Former president Donald Trump defeated his lone GOP rival Nikki Haley in Saturday’s presidential primary in her home state of South Carolina, paving an even clearer path to the party’s 2024 nomination as the former U.N. ambassador so far refuses to drop out of the race.
The Associated Press called the race when polls closed at 7 p.m.
Taking the stage at his victory party just a few minutes after major networks announced his victory, the former president told his supporters he has “never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now” and ramped up his attacks on his 2020 rival, President Joe Biden. He predicted that come November “we’re going to say, ‘Joe, you’re fired.’”
He also seemed taken aback by how early the race was called. “Wow that was sooner than we anticipated,” he told his supporters.
Trump received 451,905 votes, or 59.8 percent, well ahead of Haley, who had 298,681, or 39.5 percent, with 98 percent of the vote counted.
Haley vowed again to remain in the race, despite the decisive loss in her home state.
“I said earlier this week that no matter what happens in South Carolina, I would continue to run for president,” Haley told her supporters at her election night party. “I’m a woman of my word. I’m not giving up this fight when a majority of Americans disapprove of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.”
“I’m grateful,” she added, “that today is not the end of our story.”
Trump’s big South Carolina win capped off a sleepy primary in a state where the former president’s victory was never really in doubt. In the lead-up to the contest, Trump had double-digit leads in most surveys over Haley, South Carolina’s former governor. FiveThirtyEight’s polling average showed Trump trouncing Haley there with support of more than 60 percent of voters, in line with Saturday’s results.
Haley’s campaign tried to lower expectations in the days leading up to the contest. Haley previously said she needed to perform better in her home state than she did in New Hampshire, where she lost to Trump by eleven points.
“I don’t think it necessarily has to be a win, but it certainly has to be better than what I did in New Hampshire, and it certainly has to be close,” she said on NBC’s Meet the Press in late January. “If we win – great. If not, we need to narrow it along the way to give people in Super Tuesday states a reason to see and have us fight on.”
Saturday’s victory for Trump is yet another embarrassing blow to Haley and marks her fourth consecutive early-state loss. Yet Haley, the first high-profile Republican to announce a 2024 challenge to Trump, has remained undaunted. The well-resourced former governor is now the last Republican candidate standing against him and insists she’s in the race for the long haul, announcing earlier this week a seven-figure ad spend, a slew of state leadership teams, and campaign events in upcoming primary states.
Next up comes Michigan, where Haley hopes to perform well in the state’s February 27 primary.
But even in bluer-leaning Michigan and other upcoming March primary states like Georgia and Colorado, she faces a wall of opposition from Trump-loving grassroots activists and state party apparatuses, many of which have endorsed the front-runner long before their own voters have cast ballots, as National Review reported on Saturday. They cite various reasons for preemptively rallying behind Trump, including a desire for party unity and an eagerness to focus the party’s time and resources on defeating Biden in November.
Take Texas, a Super Tuesday state where polls suggest Trump has a commanding lead among Republican voters over Haley.
“I have no idea why she’s staying in it,” Texas GOP chairman Matt Rinaldi, who endorsed Trump on January 29, said in an interview earlier this week. “The only person right now who has any chance of winning the Republican nomination is Donald Trump.”
Hours before the South Carolina results came in, Trump delivered an hour-and-a-half long speech hundreds of miles away at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington, D.C. He made no mention of Haley and continued to signal that he is in full-blown general election mode against his 2020 Democratic rival.
As an afterthought, he capped of his CPAC speech reminding any South Carolina residents in the crowd to “please get in those cars and drive fast” to vote before the polls closed.