TRUMP: NIKKI WHO? Columbia, SC — There was talk around the Trump campaign that if former President Donald Trump soundly defeated former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in Haley’s home state primary, then Trump would move from primary-campaign mode into general-election-campaign mode — that is, stop talking about Haley, stop responding to her statements, just act like she doesn’t exist. Now, Trump has, in fact, decisively defeated Haley — 60% to 40% — and we will see if his resolve holds up.
It did on election night. A few hours before the polls closed, I ran into a Trump confidante in Columbia, and I asked how Trump would approach his victory speech that evening. Would he spend a lot of it grouching about Haley, as he did the night he won the New Hampshire primary? “I hope not,” the confidante answered. “I hope it will be a lot more like Iowa than New Hampshire.” In Iowa, of course, Trump gave a speech that was positive and forward-looking. And on election night in Columbia, the confidante got his wish. Trump spent no time at all attacking Haley — never mentioned her name — and devoted most of the speech to thanking the people who had helped him win South Carolina.
I also asked the confidante what he thought the final result would be. “60-40,” he said. That was enough to win the prediction award, since the result at the moment, with more than 95% of the vote counted, is Trump, with 59.79% of the vote, over Haley, with 39.52%. Trump’s 20-point victory was in line with the final polling in the race which, as noted in this newsletter, showed the race tightening in the last week or two from earlier polling that showed the Trump lead over 30 points.
The Associated Press called the race for Trump at 7:00 p.m., the moment polls closed around the state. At his election night event at the South Carolina fairgrounds in Columbia, Trump was out onstage in a flash, flanked by some of his most prominent supporters. There was South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, the state’s two senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, Reps. Russell Fry, Joe Wilson, and other members of the South Carolina House delegation, plus Trump posse members like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. Trump talked a lot about how great everyone was, what a great job they did, and how great the victory was.
“You can celebrate for about 15 minutes,” Trump told the invited crowd, made up of people who had worked for the Trump cause around the state. “Then, we have to get back to work. And we’re going to look at Joe Biden, and we’re going to look him right in the eye. He’s destroying our country, and we’re going to say, Joe, you’re fired. Get out. Get out, Joe. You’re fired.” That was the essence of the new, post-Haley Trump approach.
At her event in Charleston, Haley waited more than an hour after Trump to take the stage — a clear contrast to New Hampshire, when she hurried out first to declare the race close and pledge to go on. This time, in South Carolina, Haley revised her rationale for staying in the race until at least Super Tuesday, ten days from now.
On January 28, after finishing second in New Hampshire with 43% of the vote, Haley told NBC’s Meet the Press that she had a goal in South Carolina. This is how she put it: “We started with 2% [in the polls] in Iowa. We ended up with 20%. We got to New Hampshire, we needed to do better than that, and we did. We got 43% of the vote. Now we’re going into South Carolina; we need to be stronger than what we did in New Hampshire.”
With just under 40% in South Carolina, Haley failed to meet her better-than-New-Hampshire standard. So onstage in Charleston, she came up with a new standard. “We’re getting around 40% of the vote,” she said. “That’s about what we got in New Hampshire, too. I’m an accountant. I know 40% is not 50%. But I also know 40% is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative … I’m not giving up this fight when a majority of Americans disapprove of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. South Carolina has spoken. We’re the fourth state to do so. In the next 10 days, another 21 states and territories will speak. They have a right to a real choice, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate. And I have a duty to give them that choice.”
It was a clever reworking of Haley’s rationale for staying in the race. She abandoned the progressively better standard — after all, as an accountant, she knows that 40% is not 43% — in favor of a not-some-tiny group standard. And she declared that she has a duty — not a preference, but a duty — to stay in the race to give voters who don’t support Trump another option. If she didn’t, those voters would face a “Soviet-style” primary with just one candidate on the ballot. Of course, at some point in every primary contest, there remains just one candidate on the ballot, which makes that candidate the winner of a long process of multiple elections — not a “Soviet-style” dictator. By any standard of past campaigns, Trump, having won Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina by double digits, is that winner.
Over the course of many interviews, Haley has given the impression that she is in the race for the long run but has only specifically promised, only to stay in the race until Super Tuesday on March 5. But if she wants to go past that date, the not-some-tiny-group standard and the not-a-Soviet-style-election standard are flexible enough for her to stay in indefinitely, if she has the donor support.
In the end, though, as the newsletter has noted, Haley has to win something. Especially after losing her home state by 20 points, she has to win a primary or caucus to be able to point to the most minimal level of success to keep on. In the hotly-contested 2016 Republican primary race, won, of course, by Trump, Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses and later contests in Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming before dropping out on May 3, 2016. Marco Rubio won Minnesota, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico before dropping out on March 15. John Kasich won his home state of Ohio and stayed in the race until May 4, but even with that, he was seen for much of the time as a nuisance candidate who didn’t know when to get out.
So previous races have gone well past South Carolina, but only because the candidates won something. Haley has a bunch of chances on Super Tuesday — there are Republican primaries or caucuses in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and American Samoa. There is not a lot of polling from most of those states, but we do know that in national polls of the Republican race, Trump leads Haley by roughly 75% to 17% — a 58-point lead, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Let’s say that, in keeping with the experience of the first races, it’s actually a little closer than some of the polls say. It doesn’t take an accountant to see that’s still a massive Trump lead.
Haley’s problem has always been extremely simple: She needs more Republicans to support her. According to exit polls of South Carolina’s open primary, 72% of Republicans supported Trump, while Haley won 28%. Haley dominated only among voters who identified themselves as moderate or liberal, but those voters made up only 23% of the South Carolina primary electorate. And even among those voters who did choose Haley, there was a starkly visible intensity gap between her supporters and Trump’s. Haley’s events — she held a lot of them in a final two-week bus tour — usually drew crowds of a few hundred who politely applauded her speech. Trump’s events — far fewer, but many times larger — drew passionately committed supporters. They were, as they almost always are, intense. Haley could not create such a strong bond with her supporters.
That is unlikely to change as the campaign goes on. Can Haley make it to Super Tuesday? She has enough money to, and she has already scheduled a bunch of events in Super Tuesday states. Can she win something that could be a pretense for staying in longer? Perhaps, although she will not predict where. But after prevailing in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and now South Carolina, Trump appears to be moving on from Haley. It would not be surprising if Republican voters do, too.
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