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.
AP projects Trump as the winner, minutes after polls closed
More race projections are coming in mere minutes after polls closed at 7 p.m. The Associated Press has already called the race for Trump based on their polling of voters, which showed Trump with a sizable enough lead to make the call. That call was echoed by other news organizations, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. ABC News also projected Trump as the winner right as polls closed.
South Carolina primary voters view Trump and Haley very differently
I tend to agree with you, Geoffrey. Haley is presenting a very different kind of agenda and policy positions than the more MAGA side of the Republican Party. And voters are noticing the difference.
In polling from YouGov/CBS News in February, likely South Carolina GOP primary voters were asked how they thought each candidate’s policies would impact the country if they were to win the presidency. Seventy-three percent said Trump’s policies would make them financially better off, while only 32 percent said the same of Haley. On immigration, 88 percent of voters said that Trump’s policies would make the U.S.-Mexico border more secure, compared to 53 percent who said the same of Haley’s policies.
Nikki Haley, United States Permanent Representative to the UN, during the Security Council meeting on Syria's use of chemical weapons, at the UN Headquarters in New York City, Feb. 28, 2017.
Europanewswire/Getty Images
The contrast is particularly stark on foreign policy: When asked how Haley’s policies would impact U.S. military involvement overseas, 41 percent said she would increase, 44 percent said she would not change and 15 percent said she would decrease military involvement. The reverse was true of what voters expected from Trump: a plurality of 47 percent thought Trump’s policies would decrease U.S. military involvement overseas, while 20 and 33 percent expected his policies to not change or to increase involvement, respectively.
So I’d buy an argument that Haley may be staying in to keep a more hawkish foreign policy position alive in the party, which makes sense, given her history as U.N. Ambassador.
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.
