Just one minute after closing the polls in the South Carolina Republican primaries, the main American media have proclaimed the victory of Donald Trump, which leaves his nomination almost doomed and his only rival, Nikki Haley, on the brink of withdrawal. With a margin of 22 points at 70% of the vote, the magnate defeated the host, born in this southeastern state, of which she was governor between 2011 and 2017.
Trump, having just landed in Columbia, the capital, after giving a mid-afternoon speech at the ultraconservative CPAC forum in Maryland, has celebrated his streak of four comfortable victories in the first four dates of the primary calendar: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. On this occasion he “has been a little faster than we expected,” he has mocked, and stated that he has “never” seen the Republican Party “as united as now.”
With 60.8% of the votes compared to Haley’s 38.6%, Trump takes the 50 delegates at stake and accumulates 157 of the 2,429 who will elect the Republican candidate in July at the national convention in Milwaukee (Wisconsin). There are still many states to go by then, but the pace of Trump’s race leaves Haley in a very weak position to move forward with his candidacy.
Ten of the last eleven Republican candidates to win the South Carolina primary have gone on to win their party’s nomination. Its importance lies in the fact that it is a more diverse and representative state than those that have voted so far and it is the penultimate to vote before the decisive date of Super Tuesday, March 5, in which citizens will go to the polls in 17 states. and territories, and 874 delegates will decide.
Haley, whom Trump did not even name directly during his victory speech – for the first time since the election year began – promised on Tuesday that she would not withdraw from the race if she were defeated in her own state. And tonight she reiterated it: “Today is not the end of our story,” she said at an event in Charleston before a few dozen followers.
“I am a woman of my word: I am not going to abandon this battle when a majority of Americans disapprove of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” she stressed, ensuring that “Trump scares people away.” “In the next 10 days, 21 more states and territories will speak. They have the right to a real election, not a Soviet-style election with a single candidate. I have a duty to give them that option.”
The next appointment on the electoral calendar will be in Michigan. Next Tuesday, only a third of the 55 Republican delegates corresponding to that key state for the November 5 elections will be distributed. The rest will be held in 13 district assemblies on March 2, three days before Super Tuesday. In Michigan, Haley has worse voting intentions than in South Carolina: according to the average of polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight, Trump leads his rival with 79.9% support, compared to Haley’s 18%.
The magnate already declared himself the winning candidate after the first vote of the process, in the Iowa caucuses, on January 15. His campaign is now focused on beating the incumbent president, Joe Biden, who is also assured, barring any surprise, of his nomination. During his speech tonight, the Republican expressed his desire to fight that battle: “I wish we could do it sooner, nine months is a long time.”
