Former President Donald Trump has won the South Carolina Republican primary, ABC News projects. It was a swift and embarrassing defeat for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who rose to political prominence as South Carolina’s governor. Nevertheless, in her concession speech, Haley vowed to continue her campaign into Super Tuesday on March 5.
Throughout the evening, 538 reporters, analysts and contributors broke down the results as they came in with live updates, analysis and commentary. Read our full live blog below.
If Haley stays in, does that change the kind of candidate she is?
To Julia's point, up until now Haley has seemed like a classic "office-seeker" candidate — that is, someone running to win. Those kinds of candidates usually drop out once it becomes clear that they cannot win and that remaining in the race could damage them politically. However, there are also "agenda-seeker" candidates who are running to potentially promote a political agenda of some kind. If Haley is looking at the Republican Party and saying, "I probably don't have much of a future in a Trumpian GOP," perhaps — perhaps — she's looking to stay in the race to push back against the Trumpian direction of the party. To be clear, this is always a losing proposition in the near term. But agenda-seeking candidates often want to stay in the race as long as possible to broadcast their larger political agenda as long as they can.
The questions about Haley dropping out touch on some bigger issues in the contemporary nomination process. The unwritten rules of the game matter a lot in presidential nomination politics, and in the past, a candidate like Haley — like John McCain in 2000 or Mitt Romney in 2008 — might stay in the race long enough to establish themselves as a viable candidate for a future race. But there’s also pressure for a candidate who clearly won’t win to suspend their campaign and unify the party. Trump’s unusual political trajectory has scrambled these unwritten rules of the game, however. Haley has said she won’t "kiss the ring", but there will be a lot of talk about whether she should leave the race, as the other competitors have. This depends not only on how the informal rules of the game work, but also on what Haley’s goals are. If she’s mostly setting her sights on 2028, then we might expect her to wind her candidacy down soon, in order to regain some standing among an increasingly Trump-loyal GOP. But her comments this week suggest that she’s running to push back on Trump’s dominance in the party, and perhaps to make the point that a political party is still just that: not only a movement focused on a single individual.
Haley is the last one standing among major candidates competing with Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. With the odds so devastatingly stacked against her, what exactly is Haley trying to do by continuing her campaign and risking getting trounced in her home state?
As I wrote on the site last week, there are certain benefits to presidential runs even when it seems clear a candidate isn't going to become the nominee. One such benefit is raising a candidate's profile in the public eye, something Haley has definitely reaped throughout the primary. When she officially launched her campaign last February, the share of Americans who had either a favorable or unfavorable opinion on her (a decent proxy for a candidate's name recognition) hovered around 55-60 percent. Lately, that number is closer to 75 percent:
It could be that Haley is continuing her campaign to tee up a 2028 bid. The GOP tends to favor also-rans when choosing a nominee in years when there isn't an incumbent running: From 1980 through 2020, there was only one year (2000) when the Republican nominee wasn't either an incumbent or someone who had run previously (if you count Trump's third-party run for president in 2000). And as Trump's only major challenger still in the race, she's still pulling in media and public attention, as well as a decent supply of donations.
Haley has become increasingly critical of Trump. Despite previously serving in his administration, Haley says Trump is no longer "the right president." She's dragged him for his legal woes and drawn attention to his age. Positioning herself in this way could serve future political ambitions by setting her up as the new face of the Reagan wing of the GOP.
Some of the other benefits of a continued run are less likely to explain Haley's tenacity. Given her conservative record as governor, she's not exactly trying to push Trump or the party to the center (despite garnering some support among moderate and independent voters). And given Trump's hardline on loyalty, it's unlikely she'd be able to parlay this campaign into another job in a second Trump administration. Besides, she says she's not interested anyway, telling the “Today” show recently: "I don't want anything. I don't want [to be] vice president."
Republican Presidential hopeful and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks during a campaign stop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Feb. 22, 2024.
Julia Nikhinson/AFP via Getty Images
And of course, we shouldn't write off the potential that Haley still thinks there's a path for her to win. Trump's continued legal disputes remain an unknown factor, and Haley could be hoping that by simply hanging on long enough, she could become the next best option should Trump, for one reason or another, no longer be a viable nominee.
The polls are now closed in South Carolina, and based on an analysis of the exit polls, ABC News is projecting that Trump has won the state’s Republican primary. We’ll be sticking around for a while yet, though, to see what the exact margin is, how many delegates Trump will win and whether Haley will drop out following this decisive defeat.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
Former President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting on Feb. 24, 2024, in National Harbor, Maryland.
