her case once again for the GOP to move on from a 91-times-indicted former president who she fiercely attacked for devaluing the military service of American troops, including her own husband.
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2024-02-25 12:30:58Z
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